Book Review: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
This year I decided I needed to start reading more non-fiction. Where better to start than what is called the first true crime novel. In Cold Blood was written very soon after the events which the book covers. So soon after, that you have to wonder how much the rawness, the closeness of it, affected the writing of it. Researching and writing about a crime that was committed 20 years ago, is a much different thing to researching and writing about a crime that happened five years ago. The majority of our time in the book is spent with the murderers. And there’s never any question that they are the murderers, that’s not the approach taken here. We know that they killed this family, what unfolds is the how and, more chillingly, the why. We get quite a comprehensive history of both Dick and Perry, the two killers, but at no time does it feel like we’re being told this as an excuse for what they’ve done. It’s just laying out what is, it’s not trying to explain away their actio...