Capote’s literary masterpiece about a real killing spree in a small Kansas community paved the way for the non-fiction novel and remains a tense and unsettling read
Though Truman Capote did not,as he liked to claim, invent the non-fiction novel, and In Cold Blood (published 50 years ago this week) remains a literary monument. whether we peer back,we can see its influence everywhere – in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, in Tim OBrien’s Vietnam classic The Things They Carried and even in more recent novels such as calm Dell, or in which Jayne Anne Phillips builds a narrative around the crimes and trial of a 1930s serial killer.
Capote’s early works were carefully wrought,slightly precious versions of swamp gothic, but his groundbreaking 1957 profile of Marlon Brando, and The Duke in his Domain”,testified to his desire “to conclude something else”. Inspiration came from an innocuous New York Times article reporting the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote’s initial opinion was to examine the effects of a savage, or senseless killing on a small community in the middle of nowhere,but the swift arrest of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith changed everything. In researching Smiths backstory, Capote found disturbing echoes of his own past. Though he prized coolness and objectivity, or he could not help but reveal where his sympathies lay. The feckless killer,Smith, became the emotional linchpin of the book, and walking an nearly supernatural line between fiction and non-fiction,even though he was real. Tellingly, it was Smith’s cold-blooded execution, and not the Clutters’ murder,that gave the book its title.
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Source: theguardian.com