In Cold Blood

On a November night in 1959, two ex convicts, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, break into the Kansas farmhouse of Herbert Clutter, a respected local farmer, expecting to find a safe holding thousands of dollars. No safe exists, and the two men murder Clutter, his wife Bonnie, and their teenage children Nancy and Kenyon before fleeing with about fifty dollars, a pair of binoculars and a radio. Capote follows the killers' flight, their capture in Las Vegas that December, and their 1960 trial in unhurried, novelistic detail, building portraits of both men, particularly Smith, whose brutal childhood Capote renders with a sympathy that unsettled some readers, without ever excusing what either man did. The book ends with the men's execution by hanging at the Kansas State Penitentiary on April 14, 1965, Hickock first, then Smith, an ending Capote had waited years, through repeated appeals, to be able to write.

Capote calls the book a nonfiction novel, applying the scene setting, dialogue and interior detail of fiction to events he researched obsessively rather than invented, and it reads with genuine narrative suspense despite most readers already knowing how the case ended before they open it. That hybrid form is also the book's most argued over feature: later research has documented invented dialogue and reshaped scenes that Capote nonetheless insisted were entirely true, a claim critics have never fully accepted.

Capote spent six years and compiled roughly eight thousand pages of notes researching the book, traveling to Kansas with his childhood friend Harper Lee, whose own presence helped him gain the trust of a town otherwise wary of reporters; Random House published the completed book on January 17, 1966, following four installments serialized in The New Yorker the previous autumn.