▲ In Cold Blood. Provided by huffingtonpost.com.
In a remote town of Holcomb, Kansas in November 1959, four gunshots ring through the dead of night. The four fatal gunshots take the lives of six innocent people. “The townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again,” is how the author depicts the situation. The gunshots transform the once tranquil country town by instilling fear and suspicion among the residents. With the murderers leaving not a trace behind, the local authorities are baffled as to what could have been the motive behind the massacre of an ordinary American family.
 
Upon reading the news of the homicide from the New York Times, Truman Capote immediately rushes to Holcomb with his friend Harper Lee the author of the book, To Kill A Mocking Bird, to investigate the mysterious homicide. Although the murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, are caught just six weeks after the murders, Capote interviews the local residents for six years, and with arduous effort, succeeds in reconstructing the tragic incident in his book, In Cold Blood.
 
Capote’s non-fiction, In Cold Blood, has been hailed as the all-time classic of crime nonfiction novels, based on a true incident of murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, 1959. Rather than creating suspense through disclosing the victims at the very end, Capote takes a radically different approach. The victims, the four members of the Clutter family, Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon, are introduced in the very beginning. Their daily livelihoods are casually introduced so the readers can really sympathize and understand who they really were—the prototype of an average American family.
 
Then he goes on to describe the murderers from the very beginning. He gives very detailed descriptions of not only their physique, but also their character and nature. The minute details Capote offers, give the readers a chance to understand the killers, Dick and Perry, and thus what led them to commit such horrid crimes. Dick and Perry are not painted as downright evil villains who kill for joy, but as misguided and socially isolated individuals.
 
“The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey (the investigator who investigated the case) could not forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he found it possible to look at the man beside him without anger—with, rather, a measure of sympathy— for Perry Smith’s life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage or another.”
 
Capote does an excellent job of analyzing and putting together the whole incident. The book, In Cold Blood, is certainly a unique one that shines over other crime related novels. However, his very accurate and fastidious details may make his work rather disturbing and uncomfortable for some readers, for the exact scene of murder is carefully illustrated in the book.
 

It is also not a page turner that will keep one up at night nor is it a light bed time reading. Capote, in his attempt to capture every dynamic of the whole case falls into the trap of being too slow. The first couple of chapters allocated to depict the individuals involved make his book too dull and difficult to read. One has to be patient and bear with the author for a couple of chapters. Nevertheless, with beautiful articulation and sophisticated vocabulary, In Cold Blood is an intriguing masterpiece worth reading. 

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