Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.
But Capote wouldn't leave me alone, because long before he betrayed his society friends in Answered Prayers, he had done something far more interesting, far more important and considerably more troubling.
He went to Kansas, and he wrote In Cold Blood. Of all the books I have written about on this blog, recommended to friends or pushed into people's hands while insisting that they really must read it, this is the one I think everyone should read.
Not because it is comfortable. It isn't. Not because Truman Capote can necessarily be trusted. That's rather the point. You should read it because more than sixty years after four members of the Clutter family were murdered in their home, In Cold Blood still asks questions about truth, storytelling, empathy and our appetite for other people's suffering that we have never satisfactorily answered.
In fact, we may need the book more now than when Capote wrote it because we have never consumed more murder.
A tiny story in a newspaper
On 15 November 1959, Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and two of their children, Nancy and Kenyon, were found murdered at their home near Holcomb, Kansas.
They had been bound and shot. There appeared to be no obvious motive. The Clutters were not celebrities. Holcomb was not famous. This was not, at first, one of those crimes that seemed destined to become part of American mythology.
It was a murder in a place most people had never heard of involving people they had never met. Then Truman Capote read about it. The story that caught his attention was small. But something about the crime interested him, particularly its effect on the community in which it had happened.
So Capote decided to go there. Think about that for a moment. A writer sitting in New York reads about the worst thing that has ever happened to four strangers and thinks, you know what? I need to go and see that for myself,.
His childhood friend Harper Lee went with him. This was shortly before To Kill a Mockingbird made her famous, and her presence proved invaluable. Capote was many things, but inconspicuous in rural Kansas was not one of them. Lee had a talent for putting people at ease and helped him gain the confidence of people who might otherwise have been reluctant to talk.
Together they began interviewing the people of Holcomb. Capote kept going, and going and going. He went at it for years. He was a man driven. He talked to neighbours, friends and investigators. He gained access to records. He read Nancy Clutter's diary. And when the two men responsible for the murders, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, were arrested, Capote began talking to them too.
He followed the case all the way to the gallows. Smith and Hickock were executed in April 1965. Capote was there. And out of all of this came In Cold Blood.
Before the murder, there was a landscape
There are books you admire because of what they accomplish. Then there are books whose first page makes you realise that somebody is doing something different. In Cold Blood is one of those books.
Capote begins not with blood, bodies or police cars but with geography. Holcomb sits on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, in what he calls a "lonesome area". That word matters. Before Capote tells us what happened, he makes us understand where it happened.
We see the landscape. We feel the distance. We enter the rhythms of this small place and, crucially, the ordinary life of the Clutter family. Capote knew something that every crime documentary producer now, decades later, knows too.
He knew this: the murder means more if you first make us care about the world before it happened. So he does something a newspaper report cannot. He slows everything down. He has to if he is going to write a novel and we are going to continue to turn the pages.
We know the Clutters are going to die. Capote knows that we know, and still he makes us wait. The family goes about its final day while Perry Smith and Dick Hickock travel towards them. Two narratives move inexorably towards one another.
The effect is almost unbearable. The book is incredibly tense. Full of foreboding. It is also extraordinarily clever because Capote has taken facts and given them the machinery of a novel.
There are scenes. Dialogue. Foreshadowing. Shifts in perspective. Suspense. Character development. Symbolism. Rhythm. The people involved in the crime stop feeling like names in a newspaper report. They become characters, and that word should make us slightly uncomfortable. They were real people.
The birth of the "non-fiction novel"
Capote called In Cold Blood a "non-fiction novel". He certainly didn't invent writing about murder. People had been doing that for a very long time. What he did was something more consequential. He demonstrated just how completely the techniques of fiction could be applied to real crime, and it worked spectacularly.
In Cold Blood became a sensation. But its greater legacy is everywhere around us. To see that all you have to do is fire up Netflix, and take a look at what's dominating the charts. Or spend ten minutes on YouTube. Or scroll through TikTok. Same thing over and over. You cannot escape it. Not now.
Murder has become one of our favourite forms of entertainment. We listen while walking the dog.
We watch while eating dinner. We put on a podcast about a woman being murdered because we have a long drive and need something interesting for the journey.
There is an entire vocabulary around it now. We have the True crime fan, the true crime documentary, and true crime podcast. There is a true crime community. It has worked its way into TV drama where (and how many times have you seen it) podcasters turn up as characters.
The phrase itself is peculiar when you think about it. True crime. The first word promises reality. The second promises entertainment, and somewhere between those two words sits Truman Capote.
The problem is that Capote is very good
It would be easier to condemn all this if In Cold Blood weren't so brilliant, but it is. That is the difficulty. Capote doesn't merely tell us that Perry Smith and Dick Hickock murdered the Clutters. He wants to understand them. Particularly Perry who he spent most time with.
This is where the book becomes morally complicated, as Perry Smith committed an appalling crime, and nothing Capote writes changes that, but Capote gives him a childhood.
He gives him disappointments and fantasies, and he gives him intelligence and vanity and cruelty and vulnerability. He shows us the damage that accumulated long before Perry Smith arrived at the Clutter house.
That's when something uncomfortable begins to happen, as we understand him. Not forgive. Not excuse. Understand.
Those things are different, although reading In Cold Blood occasionally makes the distance between them feel alarmingly small.
Capote asks us to spend time inside the life of somebody whose actions should make us want to turn away, and we don't.
We keep reading, and this may be the book's greatest achievement. It may also be its most troubling one because while Capote gives Perry Smith extraordinary psychological depth, four other people are dead: The entire Clutter family Herbert and Bonnie Clutter- and their two children, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter.
At what point does understanding the murderer begin to shift attention away from the murdered? It is a question true crime is still struggling with.
Who gets to become interesting?
When you watch enough modern true crime you'll notice something. Killers are fascinating and victims are lovely. We learn pretty quickly that a victim lit up a room. She loved her family, and would do anything for her friends. Then we spend six episodes analysing the murderer, from his childhood and relationships (the bad dad) through his psychology and motives.
The dead person becomes the reason the story exists, and the killer becomes the story. Capote understood the narrative power of this decades before streaming television discovered it. Perry is simply a more complicated literary character than almost anyone else in In Cold Blood.
Perhaps that was unavoidable. Perhaps murder itself creates that imbalance because we desperately want an explanation for the person capable of committing it. But Capote does not merely encounter that imbalance, and he uses it, and this is where the writer becomes dangerous again.
Can we trust what we're reading?
Another problem with In Cold Blood. Capote insisted upon its factual accuracy, and the book appeared with enormous authority. This wasn't a novel based on the Clutter murders. This was what happened. Except it wasn't always.
Over the years, journalists and researchers have challenged parts of Capote's account, and one of the most striking examples concerns Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective who led the case.
In Capote's version, the investigation moves with the satisfying momentum of fiction. A crucial tip arrives, and Dewey's investigators swing into action. However, later examination of Kansas Bureau of Investigation records suggested reality was considerably messier. Details were altered. Timing was compressed. Events were rearranged. Dewey emerges in Capote's book as a more conventionally heroic investigator than the documentary record always supports.
And then there is the ending. Without spoiling too much, In Cold Blood eventually offers us a strangely consoling final scene involving Dewey in a cemetery.
It is beautifully judged, and it gives the book closure. It also apparently never happened. According to Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke, the encounter was invented, which presents a problem because it is exactly the sort of ending a novelist would write.
Life rarely provides endings that neat. Not the kind you get in novels where the reader demands a satisfying conclusion. Capote knew that.
The truth, improved
This is where In Cold Blood becomes much more interesting than a debate about whether Capote got things "right". Of course, a work of non-fiction should not invent events and present them as fact, but even if Capote had invented absolutely nothing, we would still have a problem because writing is selection.
Capote decides where the story begins, he decides whose voice we hear, decides what description matters, and when we discover information.
Capote decides that Perry's childhood belongs in the story, and what Holcomb looks like. He also decides when to make us frightened and when to make us sympathetic, and where the story ends.
Every one of those decisions changes our experience of what happened. Facts may be true individually and still become something different when a writer arranges them. Put this fact before that one, and you create suspicion. Withhold another, and you create suspense. End on a particular image and you create meaning. That isn't necessarily dishonesty. It is storytelling, walking a fine line and In Cold Blood forces us to confront how difficult it can be to separate the two.
And then there is Capote himself
There is one character who is conspicuously absent from In Cold Blood. It is Truman Capote, as right from the start he makes the decision to remove himself from the page. We don't see him arrive in Kansas or persuade people to talk. We don't see Harper Lee who was there helping him.
We certainly don't see him grow close to the killer Perry Smith, or how that relationship developed, and we don't see Capote waiting for the case to end so his book could finally have an ending.
The author disappears, and yet his fingerprints are everywhere. This becomes particularly fascinating once you know what happened to Capote afterwards.
In Cold Blood brought him enormous fame. The murder of four people he had never met changed his life. There is no pleasant way of phrasing that. It is one of the reasons why we are still talking about him now and why there have been two films, a TV series and a play based on the book.
The Clutters suffered a catastrophe, and Capote made a masterpiece from it. Both statements are true, and perhaps that is the moral knot at the centre of the entire true crime genre.
We are still doing it
This brings us back to us because it is easy to put Truman Capote on trial, and more comfortable too, but while we can tut at his methods, we then open Netflix and watch the next murder documentary.
This is the part of In Cold Blood that feels startlingly modern. Capote understood that murder could be transformed into narrative without losing its claim to truth, and modern true crime has industrialised the idea, turning it into a content production line.
1. A murder happens.
2. There is a podcast.
3. Then a documentary.
4. Then another documentary because the first documentary left things out.
5. Then a drama starring somebody A-list famous.
While all of that happens, the victim's photograph becomes a thumbnail, and the killer becomes content, and we binge-watch it.
Capote didn't create our appetite for other people's suffering. He simply understood how powerful that appetite was when a sufficiently gifted storyteller fed it.
The one true crime book I think you should read
And after all that, here is the strange part: I still think you should read In Cold Blood. In fact, I think that if you read only one work of true crime, it should probably be this one. Not because Capote gives us a perfect factual record of the Clutter murders. He doesn't. And not because his methods are beyond criticism, as they aren't.
No, none of that. Read it because the book makes those problems impossible to escape, and because Capote is such a good writer that you can feel him manipulating your attention while being unable to stop him doing it.
And finally, read it because he will make you look at Perry Smith differently from how you expected to look at a murderer, and you will occasionally forget that the people on the page were not invented.
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