2010/30

Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (336p.)

When in 1959 four members of the Clutter family were brutally murdered on their farm, Truman Capote (his only other book I have read is Breakfast at Tiffany’s) travelled to western Kansas together with his friend Harper Lee, to investigate the murders (prior to the murderers being caught) and collecting thousands of pages of notes in the process. In Cold Blood starts with describing the Clutter family and their homestead in Holcomb, Kansas, the murderers and their bios are then mixed in, and the book ends with the perpetrators hanging from the gallows. Not only is In Cold Blood a page-turner, it is also a pivotal novel and rare in that it has spawned two genres: In Cold Blood is considered to be the first work in the true crime genre, and is considered to be the original non-fiction novel. Another example of the latter category is Michael Herr’s Dispatches, which I read earlier this year.

Very good.

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’. Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveller reaches them.