In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Whispers of the Story

One sunny morning a family starts the day. The father examines the farm, the mother stays in bed due to depression and headaches, the daughter thinks about baking pie and meeting with her boyfriend, and the son enjoys his day in the town. The next morning they are all found murdered.

Nobody knew, heard, or saw anything. The panic starts to take over the small town as they believe that someone among them is the murderer.

Do you know what is worse? The story is not fiction, the events actually took place as depicted in the novel. Fiction novel gives the feeling of safety, but this novel makes you wonder: Could this happen to me?

Review of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

This novel is based on the real murder of the Clutter family in Kansas on 15 November 1959.

I find this novel as cold as the title, especially after finding out that is based on real events. Truman Capote did a marvelous job in starting the novel by presenting the Clutter family on a normal day, showing how Herbert Clutter was an honest, working man with a considerable fortune, but did not keep money in the house. He raised his children to be kind and they just had normal teenage problems. One night their whole life ended. Dick and Perry didn’t believe Herbert that there was no money in the house, and eventually killed all the members of the family. They did not get much of their adventure.

I found it especially cold how a normal family could be killed for a couple of dollars by two murderers who barely gave them a second thought. I can totally understand the hysteria that captured the small town, a respectable family killed in cold blood close to them. They thought it could happen to anyone and they were right. The Clutter family was chosen based on the sole information that there is a safe box in the house that may contain lots of money. There was no clear evidence of who killed them and since no stranger was spotted in the town people assumed the killer was one of them. It must have been a horrible thing to go through for a small community.

For the first time, I was not looking forward to seeing how the murderers were caught by the police. I love detective novels, to read new unconventional means by which a murder mystery is uncovered. This time I was much more interested to see Dick and Perry on the run, and how will they continue their lives knowing they killed a family for nothing. They seem to completely erase from their minds the gruesome acts they did, as they did not discuss between them. Even in Perry’s reflections, he was more focused on his childhood, than the fact that he murdered four people. I kept waiting for a moment in which one of them would break because of what they did or the moment in which their action would break their bond. 

If you expect a nice chase of the murderers, you will not find it here. They were caught because they made several mistakes and soon confessed. They also did not show any remorse for the killings. But there remains an unanswered question. Who really killed the Cuttlers? Both of them blamed the other for the actually killing, but I am inclined to believe that Perry was the one. Reading of the murders, Perry admitted to having killed the men but claimed that Dick killed the women.

In this book, Truman Capote demonstrates how a murder can be made to seem extremely interesting with the right storytelling. I’m not exactly sure what his intentions were, but he made sure that Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon would always be in the history books. So if you want to read a novel that is closer to reality but still sends chills down your spine, read In Cold Blood. There are also several TV adaptations with the same title in 1967 and 1996, but also the movies Capote from 2005 and Infamous from 2006, check them out as well. 

Happy reading!