Finished: Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood'

Truman Capote is credited with inventing the true crime genre with this book, and it has subsequently only been surpassed in sales by Helter Skelter. In Cold Blood is enhanced by the legend of Capote, his relationship with Harper Lee, the controversy at the time (1959) as some claimed not everything in the book was a true as Capote claimed, and the continued controversy today, plus the three movies which have been made about it (with stars from Robert Blake and John Forsythe to Daniel Craig and Sandra Bullock).

So the book has quite the back story. And, it's quite the book on its own.

From Wiki:

In Cold Blood is a non-fiction book first published in 1966, written by American author Truman Capote; it details the 1959 murders of Herbert Clutter, a farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife, and two of their four children.

When Capote learned of the quadruple murder, before the killers were captured, he decided to travel to Kansas and write about the crime. He was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee, and together they interviewed local residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. The killers, Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested six weeks after the murders, and Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book.

Here's a Wall Street Journal story from 2013 on the controversy.

Truman Capote's masterwork of murder, "In Cold Blood," cemented two reputations when first published almost five decades ago: his own, as a literary innovator, and detective Alvin Dewey Jr.'s as the most famous Kansas lawman since Wyatt Earp.

But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote's claim that his best seller was an "immaculately factual" recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse. It also calls into question the image of Mr. Dewey as the brilliant, haunted hero.

Amazonians give it a 4.5 out of 5 rating. I gave it a 6+ only because I have a negative bias against non-fiction history books (as I consider them more as reporting or research papers than products of an imagination requiring building your own characters, settings and plots). But, I do give Capote credit for some excellent writing here, really bringing the individuals to life and a good sense of place, which still works even now over a half century later.

This is a good book, should be read in all high schools for its cultural/historical value and Capote's prose.