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Book Club - by Luke

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Book Club - June 2006

In Cold Blood

June 30th 2006 05:03

In Cold Blood

Yeharrrr! Another bargain buy – this one was in the vicinity of $8 or something. Obviously, this was before all the Truman hype that came with that ‘Capote’ movie – now you gotta pay full price, fools. Yeharr! Take that! Whoop-pa!

Sorry. Anyway, I grabbed this just because it was cheap and I knew it was some kind of classic. Probably not the best way to choose a book to read, but it works for me all the same. ‘In Cold Blood’ is considered to be Truman Capote’s biggest work (closely followed by ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ I guess). It’s an early true-crime book, written at a time when crimes weren’t reported by the media in any kind of detail and the general public were still very much in the dark when it came to the darker aspects of society. Capote broke that all wide-open with this intensely-researched and groundbreaking book.

‘In Cold Blood’ starts with the now-infamous and unexplained murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. We follow both the killers and the cops desperately trying to track them down, right up to the solving of the case and the execution of the killers on death row. The book is written like a fictional novel, but it’s all true… the details are amazing and frightening in their scope. It took Capote six years to research and write this account of apparently unmotivated murder, and every minute of that time shows in the realness of this novel.

‘In Cold Blood’ was surprisingly modern to my jaded, 21st century eyes. It reads like a contemporary crime-film, ala Tarantino or Goodfellas. It goes to show how ahead of it’s time this book is, that it still feels all-too-real some forty-something years after it’s original publication. Capote claimed to have invented a new genre with this book, ‘the nonfiction novel’ and it has certainly had a massive influence on writers since, some of whom have taken this book as the starting point for the New Journalism movement. Plenty of true crime novels and journalistic tour-de-forces owe a lot to this fascinating and cutting edge book. It’s scary, compelling and tragic reading… Capote gets inside the minds of the killers, their victims and the harassed police who did so much to try and crack a case that terrified the living shit out of everyone in the county. Definitely a must-read for anyone who's a fan of true crime, high-credibility writing, or just a well-told story.

Capote. Doesn't really look like Philip Seymour Hoffman in the slightest.

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Posted By: Luke - Category: Classics

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