In Cold Blood

Truman Capote’s masterpiece of true crime, intensely researched and vividly atmospheric—“as it if were happening before [the reader’s] very eyes” (Time)

“Harrowing . . . The best documentary account of an American crime ever written. . . . The book chills the blood and exercises the intelligence.”—The New York Times Book Review

On November 15th, 1959, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith brutally murdered the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. This superb work, an exhaustively researched narrative of the lives of the family and the men who killed them, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965.

Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.