What makes mystery fiction compelling is finding out who did it. What makes true crime stories interesting is knowing not only what happened and who did it, but that the writer has an entire book to tell you how and why.
I wrote last month about the experience of walking past certain books over and over thinking that I really should read them someday, but never actually picking them up. Add Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” to the list of books I can’t believe I didn’t read before now, despite considering it for years.
The story is about the murder of a small-town Kansas family, the Clutters, who were shot inside their home at night. Capote, a writer from New York, saw a brief story about the killing in a newspaper and went to Kansas to research what became an exhaustive account of the murder, investigation and resulting trial.
Capote tells you pretty much right away that the family is dead. Shortly after he tells you who did it. In crime fiction, you would have little reason to keep reading. But what is masterful about Capote’s work is the way he reveals just how the murders were committed and how the suspects were captured.
The reader is omniscient in the sense that we know for sure the suspects are guilty, but we only learn many of the details as the investigators do. That creates this sense that, like the townspeople, we want the police to figure out the how and why as quickly as possible. We want to know just like the people who live down the street from a horrific unsolved murder.
It wasn’t the kind of story that led to a lot of dog-eared items for me to expound upon, but I do have two items.
The first comes from the description of Nancy Clutter’s bedroom. She is the teenage daughter in the family of four.
“A cork bulletin board, painted pink, hung above a white-skirted dressing table; dried gardenias, the remains of an ancient corsage, were attached to it, and old valentines, newspaper stories, and snapshots of her baby nephew…”
When I was a senior in high school, I had a locker just a few down from my friend Kristen, who lived in my neighborhood and caught a ride with me to school. Early in the year I saw her put a red rose upside down in the back of her locker. I made some sort of comment about why she would put it in there to just let it die and disintegrate all over her stuff.
She kindly informed me of the apparently widely known practice of drying flowers like that. Still, I was dubious, and spent the rest of the year peaking into her locker and saying things like, “Hm, doesn’t look so good today” or “It’s starting to go, I can sense it.”
You can learn some unexpected things at school.
Late in the book, after the suspects are captured, they spend an extended time waiting for their punishment to be carried out.
“In March 1965, after Smith and Hickock had been confined in their Death Row cells almost two thousand days, the Kansas Supreme Court decreed that their lives must end between midnight and 2:00 a.m., Wednesday, April 14, 1965.”
April 14 is my brother’s birthday, but also a day marked by a few not-so-good events. In 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre. In 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg. It’s also Pete Rose’s birthday.
If you’re interested in reading more about Capote’s role in launching “New Journalism” with this work, or the scandalous rumors about his connection to one of the killers, here’s a pretty interesting piece from Salon.