“Am I sorry? If that’s what you mean—I’m not. I don’t feel anything about it. I wish I did. But nothing about it bothers me a bit. Half an hour after it happened, Dick was making jokes and I was laughing at them. Maybe we’re not human." [loc. 4734]
Capote claimed to have invented the 'non-fiction novel' with In Cold Blood. Serialised in the New Yorker in 1965, the decades since its initial publication have cast considerable doubt on Capote's 'immaculately factual' account of the Clutter family murders. Still, this work provides a thorough, if dramatised, summary of the case.
Capote's prose reads like fiction, with metaphors aplenty (the stray cats gleaning roadkill from radiator grills, for instance) and explorations of character. His study of Perry Smith (who may have committed all four murders, or just two of them) is sympathetic, and reads as a depiction of a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The album of bodybuilder pictures; the protests such as 'Some queers I’ve really liked. As long as they didn’t try anything'; the way that Dick, his co-defendant, calls him 'honey'. Perry's own letters show that he's articulate and ambitious ('I happen to have a brilliant mind. In case you don’t know. A brilliant mind and talent plus. But no education...'). Capote makes it clear that Smith was psychologically damaged by a rough childhood. Dick, on the other hand, is a rapist, a paedophile and a man who enjoys running over stray dogs. (Perry, by way of contrast, tames a squirrel after he's imprisoned for the murders.)
The Clutter murders were opportunist, difficult to tie to the culprits because so random: Smith and Hickock drove hundreds of miles to rob a man they'd never met, a man who a fellow prisoner told them had a safe full of money. (He didn't.) Capote writes 'The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning.' And though his depiction of the victims is sympathetic and touching, he never met them: it was the murderers, and especially Perry Smith, who held his attention.
Read for a 'true crime' reading challenge on StoryGraph, and because it's a classic work. I liked the prose more than the subject matter.
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