Reviewed by LiDoña Wagner

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a classic because his characters resonate with our own experiences. The first character he introduces is the town of Holcomb. By weaving “four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives” in with “the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing receding wail of locomotive whistles,” Capote makes the murderous event part of Holcomb’s landscape. Descriptions of the postmistress, the station mistress, and each member of the Clutter family on a typical day of their lives further develop the fabric of the community.

Capote achieves his most masterful characterization in making us care about Perry Smith, one of the two murderers. Using a variety of techniques – old letters Perry has kept, dreams and memories he recalls, photos and albums he preserves – Capote gradually reveals the dysfunctional family background that is the source of Perry’s irrational anger. Capote makes us empathize with Perry’s abandonment as a child, the brutality he experienced, and the way his potential was truncated by lack of education. Each time we read of his paltry belongings and how tenaciously he tries to hold on to them, we are filled with pity and sorrow for him. When Dick Hickock mocks and belittles him, we feel Perry’s hurt and see his desperate need for a friend. When the jailor’s wife befriends Perry, we wonder what Perry’s life might have been if his childhood had not been so brutal and his adolescence so wild.

Capote shows us two sides of Perry – the sensitive one and the hostile one. Just before his execution Perry says, “It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.”  Yet when the chaplain puts out his hand, Perry spits his gum into it.

The power of Capote’s characterization is that he makes us care simultaneously about the victims, their friends and neighbors, the murderers and their families, and the men dedicated to catching the murderers. His only weakness is failing to make his villain, Dick Hickock, believable. Resistance to a highly moralistic and authoritarian father is not a convincing reason for Hickock’s extreme brutality and reckless abandon.

But what has made In Cold Blood the classic that it has become is not simply the beautiful prose, but also the way that Capote uses the techniques of a novelist -- flashbacks, foreshadowing, complicated characters who drive the story – in a work that is essentially non-fiction (though, of course Capote now admits that he made up some of the scenes he depicted as true.)  Although Dick and Perry never became notorious like other multiple murderers, (Ted Bundy, Bonnie & Clyde,The Unabomber) in the hands of a master storyteller like Capote,  their story has become the standard by which all other tales of murder and mayhem are measured.