In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

The summary

Truman Capote had the theory before he had the crime. He told George Plimpton, in a New York Times interview published on January 16, 1966, that he had held it for over twenty years: journalism “could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ’nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it” — a narrative using every novelistic technique while staying, in his phrase, “immaculately factual.” He needed material that would not go stale. One November morning in 1959, deep inside the Times, he found a few paragraphs headlined “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.”

The people in it were real. Herbert Clutter, 48, his wife Bonnie, 45, and their children Nancy, 16, and Kenyon, 15, were killed at their farm outside Holcomb, in Finney County, Kansas, on the night of November 14–15, 1959. Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith were convicted and hanged. Two arguments run through the book Capote made of it: what he did to reporting, and what the reporting established.

A theory looking for a crime

Choosing a murder was, he said, “altogether literary” — he reckoned that “the human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.” Then he set the rule that shapes every page: the author had to vanish. The hardest technical problem, he told Plimpton, was “to write it without ever appearing myself, and yet, at the same time, create total credibility.”

That is the bet: no narrator, no notebook in the frame, and you are asked to trust that scene after scene was gathered rather than imagined. The New Yorker ran it as four Annals of Crime installments between September 25 and October 16, 1965; Random House published the book the next year. Ralph F. Voss, whose University of Alabama Press study traces the line to Wolfe, Mailer and Ellroy, reads it as a gothic novel as much as reportage.

Six years, no notebook

The method still makes working reporters wince. Capote went to Kansas with Harper Lee, who had just finished To Kill a Mockingbird and came along as his “assistant researchist” for about two months. It took a month before Garden City would talk; nobody there, he said, had ever heard of him.

He used no tape recorder and took no notes, because “even note-taking artificializes the atmosphere of an interview.” Twelve years earlier he had begun training for exactly this: a friend read passages aloud, he wrote them down afterwards and checked himself, until by his own account he could get “within 95 percent of absolute accuracy, which is as close as you need.” That figure is his, and unverifiable. The surrounding numbers make their own case: 80 percent of his research never reached the page, his files nearly filled a room. He also had one genuine check: for the first months Smith and Hickock could not speak to each other, so he crossed their accounts and kept what matched.

The safe was in the other house

Both men had recently left the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing — Smith on parole in July 1959, on condition he stay out of Kansas, Hickock that August. The plan came from Floyd Wells, a former cellmate of Hickock’s who had worked for Herb Clutter and described an office safe holding thousands in cash. Writing in Federal Probation from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s own case notes, probation officer Sally J. Keglovits caught what Wells’s statement makes plain: the office he remembered was in the old house on the property, around the time the Clutters’ new one was completed. Hickock and Smith broke into the new house. There was no safe and no $10,000. They left with binoculars, a Zenith portable radio, four silver dollars and about $40.

Wells eventually told the KBI. The two were picked up in Las Vegas on December 30, 1959, in a Chevrolet stolen in Iowa, tried in Garden City that March, convicted by a jury that deliberated forty minutes, and hanged at Lansing shortly after midnight on April 14, 1965.

Why they did it is Capote’s reading, and he was candid about that. He believed Smith acted for the reasons Smith himself gave — that a life of accumulated reverses had left him, that night, in what Capote called “a psychological cul-de-sac” — and thought Hickock could plan a murder but not commit one. He also named the mechanism: “I make my own comment by what I choose to tell and how I choose to tell it.”

Where the seams show

The clearest failure is the last scene. The book closes with the lead investigator, Alvin Dewey, meeting Nancy Clutter’s friend Susan Kidwell in the cemetery; the journalist Van Jensen reported in the Lawrence Journal-World in 2005 that Dewey later said it never happened.

In February 2013, Kevin Helliker reported in The Wall Street Journal on KBI files a since-deceased agent, Harold Nye, had taken home. Where the book has the bureau acting on Wells’s tip at once, the records show a five-day wait before anyone reached the Hickock farm; where the book sends one agent, four went — three KBI agents and a deputy, at midday. Helliker also reported that Capote’s own contract with Columbia Pictures required the studio to hire Dewey’s wife, Marie, as a consultant on the film, while the book makes Dewey its haunted hero. Sandy Campbell’s fact-check file for the serialization covers dates, distances and the spelling of names; nothing in it suggests he checked the dialogue or the action.

The bottom line

Capote showed that reporting can carry the weight of a novel, and in the same book exposed the cost: a form that hides its author also hides its seams, so you cannot tell six years of verified interviewing from a scene invented to end well. The achievement is real; so is the warning about what a beautifully shaped narrative will talk you into.

Worth your time if you care how nonfiction gets built. Pair it with The Devil in the White City, where Erik Larson works a real murder case under stricter rules.