Truman Capote, 1965
Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, 336 pages
Non-fiction, Murder Mystery, Police Procedural
Read August 2026
*Spoilers*
The crux of In Cold Blood is that an unprovoked, violent crime is committed, investigated and judged. But this story is much more than just that; starting with the Kansan village of Holcomb, it establishes the character of the town, the townsfolk, the victims, the perpetrators, the crime and those who must look into it. Rather than just the details of the event, it details the life of the victims and the life of the murderers.
Highly detailed and meticulous, this book is in part journalistic and in part a police procedural. Besides its deliberately broad scope, which made me think of journalistic long reads like Into the Wild and The Fight, a point of interest is the combination of non-fictional content with a narrative form closer to fiction, such as including dialogue between the perpetrators to which no one else would have been present. It is structured so that the details of the murder as it happened aren’t revealed to the reader before they revealed to the inhabitants of the book.
Truman Capote gives the personalities of the perpetrators a lot of time, fleshing them out and showing how one of them, in addition to many poor choices, was dealt a poor hand in life. The murderers aren’t accustomed killers – if anything, they are banal.
That said, it’s not really a murder mystery, as it is very strongly implied who did it (a ‘suspicion’ which is later confirmed). Whether Capote meant to or not, this touches upon how authorial choices can choose to privilege readers with information unbeknownst to the inhabitants of that universe.
Worth reading? Yes – an interesting story.
Worth re-reading? Yes – an interesting way of telling the story.
If you liked this, you might like…
The Sixteenth Round, Ruben ‘Hurricane’ Carter
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Into the Wild, Jon Krakuer
The Fight, Norman Mailer
