In Cold Blood

343 pages

English language

Published Feb. 1, 1994 by Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-679-74558-7
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
28710511

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4 stars (4 reviews)

In Cold Blood is a non-fiction novel by American author Truman Capote, first published in 1966. It details the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas. Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, and he traveled to Kansas to write about the crime. He was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee, and they interviewed residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. Killers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested six weeks after the murders and later executed by the state of Kansas. Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book. In Cold Blood was an instant success and is the second-best-selling true crime book in history, behind Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter (1974) about the Charles Manson murders. Some critics consider Capote's work the original …

53 editions

reviewed In cold blood by Truman Capote (Penguin twentieth-century classics)

A masterpiece

5 stars

I only rarely pick up true crime books these days because I devoured so many not-so-well-written examples as a teenager that they quite put me off attempting any more. That said, a friend offering to lend me his vintage edition of In Cold Blood together with it being a Classic and of the right era to complete my current Decade Challenge - how could I turn it down?

Capote certainly did his research for In Cold Blood. I wasn't expecting such an incredible depth and breadth of information, and especially not for so many pages of small font (it's an old book) to grip my attention for hours. This is excellent reportage journalism of a kind I feel we rarely encounter any more (although I was strongly reminded of One Of Us: Anders Breivik by Asne Seierstad which I would happily recommend to other fans of In Cold Blood. Truman …

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rated it

4 stars

Subjects

  • Murder -- Kansas -- Case studies.