Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’: An Autopsy of the True Crime Genre 

When I put down Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for the first time, I sat in complete, suffocating silence for about 15 minutes. It was long-past midnight, most cars had chuffed off to bed, and I was left with the beautiful, yet heartbreaking, final lines of Capote’s magnum opus: 

Then, starting home, he walked towards the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat. 

My experience reading In Cold Blood was probably not what Capote had originally intended. First I tried listening to the audiobook; then I flicked through the first couple of chapters in the much-abused copy in the Criminology section of the library; and finally, I found myself staring at the copy proudly front-facing patrons in the small – but packed – True crime section of Cambridge Waterstones. 

The Penguin Modern Classics edition of In Cold Blood has a bold cover choice, to say the least. Before even picking up the book, readers are forced to confront head-on Perry Edward Smith and Richard ‘Dick’ Hickock, the two men who, in 1959, annihilated an entire family in their beds for the meagre prize of 40 dollars. Their story, the main subject of Capote’s fascination, has since become heralded as the original ‘true crime’ novel – speaking to the general public’s fascination with death, the macabre, and the very depths of what man is willing to do to their fellow man. 

Calling In Cold Blood a true crime novel feels like a disservice, even though, factually, that is of course what it is. Told in a bleakly removed, third-person narrative, the reader is themselves made to feel like some sort of benign spirit watching the events of the book unfold – the excruciating level of detail Capote includes (the result of his six years of research and interviews with those involved with the case) subconsciously reaffirming that what you are reading simply has to be a work of fiction. There’s no way that these two men, so painfully characterised in all of their apathetic cruelty, actually existed, right? 

You continue on reading about the community reactions in Holcomb (no doubt a fictional town), the efforts of Al Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigations officer in charge of catching the killers (obviously the made-up, stereotypical straight-laced policeman so crucial to murder mystery novels), and, critically, the idyllically perfect life of the Clutter family themselves in the hours leading up to their murders, and you are able to cloak yourself in the reassurance that of course, none of this could actually have happened. 

But then you shut the book, and there they are, plain as day – the two men responsible for the clearly fictional crime that you’ve just been reading about for the past however many pages. They look so real, undeniably so: even the grainy, black-and-white unreal feeling connoted by older photos is completely lost by the stark, high-definition rendering of their features. 

In Cold Blood is, as you might have already gathered, by no means ‘easy reading’. Nor, if you try to go with the audiobook version as I originally did, is it ‘easy listening’; both of these terms are ones that are commonly applied to other forms of ‘true crime’ media, however, and both feel laughably inappropriate in conveying the true magnitude of apathetic weight that Capote throws upon you by reading his work. 

Before reading In Cold Blood, I would, without much thought, class myself as someone who engages with the modern-day true crime genre – mainly in the form of documentaries and podcasts. Many online jokes have been made about doing the dishes whilst listening to stories about plane crashes, murders and kidnappings, and many more about the cliches of the genre; from clawingly-inappropriate, Halloween-esque sound effects being used when describing the absolute dearth of human experience, to podcast hosts merrily laughing along and chirping in their experiences in the check-out line at the supermarket whilst talking about truly horrific scenes of violence, it’s no wonder that the modern day true crime genre has become something both lauded and reviled by such large swathes of the population. 

I won’t be going over arguments here as to whether or not the true crime genre, in the form we have today, is of genuine benefit to the human race; there have of course been stories about amateur online detectives coming together to solve years-old cold cases, as many as there have been about true crime creators completely forgetting the air of respect and restraint they are supposed to adopt with the genre and merrily jumping up and down on the grief and healing of victims.  

However, the reason I am so hesitant to call In Cold Blood a true crime novel – even though, as we have already discussed, that is quite literally what it is – is precisely because of what the genre has become today. No longer are these cases of mass-murder the things of hushed dinner-time conversations, or front page, sensationalised news stories; now they are merely fodder for small online creators and massive production houses alike to blandly describe to their audience, the only thing still remarkable about the end product being the callousness and brutality of the original crime itself. 

I can’t really sit here and moralize endlessly about the ethics of the genre; as I have said, I myself consume ‘true crime content’ on a regular basis, and the moral questions of what my participation as an audience member means still sometimes gnaw away at me in the background. But I would be lying if I said that reading In Cold Blood, a book that is truly the antithesis of the stylised, glitzy normalisation of the true crime genre we have received today, didn’t make such ethical questions leap firmly and unavoidably into the foreground of my mind. 

Truman Capote, despite the larger-than-life figure of modern legend he has become today (thanks in part to the Oscar-winning performance given by Philip Seymour-Hoffman in the 2006 film Capote, chronicling the writing of this very book,), never once appears directly throughout this entire book. Despite the countless hours of interviews, the years he spent in-person in Holcomb and in the Clutter family home, and even the accusations that his fascination with Perry Smith was based on an inherently manipulative relationship, the closest Capote comes to actually featuring in the book is in a brief reference made by Hickock towards the end, speaking in an interview, and referencing a ‘journalist’ accompanying the police: 

“[…] God, I’ve done my damnedest to get along with Perry. Only he’s so critical. Two-faced. So jealous of every little thing. Every letter I get, every visit. Nobody ever comes to see him except you,” he said, nodding at the journalist, who was as equally well acquainted with Smith as he was with Hickock. 

Perhaps this, in contrast to the true crime productions of today, is what we should aim for in retelling the stories of such events and the individuals involved with them; an apathetic, fly-on-the-wall style, blank retelling of the facts. The level with which we engage with violent events and individuals is likewise masterfully analysed in Alex Garland’s 2024 film Civil War, which instead focuses on a fictionalised troop of photojournalists on a road trip across America during a modern-day eponymous conflict. Does the photographer, or, indeed, author, in the case of Capote, deserve memorialising and deconstructing alongside his own subjects? 

Are we, as the audiences to the works of these documentarians, their equals in ‘exploiting’ the original cases themselves? Or can we simply never truly quantify the sprawling moral questions inherent to an ‘enjoyment’ of the true crime genre? 

Such are the questions that Capote left me with when I turned over the final page of In Cold Blood, and was left to silently ponder the meaning of the 300-or-so previous pages. Ironically, I usually listen to a podcast before bed, which, more-often-than-not (largely thanks to the ubiquity of the genre), happens to be a true crime-centred one. But no – after finishing In Cold Blood, I just wanted to be left with silence, and the questions I’ve tried, largely unsuccessfully, to render above floating around in my mind. 

If you are someone who enjoys true crime-related content, reading In Cold Blood is a must. Not because the case of the Clutter family, and the two men who so callously ended their lives, is another interesting piece of true-crime-fodder for you to hear about; but because the questions Capote left me with as a reader will no doubt change my relationship with the genre for the better. 

I read a Goodreads review by a user who said that, shortly after finishing In Cold Blood, they looked up pictures of the victims, and “just stared for about five minutes”. I did the same; I thought about the brutality of the crime; about the lives lost; and about the less-than-pathetic reason they had to be murdered on that late November night. I hesitated as to whether I should put a picture of their killers here, and likewise hesitate over whether I should include an image of the Clutters alongside them; it feels so cruel that, in death, they are forced to be memorialised next to the very men who were their ruin. 

I hesitated even over whether or not I should write this essay; am I myself exploiting this story by chronicling my own experience reading it? Am I contributing to the pastiche of the modern true crime genre by creating something readers are to merrily consume, before then moving onto the next thing? Maybe so. But once again, I look down at the cover of In Cold Blood, and see the two men staring back at me, and am reminded of one, crucial, yet seemingly-easily forgettable fact. 

This was real. This was, as the very name of the genre would suggest, true. And what Capote brings us, with such incredible skill and observation even 60 years later, is a stark set of questions on how we should engage with the genre as a whole. 

Media related to true crime will always be produced. But it is up to us – the audience – as well as those researching, creating and producing content itself, as to whether or not we do it in a way that is exploitative of those who are the final, morbid objects of our curiosity, or whether we follow Capote’s model of so apathetically-yet-honestly depicting, as the book’s byline so eloquently puts it, ‘A True Account of A Multiple Murder and Its Consequences’.