In Cold Blood

It was the title that first attracted me to In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. It made me think of murder and intrigue and dank prison walls.
 
In Cold Blood.

At first, there was no blood anywhere. The book starts off slow, painfully rehashing each detail of the Clutter families lives in little Holcomb, Kansas and heavily foreshadowing that the happy, average family would die. Right on the cover the book, Capote told the reader. "The true story of a multiple murder and its consequences," it said.
The explosive end of the Clutter family's day was predictable, but still satisfactorily shocking. Each Clutter died with a shotgun against their head, and the story began.

Capote wove a well researched tale of the two criminals, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, and their mad trip across the country, into Mexico, and then into the clutches of the law enforcement. He wrote of the detectives story, the estate sale, the combined grief of Holcomb, everything from individual prison cells to the audience at the trial. From 8,000 pages of notes, Capote draws 343 pages of focused information. He is carefully aware of the possible dryness of his nonfiction, punctuating his story with eyewitness accounts and playful or quirky scenes.

But above all the miscellany and details, one character becomes the story. Perry Smith, the abused, disturbed murderer, is the subject of at least 30 pages of character development. Perry is the opposite of cold. From a childhood of neglect and bitterness, he becomes strange contradiction. From different perspectives, he is scary, polite, pretentious, and, as described in a 3 page long report, psychologically fractured. Capote tells his life story, starting all the way back from when his parents messy separation left him with no money or education.

As Perry sits in a cell being character developed, the book also follows the storyline of the trial and eventual conviction. There is no suspense, not even a vague wondering about the outcome, but the beauty of Capote's storyline is in the telling. He has that quality common in classics, where each sentence is not crafted to propel you to the next one, but to be a beauty in itself, to provide insight and new feeling into a tale that is going to be read for years and years to come.

And it has been years and years. The Clutter family was murdered 1959, over 50 years ago, but the theme of criminal psychology is still very relevant. Perry Smith could be the man you heard about in Ohio a few months ago, or the newest criminal on Texas's death row. Capote doesn't truly write about the murder, he writes about the murderer.
When the trap door falls and Perry breaks his neck, no one can help feeling something. Even murderers feel, and these murderers were ones we grew to know, love, and hate in almost equal quantities. Even murderers don't deserve to die in cold blood.

--Sagaree Jain