Review: In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of the big name forerunners of the True Crime genre yada yada (and also inspiration for the film Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, if you've heard of it). Seems like a pretty straightforward account of a major murder case that took place in Kansas in the early 60's, but it delves particularly into the perspective of the murderers themselves, from their upbringing to their motivations and behavior going into and after the crime, and it also takes the effort to present the case vividly with techniques you'd find in fiction (like an almost-omniscient narrator), something more or less unprecedented for its time.

The writing is good for the most part (I'm not a huge fan of how people speak, but that can't really be helped given where the incident took place: rural Kansas), and some sections, particularly the recollection of the incident itself from the criminals' perspective, are rather gripping if not also harrowing. But at the same time, the level of detail can sometimes go too far into the other end of the spectrum where it starts to drag a bit. I'm not sure how much detail or remembrance from every little player in the story was really necessary, or if Capote was just trying to encapsulate the entirety of a moment in his own way- regardless of how well it worked in the narrative functionally speaking.

In fact, I'm not even entirely sure how much detail is actually true, considering that Capote himself apparently didn't take notes when he interviewed the criminals and thus seems to have recounted a lot of witness accounts directly from memory. Like realistically, most people wouldn't be able to repeat such long accounts word-for-word without some level of paraphrasing (and then you have to take into account how truthful the witnesses are, which is a whole other story)- so either the guy had an amazing voice recorder-like memory, or he probably wound up rephrasing some things around for the sake of providing a solid and consistent narrative.

Given the way the book seems to take a lot of its own recollections at face-value, I get the impression Capote was probably more concerned with writing a good story, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction, than he was with preserving its veracity, which otherwise would come with a level of uncertainty or ambiguity the way a lot of witness-dependent crime cases do in real life. (That's not to say that there isn't any ambiguity, though; you could probably draw out a huge debate from it on capital punishment and the use of the death penalty in our justice system, among other things.) Honestly, I don't really know I how feel about that- whether it's worth fudging the truth a little for the sake of... art, I suppose, especially in an otherwise nonfiction narrative. Were this book about a more serious and relevant topic today, I'd probably be more vocally against it.

At the end of the day, I didn't really find myself sympathizing with the murderers after their stories were said and done... but I did pity them, realizing that regardless of how much we like to dehumanize criminals, and murderers especially, these people were still human at the end of the day. Perhaps impossible to understand or empathize with, but still recognizably human in motivation and spirit, even when at their ugliest. This may be my own worldview speaking, but these were broken people, through and through. It's sad- but then again, all crimes (and the people entangled in them) are sad when it comes down to it.