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In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (Penguin Modern Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Truman Capote
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £3.49
You Save: £5.50 (61%)
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Rating:  37 reviews
Sales Rank: 3462
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0141182571
Dewey Decimal Number: 364
EAN: 9780141182575
ASIN: 0141182571
Publication Date: February 3, 2000
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 32 more reviews...
 I'm definitely not following the crowd November 14, 2008
G. Soye (Ireland)
So the general consensus seems to be that In Cold Blood is a masterpiece and Capote is a genius. Well I am sorry but I do not agree. In fact I think this is absolutely preposterous. The only way I can use the word genius in the same sentence as Capote is if I conclude that it was complete genius of him to make anyone believe this book is anything other than a badly written web of lies trying to disguise itself as something other than an unrequited love letter to a cold blooded psycopathic killer.
Let's look at what the book actually is. Difficult I know to do this because there seems to have been a completely new genre invented for this book. Why? I do not know, because the book is simply a novel based on a true story. Loosely based at that. Capote conducted interviews with witnesses and people who's lives were affected by the murders at the centre of the book. Some 90 or more in fact. He did not make one single note during any of these interviews. Can you remember the last 90 conversations you had?
The book has many factual inaccuracies and events that simply did not happen, it's closing scene for one. So how anyone can describe this as "new journalism" is beyond me. Although given what passes for journalism in some circles today this could be true. Maybe Capote did invent something new with In Cold Blood; the idea for journalists to lie through their teeth in order to try and make their stories more interesting.
In my view though at the heart of this book is Capote's infatuation with one of its main protagonists. There were 2 people involved with the crime at the centre of the book. It turns out that only one of them actually committed the murders although it is this person who we are subjected to throught the book and asked to feel sorry for continously. It was after all never his fault but his fathers. The other criminal is rarely mentioned and when he is it is to show him as idiotic, psychopathic and a sex fiend.
If you want to read a good novel by all means do so, there are thousands better than this. If you want to read a good piece of investigative journalism again go ahead, there are many noble journalists who base their work entirely on facts and would not stoop to something so low as to embellish or flat out lie simply for effect.
If you want to read a badly written love letter masquerading as... well I am not sure what it is masquerading as because no one seems to be able to give an answer to that, maybe this is where it's genius lies.
 Brutal Event in Journalistic Focus October 29, 2008
Douglas P. Murphy (Charlottesville)
This book is essentially a detailed and well-crafted piece of journalism with the level and quality of detail to bring it into horrific focus. One gets access to all sides of the murders of a family from the effect on the close relatives and friends to the emotional states of the murderers themselves and their final demise at the end of a rope. No one can escape this book without a large emotional wallop that will leave one's mind reverberating for some time. The book additionally invites questions concerning the limits and boundaries of journalistic integrity. When does the journalist step beyond his role as observer and become part of the story? And...Should the journalist do so and thus change outcomes? Disturbingly provocative in many ways.
Gorgeous prose October 23, 2008
J. D. Aspinall (South West England)
There is no doubt Capote was a man of rare ability. One of his contempories - Norman Mailer - described Truman as: "The most beautiful writer of my generation." Mailer had an impeccable ego (roughly, the size of Kansas), so any praise from him was to be taken seriously.
And Truman's book is a serious one; six years in the researching and writing, it was a labour of love; or, perhaps, obsession.
What is the point of talking about this book? It is a famous book, one that made Capote's name, and is an example of the writing style called "New Journalism", the creative style merged with factual reporting, but what makes it great, a classic?
The story is horrific: a multiple murder for no gain, no more than forty or fifty dollars, and the killers drove eight hundred miles overnight to perpetrate it; so why did they bother? That was one of two questions I had; the other was: how did they get caught?
What else is there? We know they murder the family and we know they get hanged for it, there's not a lot of mystery here.
The killers are wasters; just drifting bums with no morality glueing the seperate parts of their brain together, yet Capote paints one in a sympathetic light, and leaves the other to appear evil in his friends reflection.
Poor old Perry Smith; he had a crappy life and no-one loved him, so its no surprise he turned out like he did, is it?
But wild Dick Hickock, why, he was a murdering monster: a man vomited straight from the devil's gut onto the earth.
Capote tells us (more than once) how Smith stopped Hickock raping Nancy Clutter during the robbery. Smith was obviously a man of rare self-control.
It's a shame he didn't have the self-control to stop himself obliterating her head with a .12 gauge shotgun.
The imbalance in Capote's portraits is ridiculous.
And the killers are the author's main focus, they are what and who he was interested in, not the victims.
This is worth buying and worth reading, if nothing else, for the privilege of reading Truman's gorgeous prose.
Four shotgun blasts that changed a town forever! October 5, 2008
Michael Murphy (Glasgow, Scotland.)
Recently re-read this disturbing factional story of unspeakable horror after some thirty odd years, re-visiting the pain of Holcomb, the scene of the tragic, senseless snuffing out of the Clutters. Contoversial on its publication due to its blending of fact and fiction, a hybrid composite that had not been done before, Capote's "In Cold Blood" reconstucts, in all their brutal detail, the 1959 grisly, cold-blooded murder of the Clutter family on their farm in the plains of western Kansas when four shotgun blasts changed the town of Holcomb forever. This fictionalising of real events, coupled with imagined dialogue between real-life characters, broke new ground and established Capote as the inventor of True Crime 'non-fiction' novels.
Capote's meticulous reconstruction of the tragedy covers the lead-up to the gruesome murders and the aftermath. In the lead-up, Capote builds suspense and tension by cross-cutting intermittently between descriptions of the routine domestic life of the Clutters in their small farming community near Holcomb and the unstable lives of drifters Smith and Hickock - what's chilling is their humaness in the picture Capote draws - as they drift cross-country towards Holcomb. The aftermath comprehensively covers the search for and apprehension of the killers and their subsequent trial and incarceration on death row. WARNING - the amoral Perry Smith may make your blood run cold!
Capote's case-study is concerned not just with the who of the crime but the why, probing into every facet of the lives of the killers, the background influences that shaped them, taking us into their minds to give us the opportunity to get to know them, exploring the psyche of the criminal mind to discover the psychological motivation that can turn men into monsters. A forerunner of classic true-crime titles such as "Fatal Vision" by Joe McGinnis, "Blood and Money" by Thomas Thomson" and "Daddy's Girl" by Clifford Irvine, "In Cold Blood" is itself, an American classic and one of the best American books of the 20th Century.
Masterpiece of crime writing August 25, 2008
Sally Wilton (Bournemouth UK)
I read this book over several weeks yet every time I picked it up I was able to get straight back into the story. I think this is slightly due to the style of writing giving out accurate information in a chronological order similar to a long running news story.
Capote's writing is always brilliant whatever he writes about. There is no word wasted here, no over the top descriptions just a very gripping true story told from every angle. He doesnt judge anyone involved but gives enough detail to make you sympathise 'almost' with the killers.
Before reading this book the only story I knew of Kansas was the Wizard of OZ which also evokes the huge plains where farming is the main source of income, windy and lonesome with god fearing, hard working farming folk making a living. Then one night this terrible crime takes place. Capote relives each and every minute of the crime, the getaway, eventual capture and the court hearing and outcome. A great book in every way.
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