Best Ever
True Crime Book?

On November 15, 1959, in the village of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were murdered in their home by two men who’d expected to find a safe containing ten thousand dollars. There was no safe. The Clutters had almost no cash on the premises. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith drove away with a radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than fifty dollars—leaving behind a crime so disproportionate to its motive that it would occupy Truman Capote for the next six years and produce a book that changed what nonfiction could do.

In Cold Blood, published first as a four-part serial in The New Yorker in September 1965 and then as a book in January 1966, claimed to be something new: a “nonfiction novel,” a work of reportage that employed the techniques of fiction without sacrificing accuracy. The claim was both revolutionary and contested. Capote had always been a stylist first, his novels Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s distinguished by prose so controlled it approached the decorative. Now he proposed to apply that control to real events, real people, real suffering.

The structure alternates between the Clutters and their killers, cross-cutting in a way that generates dread through dramatic irony. We know what’s coming. We watch the Clutter family through their final day—Herbert checking on his wheat fields, Bonnie resting in her room with the depression that had plagued her for years, Nancy finishing homework and making plans, Kenyon tinkering with his radio—and we know these ordinary activities are their last. Meanwhile, Dick and Perry drive toward Holcomb, their car a mechanism of fate ticking closer with every chapter.

Capote’s sympathy for Perry Smith became the book’s most controversial element. The writer spent years visiting Smith on death row, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews, developing what many observers called an obsessive attachment. Perry emerges in the book as intelligent, artistic, damaged by a brutal childhood—a man whose capacity for violence coexisted with genuine sensitivity. Whether this portrait is accurate or whether Capote projected onto his subject remains debated. What’s undeniable is that Perry receives the book’s most interior treatment, his dreams and memories rendered with a novelistic intimacy the Clutters never achieve.

The Clutters, by contrast, function almost as archetypes: the prosperous farmer, the devoted wife, the popular daughter, the quiet son. Capote researched them exhaustively—interviewing friends, neighbors, teachers, employers—but the result reads more like hagiography than portraiture. They’re too good, too wholesome, their deaths too meaningful as symbols of American innocence destroyed. Critics at the time and since have noted this imbalance, suggesting that Capote couldn’t imagine his way into lives so different from his own.

The book’s final section, covering the trial and execution, raises questions about Capote’s relationship to his material that he never satisfactorily answered. He needed the execution to complete his narrative—the book requires that ending, dramatically if not morally. Did he therefore hope for it? Did his presence in Kansas, his fame, his willingness to fund appeals, affect the outcome? Capote always denied any conflict, but the denial itself suggests awareness of the problem.

The prose throughout is Capote at his most disciplined. The baroque tendencies of his earlier work are sublimated into clarity; the sentences are shorter, the rhythms more journalistic. But the eye remains novelistic, selecting details with a fiction writer’s sense of what matters. The description of the Clutter house after the murders—“four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives”—achieves its effect through what it doesn’t say, the restraint more devastating than elaboration would be.

In Cold Blood created a genre, or at least named one. The nonfiction novel became a category, populated by works from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song to Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. True crime, once confined to pulp paperbacks, became respectable, a form capable of literary ambition. Capote’s method—immersive reporting over years, scenes reconstructed from interviews, interiority attributed to real people—became standard practice.

But the book also ended Capote. He never finished another novel; Answered Prayers, the scandalous roman à clef he’d promised for decades, appeared only in fragments. The six years in Kansas, the relationship with Perry Smith, the execution he may have needed and certainly watched—whatever happened in that process, it broke something. In Cold Blood reads like a book that cost everything to write. Whether it was worth the price is a question only Capote could answer, and he’s not available for comment.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Vintage International paperback keeps the book in print in its standard form—no scholarly apparatus, just Capote’s text.
• The audiobook read by Scott Brick captures the rhythm of Capote’s sentences—the pauses, the carefully constructed clauses, the way the prose builds toward revelations it’s been withholding.
• Gerald Clarke’s biography Capote provides the context the book itself omits—the author’s state of mind during the Kansas years, his relationship with Smith, the toll the project extracted.