In Cold Blood
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4.2 • 109 Ratings
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
Truman Capote’s masterpiece of true crime, intensely researched and vividly atmospheric—“as it if were happening before [the reader’s] very eyes” (Time)
“Harrowing . . . The best documentary account of an American crime ever written. . . . The book chills the blood and exercises the intelligence.”—The New York Times Book Review
On November 15th, 1959, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith brutally murdered the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. This superb work, an exhaustively researched narrative of the lives of the family and the men who killed them, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965.
Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When it comes to true-crime classics, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is the genuine article. A stark departure from Capote’s carefully crafted fiction (he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s a few years earlier), the book reads like a novel but covers the baffling real-life murder of a Kansas family. Capote spent months in Holcomb, Kansas, interviewing people related to the crime, including the two murderers. He tells it all in crystal-clear detail, weaving together the stories of the family, the investigators, and the killers. This is a book you can’t put down, one of the most chilling yet compelling stories we’ve ever read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the wake of the award-winning film Capote, interest in the author's 1965 true crime masterpiece has spiked. Capote's spellbinding narrative plumbs the psychological and emotional depths of a senseless quadruple murder in America's heartland. In the audio version, narrator Brick keeps up with the master storyteller every step of the way. In fact, Brick's surefooted performance is nothing short of stunning. He settles comfortably into every character on this huge stage male and female, lawman and murderer, teen and spinster and moves fluidly between them, generating the feel of a full-cast production. He assigns varying degrees of drawl to the citizens of Finney County, Kans., where the crimes take place, and supplements with an arsenal of tension-building cadences, hard and soft tones, regional and foreign accents, and subtle inflections, even embedding a quiver of grief in the voice of one character. This facile audio actor delivers an award-worthy performance, well-suited for a tale of such power that moves not only around the country but around the territory of the human psyche and heart. Available as a Vintage paperback.
Customer Reviews
In Cold Blood By Truman Capote
‘In Cold Blood’ is a non fiction book written by Truman Capote in 1966. The book follows the true life crimes of Richard Hickock and Perry Edward Smith. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith killed the Clutter family in Holcomb in Kansas in 1959. The book follows from before the murders through to the fate of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith.
I read about this book on a list of must read books and I must say prior to reading this book, I did not think this was going to be my kind of book. However how wrong I was, this book was really fascinating and so descriptive, I really got interested in the people involved in the case and I really feel you get a feel of what goes through murderers mind and what leads some people to murder.
This is not my favourite book of the year so far but I would say it’s definitely my favourite book of this month. I haven’t given this book a five star rating because I don’t feel it quite reaches five stars but it’s a shame I can’t give a half rating because this book would have easily been given a four and a half star rating by myself.
A really enlightening read
A difficult read unless, like the two men who murdered four people for a cash haul of forty dollars, you see no value in human life. The writer skillfully introduces us to a world where we see how such people can be created, fester to a point where they can laugh as they leave the scene of their dreadful crime and end up facing their own, judicial death with the same lack of feeling as they took the lives of their victims. The book and the insight of a single psychiatrist speaks volumes about what society should be doing to identify and protect children from suffering abuse, poverty and emotional deprivation but isn’t.
Great art
This is a thoroughly gripping work which holds the readers attention throughout, and not for prurient reasons, but because he takes you into a world where we are invited to look at human beings that have done and do terrible things, yet remain human.