Truman Capote (1966 [2000]) In Cold Blood.

American blue-blood Truman Capote’s factionalised account of the murder, Saturday, 14th November 1959,  of forty-eight year old William Clutter, his wife ‘poor’ Bonnie (nee Fox) who had ‘little spells of melancholia’ three years younger than him and two of his teenage children who lived at home with them,  the teenagers Nancy, who was pretty and popular and Kenyon who was more reserved,  was a blueprint for later works such as Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. In Cold Blood is a play on the execution method, the victims were firmly bound with identical cuts of cord that the executioners had brought with them, and shot through the head, but it also alludes to a more reptilian species of man (or woman) because there seemed to be no motive for the killings. William Clutter was a prosperous farmer that lived in the village of Holcom, outside Garden City, in the high wheat plains of western Kansas, the kind of place that a pigtailed Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz clicked her heals together twice to return to, but nothing seemed to be have been stolen from their home. One of the initial suspects, because there was no suspects, was Bobby Rupp –listen to the names and that will tell you everythng you need to know about the kind of place it was—because he was Nancy’s boyfriend, was made to take a polygraph test, when describing his visit to the Clutter home and also because he was perhaps the last person to see them alive—apart from the killers. Bobby was seventeen. Mr Clutter, we are told, liked Bobby and for three years had been permitted ‘dates’.  He had caught them kissing, but had reminded Nancy that the Rupp family were Roman Catholic and the Clutters were regular church-going Methodists. They could not marry.

‘Nancy had been reasonable—at any rate she had not argued—and now, before saying good night, Mr Clutter secured from her a promise to begin a gradual breaking off with Bobby.’

The author cannot know this,  cannot hear these conversations.  Nancy might well have said it’s okay dad, we’ve just exchanged fraternity rings.  I just suck him off and sometimes let him accidentaly ride my ass; I’m far too smart to get pregnant and he’s got such a small penis and such a limp dick I’ve not intention of marrying him anyway.

The reader, looking over Capote, the omniscient author’s shoulder, assumes that nice girls don’t and father knows best. Forensic results did however verify that no sexual impropriety or rape had taken place before the family’s murder. Looking back on the crime scene from what we know now about forensic science, DNA  and Locard’s exchange principle, Al Dewey and his staff of nineteen experienced detectives might well have ploughed up and down the Clutter house with a John Deer tractor. They did, however, find a bootprint that was to provide crucial in the conviction and hanging of the two murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.

          The mastery of the book lies in Capote’s ability to get inside their heads and how they blundered from one crime to another in pursuit of their American dream of the next big haul that would set them up for life. It traces their poverty stricken background to a series of  petty crimes and the bond that they established inside the prison system. Ironically, it's in prison from a fellow inmate that worked for Mr Clutter that they here how rich the farmer is and how he keeps his loot in a wall safe. There is no wall safe and no riches. Their haul for the muders includes a transistor radio and a set of binoculars. They get away free, drop some dodgy cheques and escape to Mexico.  Capote traces the pebble of fear that spreds through the community of Garden City after the muders.  Over a year after the murder, the big break Dewey was looking for came from the same prisoner that had mouthed off about rich Mr Clutter. He fingered both Smith and Hitchcock. With no money the two vagrants retured home and were caught passing more dodgy cheques.

       

 

Comments

He's a great writer, but I don't like the way he betrayed Marlon Brando. Brando was not a brute and an ape. He was quite elegant when he wanted to be. Marlon Brando will always be one of my heroes.

 

sorry steve, not read anything about that.