Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

I mentioned in an earlier post on the movie Capote (https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...) that I had purchased Truman Capote's novel to read. In the meantime, I watched the film version of In Cold Blood with Scott Wilson and Robert Blake and was impressed by the quality of the production.

Although Capote presents the stories of both killers of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, it is obvious that his sympathies lie with Perry Smith, the abused and abandoned boy who grew up to be a drifter and dreamer and ultimately a murderer.

What I appreciated most in the novel that was missing from both Capote and the film version of In Cold Blood were the stories of the slain victims. Capote does a careful balancing act as he tells the victims' stories, while providing us with the history of the killers.

Especially poignant is the story of Nancy Clutter, the young girl murdered in the attack. In fact the novel ends with a graveside visit by Dewey, the chief investigator of the murders, in which he encounters Nancy's closest friend, who is visiting her grave while home from university. Several years have now passed since the murders, and the young woman tells him how she and Nancy had planned to room together at university. As she leaves the cemetery--the sun shining on her hair and highlighting the beauty and vitality of her youth--Dewey thinks of the slain Nancy Clutter and what might have been.

In writing this novel, Capote has created an account of a true-life crime in some of the most beautiful and poetic prose I have read in a long, long time.

In the end, the title of the novel is double-edged: In Cold Blood reveals the senselessness of both the original murders and the state-sanctioned hanging of the killers.