In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Book Analysis

📌Category: Books
📌Words: 1314
📌Pages: 5
📌Published: 19 February 2022

Truman Capote was a famous literary figure in 1959 after writing Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Nonetheless, he decided that he wanted to try something new; Capote wanted to write the first nonfiction novel. After reading a newspaper article about the murders of the Clutter family, four well-known members of a small, quiet Kansas town, he decided that it would be the perfect subject for his novel. He immediately travelled to Holcomb, Kansas and began the research and writing that would take him six years to complete. Capote finally released his novel In Cold Blood in book form in 1966 after the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hicock, were executed. Over the last 50 years countless readers and critics have pointed out inaccuracies between the book and the real case and have questioned whether In Cold Blood is truly the first nonfiction novel. These inaccuracies are seen through the family’s wrongful portrayal, the killer's inaccurate portrayal, and scenes getting added that did not happen in real life. 

Capote began his book, In Cold Blood, by giving us insight into the Clutter family’s daily lives. We first learn about the father of the family, Herb Clutter. When writing about Herb, Capote portrays him as a man who seems to have an incredible moral and ethical standing. He was a known churchgoer and had anti-smoking and anti-drinking beliefs. However, that may not have been the truth. Author Gary McAvoy recently published a book titled And Every Word is True based on the truth about the Clutter murders and evidence surrounding the case. According to the Forensic Files article “In Cold Blood's Newest Infusion,” when asked about how he portrayed Herb within the book, he stated: “Nancy wrote in her diary that Herb had started smoking. He was also said to be having an affair with the wife of a business associate. And Herb Clutter had made enough enemies that Dewey, who was good friends with him, at first thought the murders were grudge killings. I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusion.” Herb, however, was not the only Clutter family member that Capote earned backlash for portraying inaccurately in his novel. Throughout In Cold Blood, Bonnie, the mother of the family, appears as someone who has a history of suffering from mental illness and various physical illnesses, including postpartum depression after the birth of her youngest son, Kenyon. Apparently, however, Bonnie Clutter was never depressed at all, according to a reporter who decided to speak out and prove this portrayal wrong. She wrote in her article that Bonnie was:

anything but unhappy. She was a member of the local garden club, a regular at church and involved in the local community, they say in the series. While she suffered from some pain issues, they were manageable, and she was not bedridden or overcome by the depression Capote described.” This same reporter also wrote in her article that the living Clutter family members made their negative feelings about these inaccurate portrayals of their family very clear to Capote, yet they never heard anything else from him (McDonell-Parry). 

Besides the Clutter family, critics additionally believe that Capote did not accurately portray the killers, or at least did not fully reveal their true colors. During an interview with Capote that took place after the publishing of In Cold Blood, he discusses things in his research that he left out of the book with the interviewer. Readers of both this interview and his novel would likely guess that he left these instances out of the book to make the killers, Dick Hicock and Perry Smith, seem more likeable. When discussing instances left out of the book, Capote tells the interviewer: 

At one point, in Mexico, Perry and Dick had a terrific falling-out, and Perry said he was going to kill Dick. He said that he’d already killed five people--he was lying, adding one more than he should have (that was the Negro he kept telling Dick he’d killed years before in Las Vegas) and that one more murder wouldn’t matter. It was simple enough. Perry’s cliche about it was that if you’ve killed one person you can kill anybody. He’d look at Dick, as they drove along together, and he’d say to himself, Well, I really ought to kill him, it’s a question of expediency.

They had two other murders planned that aren’t mentioned in the book. Neither of them came off. One “victim” was a man who ran a restaurant in Mexico City--a Swiss. They had become friendly with him eating in his restaurant and when they were out of money they evolved this whole plan about robbing and murdering him. They went to his apartment in Mexico City and waited for him all night long. He never showed up. The other “victim” was a man they never even knew--like the Clutters. He was a banker in a small Kansas town. Dick kept telling Perry  that sure, they might have failed with the Clutter score, but this Kansas banker job was absolutely for certain. They were going to kidnap him and ask for ransom, though the plan was, as you might imagine, to murder him right away. 

Assuming these are not the only violent situations that Capote left out of his novel, as Capote also stated in the same interview that 80 percent of the research he did was never used in the novel, readers may believe that Capote did this to paint the killers in a better light (Plimpton). After spending much of his time with the killers, Capote likely became close with them, especially Smith. One sign of how close he became with them was proven after their execution when Capote bought the original headstones for Smith and Hickock’s rest place (Keglovits). Due to the level of this closeness, readers may be led to believe that his opinion on the killer’s is shown in the novel by portraying them more as humans who made a mistake and not the cold-blooded killers that they really were. 

As soon as In Cold Blood was published, critics began poking holes and fact checking the novel almost immediately. According to an article titled “Fact Checking In Cold Blood,” an early revelation showed that the final scene in the book was completely fictionalized. The last scene shows detective Alvin Dewey and Nancy Clutter’s living best friend, Sue Kidwell, at the cemetery having a conversation. Capote likely added this fictionalized scene to give the novel some type of closure. The same article discusses another difference between the novel and the real murders. The article states: 

In the first of two notable recent revelations, a Wall Street Journal article suggested that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation waited five days before following up on what turned out to be the crucial lead in the case, rather than doing so immediately, as Capote wrote. This is not a trivial matter, because if the KBI had acted quicker, the killers—Perry Smith and Dick Hickock—may not have made it to Florida, where, according to a separate investigation by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, they possibly committed four additional murders, of a husband and wife and their two young children (Yagoda). 

Another thing that Capote did in his novel was change the names of a few characters. In the same interview as discussed earlier, he states: “There are only three people in the book whose names I’ve changed--his [Mr. Bell, the one who picked up the killers while they were hitchhiking across Nebraska], the convict Perry admired so much (Willie-Jay he’s called in the book), and also I changed Perry Smith’s sister’s name” (Plimpton). For decades, fact-checkers have worked to check all the facts, scenes, dialogue, etc. in this novel. Some things, however, are impossible to check because they involve people who are now deceased. Although, one fact-checker did seem to think that despite the few mistakes, it was an exact portrayal of the murders. This fact-checker, Sandy Campbell, is reported saying that “he had never seen such an accurate account and that whatever the fiction veneer, ‘In Cold Blood’ was a scrupulous non-fiction report” (Yagoda). 

More than 50 years later, readers still try to poke holes and figure fact versus fiction within In Cold Blood. Despite the inaccurate portrayal of the family, killers, and some scenes, it is still an extremely famous novel that is read all across the world in classrooms, libraries, and homes. Capote received an outstanding amount of backlash for writing the first non-fiction novel; nonetheless, it made him a more known literary figure even after his previously released work.

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