The Long Ambivalent Afterlife of In Cold Blood

for Truman with love and squalor

The late, great, beloved and brilliant fantasy author Terry Pratchett once opined the following about The Lord of the Rings:

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

I feel that, at least in terms of contemporary true crime writing in America, the same can be said of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. As FX debuted Feud: Capote vs. The Swans last week, it seems as good a time as any to state my piece on Capote’s monumentally influential “non-fiction novel.”¹

I mean, just the ever-loving moxie of calling it that! Did he invent the genre? Certainly not. But he labeled it, and in the media landscape of which he was sharply savvy, it’s almost the same thing. The origin story of In Cold Blood describes the sort of lightning strike that writers² dream about. Paging through the Times on a Sunday morning, he noticed this headline:

nytimesmachine

He was on a train to Holcomb, Kansas, that night and spent the next six years following the case and developing his book, and, according to his biography, slowly deteriorating mentally and physically at least partly from the strain of managing his growing personal connection to one of the accused killers.

The work, published serially in The New Yorker in 1965³ and in book form in 1966, was an immediate popular sensation, but also received favorable critical attention for its attention to detail and its suspenseful third-person-omniscient retelling of the gory crime. Reviewers for The New York Times and The Guardian explicitly indexed their admiration for the book to Capote’s meticulous research, with Conrad Knickerbocker praising the “massive quantity of detail,” and George Steiner lauding the author’s “superb journalistic skills,” marveling:

There is nothing Capote does not seem to know and to have realised in the language of the sounds, speech-patterns, manners of Holcomb, and of the men both lonely and gregarious who build the clap-board houses and drive the straight highways under the big sky. Every detail tells; the authority with which Capote introduces a physical object . . . is uncanny.

Both reviews yoke the success of In Cold Blood to Capote’s commitment to research, and his concomitant “authority” as a truth-teller.⁴ For Capote, the book, and his involvement in the case, ended with the executions of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith; the text’s three-hundred-some pages both narrativizing and attesting to the justification for their conviction and punishment.

This research driven, conventionally structured approach became the privileged, and best-selling, true crime storytelling method throughout the rest of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. The most obvious antecedent is Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song,⁵ but other examples include prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s best-selling true crime book of all time(!) Helter Skelter (written with Curt Gentry, 1974)⁶ and Edgar-winning In Broad Daylight (1988), by attorney general Harry MacLean. In Cold Blood’s influence extends beyond the written word as well, and not just in hastily produced (copaganda?) shows like Forensic Files and Dateline. One of the most lauded docuseries of the last ten years exhibits a similar posture in terms of research, authority, and prestige: The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst⁷ The Jinx is a miniseries that took years to produce and was serialized over six weeks on HBO in 2015. It is largely comprised of reenactments and over twenty hours of interviews between award-winning documentarian Andrew Jarecki and its subject, millionaire and accused murderer Robert Durst, who had never cooperated with a journalist before. The show won two Emmys and a Peabody Award, and Jarecki won a Producer’s Guild of America Award. A New York Times review compared Jarecki to “the police prepar[ing] for an interrogation or a lawyer for a cross-examination,” linking him to the same sort of authoritative and central role as Capote. 

In Cold Blood tells a story of a criminal justice system that got it right, whereas The Jinx tells a similarly authoritative account of a time when the same civic apparatus got it wrong. What remains the same is that right and wrong, guilty and innocent, are stable concepts, accessed through linear narratives, that affirm true crime’s capacity to deliver truth to its audience either through lengthy books or extensive documentary footage. However, there are other twentieth-century texts that also followed in the wake of In Cold Blood, but that pushed back against the claims to authority and narrative stability offered by Capote. These texts disturbed the assumption that true crime can or should offer one coherent truth, and initiated a counter-tradition in modern American true crime that twenty-first century true crime texts, particularly those by female creators and writers of color, are adopting and expanding. My current work in true crime scholarship is dedicated to tracing and elevating this counter-history of true crime in America.⁸

However, as evidenced by the subtitle of this newsletter, I hold a great deal of nostalgic admiration for Truman Capote, and for the place In Cold Blood holds not only in the history of true crime writing, but also my personal history as a reader. Discovering Capote’s writing in high school made me feel like I was making a new friend, one who was cooler and older and funnier and smarter than me, but who was also interested in the same things that I was beginning to find most compelling in literature: passion, violence, mystery, and juicy fistfuls of gossip. I found, and still find, him to be one of the most compelling characters in American literary history, and will always proudly declare myself Team Truman.

1. For an illuminating Capote syllabus to prep for Feud and a review, check out Best Evidence at their new home over at reality blurred!

2. At least this writer.

3. So yes, Serial is also somewhat indebted in In Cold Blood.

4. Yes, he made up scenes in ICB that recreated events and conversations he could not have been present for (it is a nonfiction novel, after all). But the ethos of the book is one of unquestioned authority.

5. Ugh.

6. Celebrating it’s 50th anniversary this year! A good analysis of its legacy appeared over on CrimeReads last month.

7. Brace yourself: season 2 is dropping later this year.

8. Such texts include The Algiers Motel Incident, The Stranger Beside Me, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and works by Maggie Nelson, Myriam Gurba, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, and many more.