What can you say about this book that has not already been said. This one has been on my to-read list forever. Just never enough time to read so I decided to give this one a shot via audio, my first audio book. I loved it. I spend so much time in the kitchen that it was perfect and I flew through this one. The narrator was awesome. I'm looking forward to hearing more of his work. Now, the story, naturally it is quite gripping. Capote does such a wonderful job with not only building up the story on the Clutters but also the story and empathy for the killers. I feel odd saying how much I enjoyed this story when it is such a gruesome story. But I felt the same way about Helter Skelter. I've heard that Capote was obsessed with this story and it shows in the level of details that he has placed into this story. I would suggest this book to any book lover.

“I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.” ― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

So glad I finally got around to reading this classic…

You would never know that this ground-breaking true crime novel was written over 50 yrs ago. This story was constructed in a way that made me feel like I was reading fiction. The characters and the events/circumstances of the crime were very well developed. While there aren’t any ‘twists’, because we all know how this story plays out, I was surprised that I was really placing most of the responsibility of the crime on one individual over the other only to have my opinion completely changed upon finishing.

The biggest flaw in the writing was that there was some repetitiveness and a too much unnecessary detailing in events told at different points. I understand the desire to get the most fully developed view of the characters, however, it did make the story slow in places.

I chose to listen to this on audio and Scott Brick did an absolutely outstanding job with the narration. I would highly, highly recommend listening to this rather than reading a hard copy.

Again, I’m so glad that I finally read this and think that any fan of the true crime genre will enjoy. A true classic that I think has endured the test of time. 4 stars.

Lo leí hace algunos años y me encantó. Lo he vuelto a releer en el tiempo. Me di cuenta que no lo tenía en goodreads así que aprovecho de agregarlo y dejarles mi reseña. https://youtu.be/rTjbWR6RXwk

I didn't know about "In cold blood" until a few months ago when I read some Goodreads reviews about it. I listened to the audiobook. Audiobook narrator Scott Brick was very good, although he chose to read the book using a bit of a preachy tone, which I didn't enjoy too much.

Just incredible how deep into the events and into the characters Capote managed to get, thanks to a massive work of research and to what amounted to years of interviews.

Despite the often flowery prose (personal taste and, I guess, different times), "In cold blood" grips you and sucks you in. It makes you feel like you experienced what they experienced - the victims, but mainly the murderers. Capote moved to this little Kansas town when he heard about the murder of the Clutter family, and he gathered information for his book for the next few years, during which he even got acquainted with the convicted criminals.

As dark and disturbing as any piece of true crime writing, and in the end, thanks to the well-rounded, hyper-detailed representation of the criminals as real human beings, yet another demonstration that capital punishment is a barbarian practice.

10/26/19 it doesn’t matter to me if some of this story is made up. it’s still great writing. Capote at his best.


Exquisite crime writing with a human outlook
Perfect book for Audible. Was like listening to monologues
Totally understand how Capote became so connected to the criminals. His attention to detail, his choice of words, his inability to determine how to end the book, all prove how emotionally involved he became. Obviously these men were guilty of four grisly murders, but Capote proved they were also two men with abusive childhoods, broken hearts, and unsatisfactory family relationships.

Aweosme true crime story. There's a reason this book comes up on like every list of "the best true crimes stories" cause it's one of the best. Super easy story to follow, not bogged down with too many facts and details. You get to know the characters (mostly the killers) and get to feel like you know them a little.

Spoilers to follow

It was pretty easy to feel bad for the killers in this book. I feel bad for the family that got killed, but it was more about the killers and their story. It makes you wonder. People always say I wonder what happened to that guy,b why is he the way he is, or what made him do what he did. Well perry had a pretty jacked up childhood. Drunk mom, abusive father, and no access to education. No wonder he did what he did. At some point, the parents are to blame for this one. At least perrys parents are. Yes, Perry and Smith deserved to hang, but maybe if Perry was shown the love and attention he needed or got the education he craved, then maybe the Clutters would still be farming river vally.

My last thought and my favorite part of the book. The very end when they are on death row. They see their "friend" walk down to the gallows, and he's laughing and joking right to the end. Then awhile later, and its their turn. According to ths book anyway they walked down to the gallows and said their last words and then got hung. No fuss. No fight. No animosity. Makes you wonder why they took it so lightly. Did they care? Were they just glad it was finally over? Makes you wonder how someone can face death so easily.

Spook-A-Thon: Read a book with a spooky word in the title

I read In Cold Blood for the first time when I was in high school and I though it was okay. It didn't really do anything for me. But then again I wasn't really into True Crime back then and I think I preferred a snappier more fast paced writing style.

Rereading In Cold Blood as an adult whose reading style and interests have changed. I loved this book. I totally get the hype. I agree with the people who say this book is a masterpiece because it is.

With In Cold Blood Truman Capote invented modern True Crime. I'm sure there had been True Crime books before but In Cold Blood took it to a completely new level.

On November 15, 1959 in the small town Holcomb, Kansas four members of the Clutter family Herb Clutter is wife Bonnie and their two children Kenyon(15) and Nancy(16) were savagely murdered. Capote exhaustively reconstructs the crime and the hunt for the killers. In doing so he befriends the two killers and attempts to humanize them without ever making and excuses for their disturbing crime.

This book is hard to read at times. Truman Capote is a masterful writer who pulls no punches when describing in vivid detail every brutal detail.

A must read!

This was the best story about true crime that I have read. Capote's description of these events is riveting and everybody should read it, whether they like books on true crime or not.

A couple of weeks back, a disgruntled former senior inspector Rolando Mendoza from the Manila Police District shot and killed eight Hong Kong tourists ending the hostage crisis drama that lasted for around 10 hours. This took place at the Quirino Grandstand in the heart of Manila, Philippines. The whole nation was stunned while watching the images unfolding on TV screens. The whole world watched with us as the events are covered by CNN. Mendoza's demand was for him to get his job back. He was about to retire in a year's time when he was kicked out from the service due to allegation of extortion.

Each of us, including me, quickly say Mendoza is wrong. It is wrong to extort (forcibly ordering a chef to eat cocaine!). It is wrong to carry a firearm (he was no longer in service). It is wrong to take people as hostages (especially tourists!). It is wrong to kill (eight innocent unarmed foreigners!).

But... have we heard his side? (he is already dead) Have we at least heard the people he was close with? Do we know exactly what went into his mind why he did those senseless and brutal shootings?

That is what Truman Capote (1924-1984) did in his nonfiction novel, published in 1966, In Cold Blood. He was so good at it that my heart cried for the killer, Perry Smith. Yes, the murder of the whole Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 was wrong. Smith and his partner, Dick Hickock should not have gone to the house with the intent of robbing the family. Then when they did not find the safe (supposed to contain US$10,000), Smith shot each of the people in that house (they ended up getting a measly amount of US$50, a binocular and a portable radio). I felt total raging hatred for Smith and Hickock. But when their own life stories were presented by Capote, at first I did not know what to feel (he came from a broken family, he grew up with strangers, his father humiliated him, all he wanted was to have a good education, when he was small he cried looking up at the moon as he thought it was so beautiful). Until that scene when Smith was taken back to his cell after the verdict was given. That scene when he extended his hands so the warden's wife could hold them... That scene followed by the one with the squirrel missing Smith in his cell... Capote's narration reaches out to your heart so that it bleeds pity and empathy for a wrong person.

The book screams to us: is capital punishment right or wrong? Prior to this book, I used to react to this question with a shrug and "yes, it is right". Then I normally add that as a father, I feel the pain of my daughter whenever she cries (due to sickness or whatever), etc. In short, no debate needed, I was totally in the side of the victim (pp.336 "I believe in hanging. Just so long as I'm not the one being hanged"). However, in this book, Capote opened my eyes to the other side of the argument: the background of the killer (he is also a victim of the society, he could be schizophrenic: feeling totally detached from himself at the time of the killing, taking the killer's life does not give him opportunity to change, taking the killer's life is a pure and simple act of revenge).

I bought this book from a second-hand bookstore at P50 (around US$1) last year. My brother says that we used to have a copy of this when we were kids in the province. He also says that my late father read and liked this so he read it too. I was young then and not interested in literature. Last Wednesday was my father's 13th Death Anniversary so as my way of remembering him, I picked this from my to-be-read pile. One good decision I made. This book is life-changing.

I have 51 friends here in Goodreads. More than half of them are Filipinos. Some of them are Americans or Europeans. Not a single one of my Filipino friends has this in any of his or her folders (read, marked-to-read, currently-reading, wish-to-read, etc). None. All the Americans and Europeans have read this book and rated this with either a 5 or a 4. Last Friday, I saw brand-new copies in a popular bookstore. Oftentimes, I also see many second-hand copies in other bookstores. It is not thick (only 343 pages) and it is an easy read.

My theory: there are so many killings and murders in the Philippines that Filipinos are either desensitized already or Filipinos are fun-loving people so we do not want to read books or watch movies that we already experience in real life.

My opinion: this is wrong. We need good books like In Cold Blood to widen our perspective on important issues like in this case, capital punishment. For all we know, we could have already set biases and prejudices clouding our judgment and views. In fact, in one of the TV news programs last week, I saw no less than Senator Miguel Zubiri calling for the return of capital punishment in the country.

I am not saying that Rolando Mendoza was right in taking those tourists as hostages and killing them in the end. No! All I am saying is that we should not be too quick to pass judgment on him or the likes of him. Voices should be heard.

When this book was suggested for my bookclub, I was intrigued. It is one of those books that I have meant to read forever and, indeed, it was published in 1966, the year I was born, so it was interesting for me to read just from that angle (even if it was first serialised in the ‘New Yorker’ in 1965).

Like so many great things that are created, this was inspired by something quite inconspicuous; a one column story which appeared in a newspaper on November, 16th, 1959, about the murder of the Clutter family on Rivery Valley Farm in western Kansas. This news story sent Truman Capote out to Kansas to investigate and resulted in him creating, arguably, the first ‘nonfiction novel.’

Although the subject matter of this book is, obviously, a tragedy, it is wonderfully written, with great sympathy to everyone involved and a very modern examination of the reasons for the crime. Indeed, early crime books/magazines tended towards the sensational and shocking. “In Cold Blood,” is the second best selling true crime book of all time, beaten only by the brilliant, “Helter Skelter,” so it keeps good company.

Like, “Helter Skelter,” this book is obsessed with detail. “In Cold Blood,” is a work of great research and took years to write. Capote sets the scene well; taking us through the last day of the Clutters and introducing us to this respected, and respectable, family. Although, later in the book, the author focuses on the killers, their backgrounds and their motivations, he is respectful to the victims and, by introducing them to the reader first, he enables us to feel sympathy for them before anything else. However, the bulk of the book does look at the men who are arrested, and tried, for the murders in great detail. He examines their past, their relationship and how they were caught, plus what happened to them afterwards.

Although these events happened a long time ago, this book does not feel particularly dated. The reasons behind such crimes are, sadly, still much the same as they were then. Although I cannot say this was an easy, or comfortable, read, it is really a brilliantly written book and I am glad that I finally read it.

(You can watch my video critique of the book here: https://youtu.be/V1EfxusX8-w )

Over the six years Capote spent writing the book, he supposedly took eight-thousand pages of notes. Presumably, these were compiled from the interviews he undertook with the police, townsfolk and the criminals themselves. The notes also would have included the deeply personal papers he had access to. Nancy Clutter, the sixteen-year-old girl who Richard and Perry murdered, kept a diary which Capote was allowed to read, so paired with the numerous witness reports he gathered and the extensive amount of time he spent in the town of Holcomb, he had a reasonably good idea of what the last hours of the Clutter family were really like. What’s more, on top of this acute attention to detail, he often managed to go further still, such that he even described a photograph of Richard and Perry that was taken by a complete stranger during their brief stint in Mexico. To all appearances, Capote had an unbelievable dedication to identifying every atom that was in play during both the build-up to the murders and in their fallout. Astonishingly, he was so sure of himself in this regard that he wasn’t beyond making the erroneous claim that In Cold Blood was the first book of its type and that no better example of the genre would ever be written. The first claim was transparently false, but of the second, he might actually have been able to rest assured if only for one troubling fact.

Capote lied.

In 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported that there are elements of In Cold Blood that seem to have been exaggerated and others that were clearly just made up.

Futher to this, Throughout the story, one of the killers, Perry, is often portrayed as the more conscientious criminal. It’s Richard who’s drawn as the bloodthirsty one. But at the end of the tale when their brutal acts are finally shown in all their gruesome glory, the twist is that it was Perry who slit poor Herbert Clutters throat and then shot him in the back of the head. It was Perry who claimed to have killed everybody in the house. And while the text leaves some doubt for this, there’s little cause to doubt that on the night itself it was Perry’s manic behaviour that drove all of the murders to happen. Yet in every other manner, Capote constructed the story and revelations in such a way that for all the evils Perry committed, in some way, there was something in him that was worthy of forgiveness.

Of his Perry’s words, it might have been the case that Capote saw the nascent form of a guilty conscience and felt compelled to have the man say in fiction what he never could in reality. Even so, it isn’t crazy to imagine that Perry actually did express those words of regret, if not at the time of execution, then maybe in the months prior. Given the other tweaks Capote made, he could have simply moved them to where all of the anger, irony and sorrow they contained could be squeezed for every last drip. Of course, it’s just as possible he merely contrived the sentiment to create a more powerful ending. Regardless, for all the questions of journalistic integrity it’s clear there was a very particular worldview that was expressed through them and a literary benefit to be gained. Tom Wolfe wasn’t entirely wrong when he criticized the book for stringing the reader along with the promise of gory details. It was a cynical way to approach a detective story. But as a successor to books like Fyodor Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, in which a man murders a pawnbroker and struggles to understand why the ends don’t justify the means, and Albert Camus’ The Stranger, in which the murder that sets the plot in motion is depicted as just another arbitrary happening in a meaningless universe, In Cold Blood is a worthy successor that presents its own philosophical quagmire in which to get bogged down. The romanticized portrait of the Clutter family and the flattering way Capote portrayed the police investigation are combined with the monstrous acts of the convicts and the apparent regret of the man most responsible for them. As such, on the surface the book can be read as a reassurance that though paradise has been lost, there are still guardians in world and redemption for those who brought it to an end. But that’s only when looking at it through one eye. When you open the other you can see that this lesson only exists as part of a stereoscopic vision in which there is also a lamentation for the absolute despair that such beauty and horror can live side by side. Yes Capote lied, but when viewed in this manner, it’s fair to say that it appears to have been for the sake of constructing a better novel rather than just because of a favour he owed.

Today, In Cold Blood remains listed as the second-best-selling true crime novel right after Vincent Bugliosi’s, Helter Skelter, which presented the first-hand accounts of the Manson murders. Nevertheless, as far as household names go Charles Manson has long since eclipsed Vincent Bugliosi and the title of his book. Not so in the case of Richard Hickcock and Perry Smith. In the years since it’s publication, In Cold Blood and Truman Capote have mostly withstood the criticisms against their warped version of history and only grown in popular imagination. The artistic licence, if we’re to use a kinder term to describe what Capote did, was handled with such self-assuredness that the book itself has become larger than anything that might have happened in real life. It’s worth pointing out that the lies many people feel weaken Capote’s work aren’t something that most critics worry about when it comes to exploring true stories in other mediums. In point of fact, the Bennett Miller picture starring Philip Seymour Hoffman grants itself a huge amount of leeway when it comes to telling us how the book was made, but it’s hard to imagine it being condemned for its own embellishments. At the very least, it’s mostly accepted that the so-called true stories of film should be taken with a grain of salt and that when they’re at their best the creative liberties they employ allow us access to a far greater Truth than that of a mirror held to the side of the road. As a work of journalism, In Cold Blood is reprehensible. It was a mistake to claim that everything in its pages was one-hundred per cent accurate. An offence to the ideals of journalism, a stain on the industry that lauded it, and disrespectful to the surviving members of the Clutter family. Moreover, even though the success of the book benefited the world by shining a light on issues of mental illness and the death penalty, the ground on which it stands has become so shaky it’s forever damaged as a point of interest in any meaningful sociological conversation. Yet if you’re able to ignore the epigraph that states it’s a true account and instead concentrate on Capote’s insistence that it should first and foremost be considered a work of art in which he applies his style sheet for fiction to an event that began as something real, it’s a masterwork of novel writing craft — though be it one forever tied to a morally questionable origin.

(Don't forget to check out my full video critique: https://youtu.be/V1EfxusX8-w )

Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" is a highly disconcerting read. After painting an idyllic scene we'd expect from the Midwestern setting evil makes it's presence felt. The blood is chilled and the heart gripped as a result.

As everyone must know by now this is considered the first nonfiction novel. All the bare facts of this story actually took place. A family of four was indeed murdered in their home by two unknown assailants on 14 November 1959. What made this book innovative was the fact that Capote handled these facts not as a journalist but as a novelist. Rather than restrict himself to just the "who, what, where, when and why" of the fourth estate he let the fiction writer in him fill in the gaps left by the facts at hand. Scenes like Bonnie Clutter's last sad night on earth could and would only be attempted by a novelist.

While Capote never makes it possible for us to forgive the murderers - not that he or anyone could - he goes a long way towards making them sympathetic. It is the film's ("Capote") claim that he fell in love with Perry Smith while writing this book. Perhaps. Smith does indeed come off as a fully rounded person while Hickock seems less interesting to him and consequently to us. What counts though is that he makes them human. After reading about the nature of this crime that in itself is a huge achievement.

Finally, I just want to point out a person who played a huge part in this story but always fails to attract the attention accorded to the murdered, the murderers or Capote himself, namely Alvin Dewey. Dewey is the relentless Javert of this tale and it is through his eyes we see the facts unfold. Capote's drawing of him as a man morally wounded by the evil inherent in the murders of this poor family touches the heart. His refusal to let the murderers get away with their heinous crime galvanizes the spirit in turn.
This is where the true greatness of this book lies.

I started this book one night at two in the morning and read til I finished it at nine a.m. It is the very definition of a page turner. Once you are told what happened it is impossible to put this book down until you find out why.