In Cold Blood: An Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: Bookmarked, by Justin St. Germain:
In Cold Blood wasn’t just an unprecedented success at the time; it has also enjoyed a long, remarkable afterlife as perhaps the most influential work of American nonfiction. The book still sells well, and it entered the canon long ago, as a staple of high school and university classes. The eponymous movie, which Capote consulted on and included scenes shot inside the Clutter house, was released to wide acclaim in 1967. (Ironically, Capote criticized the film for focusing too much on the killers.) Since then, the book has been the subject of two other feature films–including the Academy Award-winning Capote in 2005–as well as three plays, two biographies, two fiction novels,[1] another short documentary, a TV series, an opera, a graphic novel, a book-length critical treatment, dozens of dissertations, hundreds of academic papers and articles, this book, and who knows what else.[2] In Cold Blood has stayed relevant for fifty-five years, and still frequently appears in the news. Since we went to Holcomb, seven years ago, the killers have been dug up for DNA tests attempting to link them to another murder, which led to dozens of national articles and a book speculating about their involvement;[3] Harold Nye, one of the KBI detectives featured in In Cold Blood, died and left secret case files to his son, who co-wrote a book of his own;[4] and a new documentary TV series about the Clutter murders was recently released.[5]
Countless other works have been influenced by In Cold Blood, whether or not their creators knew it. Capote did create a new art form, just not the one he thought. It wasn’t the “nonfiction novel,” which never caught on, and wasn’t original, anyway: he likely borrowed that approach from Lillian Ross’s Picture.[6] Capote wasn’t the first writer to make the murderer the protagonist, either: Meyer Levin did that nine years earlier, with Compulsion, his novel about the Leopold-Loeb case. But In Cold Blood was more successful than its predecessors, and much more influential. Capote spiked a vein, and out came a stream of imitators, a whole bloody genre, one of the most popular forms of American nonfiction: true crime.
In Cold Blood helped launch a national fascination with murder, and especially with murderers themselves. A few years after its release, the Manson family murders riveted the country; in 1974, the prosecutor of the case, Vincent Bugliosi, wrote a nonfiction book of his own, Helter Skelter, which would go on to outsell even In Cold Blood. Five years later, Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize[7] for his true-crime doorstop, The Executioner’s Song, a book Capote deeply resented, both for its success–he was still bitter that In Cold Blood hadn’t won any national awards–and because he thought his old friend had ripped him off. (He was right in at least one sense: of its thousand-plus pages, Mailer devotes just a few to the victims.) The next year, Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, about her friendship with the serial killer Ted Bundy, was a runaway success. In 1986, Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac followed suit, and on and on.
I came of age in the 1980s, during a true crime boom, surrounded by sensationalized stories about murder. I watched Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted on TV, read anthologies with lurid covers in my middle school library, played Police Quest–one of the first true-crime video games–on my family’s primitive computer. Serial killers were constantly in the news–Gacy, the Nightstalker, Dahmer–and their Hollywood analogs featured in playground conversations, descendants of Norman Bates, many of whom were also based on real murderers: Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Pennywise, Hannibal Lecter. In the early 1990s, the O.J. Simpson trial became the first true crime story broadcast live on television. In 1997, Eric Schlosser traced the then-burgeoning national fascination with murderers back to In Cold Blood.[8] In 1999, after the Columbine High School shooting, that fascination mutated into a deadly new strain, in which serial killers were largely replaced by mass shooters as emblems of American evil. In 2001, after the nation watched thousands of people die on television in the September 11th attacks, there seemed to be a lull in our true crime fascination, but it’s hard for me to say: my mother was murdered eight days later, and for a while after that I wasn’t paying attention.[9]
[1] Forgive the use of this barbarism: it seems necessary here, for once, to distinguish from Capote’s “nonfiction novel.”
[2] For a full list of artistic works based on In Cold Blood, as of 2011, see Voss, p. 151.
[3] The book, JT Hunter’s In Colder Blood, offers a compelling circumstantial case for Smith and Hickock having killed another family, the Walkers of Osprey, Florida, in strikingly similar circumstances later in 1959. Hunter points out multiple inaccuracies in In Cold Blood, which suggests that Smith and Hickock didn’t kill the Walkers. Recent DNA tests were inconclusive, but they remain the most likely suspects in the Walker murders, according to local police. If Smith and Hickock did kill the Walkers, that would invalidate Capote’s entire theory about the Clutter murders–Smith’s “brain explosion”–and make his sympathetic portrayal of them even more problematic. It would also make Capote a pioneer in another sense, the first literary writer to glorify serial killers.
[4] And Every Word is True by Gary McIvoy, which was self-published in 2019, presents a possible alternative motive for the Clutter murders, based on Nye’s notes and Hickock’s correspondence.
[5] Sundance TV’s Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, directed by Joe Berlinger.
[6] The idea likely goes back further than that, possibly by centuries–some critics have traced the idea of a nonfiction novel all the way to Daniel Defoe.
[7] In fiction, oddly enough.
[8] This is also from “A Grief Like No Other.” He mentions other origins–Edgar Allen Poe, Psycho–but credits Capote with creating a new genre, and helping to take killer-protagonists mainstream.
[9] There may not have been a lull at all, or not a long one, at least: Voss mentions a 2009 Newsweek cover article titled “True Crime: An American Obsession.” (Pg. 97)