I recently re-read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and realized: “OMG. This is basically procedural… a true crime podcast, even.”
In Cold Blood shook the literary world. Capote brought literary nonfiction to the limelight and put respect on true crime reporting in a time when it was being sensationalized.
Combining in-depth reporting with narrative storytelling, Capote gave us a new form of nonfiction that put the spotlight on the 1959 murder of the Clutter family at the hands of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. Through interviews and investigative journalism, Capote worked on the book for nearly six years and developed an emotional relationship with the incarcerated Smith. The book follows the story until Smith and Hickock’s chilling execution — and Capote was there.
The book launched Capote into superstardom and was adapted into film three times on separate occasions and from different lenses. In 1967, Richard Brooks directed a straightforward adaptation, more or less, of the novel starring Robert Blake and Scott Wilson. The adaptation was nominated for four Academy Awards.
In 2005, the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman starred as the titular author in Capote, directed by Bennett Miller. The film also starred Clifton Collins Jr. as Perry Smith, and Catherine Keener as Capote’s BFF Harper Lee. Hoffman won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Capote. The film folded Capote into the narrative more heavily, while Douglas McGrath’s 2006 adaptation Infamous followed suit with Toby Jones and Sandra Bullock as Capote and Lee, while Daniel Craig played Perry Smith.
The 1966 groundbreaking novel helped define a new kind of journalism and sparked many conversations and debates around journalists’ relationships with subjects, factual accuracy, the morality of the events, as well as the death penalty. Even though Capote received a flood of praise and notoriety for the book, some say he never recovered emotionally from the experience. His addiction to drugs and alcohol worsened, and he went into social exile. This led to his death in 1984.
Capote was working on a follow-up, Answered Prayers, which was never released in his lifetime. He spent years telling his friends that he was writing it, and chapters were published in Esquire. It was his Sagrada Familia of novels. In Cold Blood remains Capote’s last completed major work.
Purchase In Cold Blood at Bookshop.org.
