Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel, a true story of bloody murder in rural Kansas, opens a window on the dark underbelly of postwar America
Some of the greatest books on this list are built on narratives that could have been torn from the pages of a newspaper (The Great Gatsby is a good example). In Cold Blood, subtitled “A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences”, grandly described by Capote as “a non-fiction novel”, actually began as a New York Times murder story that became transformed into a tale of spine-tingling suspense and extraordinary intuition. It was Capote’s genius to understand that this midwest killing had a mythic quality, and that the sinister murderers opened up the dark underbelly of postwar America.
During the early hours of 15 November 1959, in the small prairie community of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of a prosperous farming family, the Clutters, were savagely murdered by shotgun blasts discharged at close quarters into their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and hardly any clues. The local FBI investigator, Alvin Dewey, had never seen a crime so meaningless or “so vicious”, and vowed to hunt down and convict the killers, whatever the cost. More darkly, the backstory to Capote’s book became a private tragedy, etched between the lines of a brilliant quasi-journalistic investigation, that would haunt Capote throughout his writing life.
Related: Observer review: Summer Crossing by Truman Capote
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