Fictitious Novel

Masterpiece” is the word most commonly applied to Truman Capote’s powerful and disturbing new book In Cold Blood. It is a judgment with which I am willing to go along, but only with a rigid definition of the word. We all know the story without reading it, as one cannot help but know the story of a book that has had the unremitting publicity of a 100,000-copy first printing, serialization in the New Yorker, $500,000 movie and paperback sales, a Newsweek cover story, a huge take-out in Life complete with photographs by Richard Avedon, and finally, an event which Mr. Capote can surely dine out on until his next publication day, the celebrated altercation in “21” between a water goblet, Mr. Capote’s agent, and a Hollywood director who thought he should have been given the honor of bringing In Cold Blood to the screen.

It is a chilling story. One night in November 1959, on the remorseless tablelands of fundamentalist western Kansas, “a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’,” two ex-convicts broke into the farmhouse of Herbert William Clutter, a former minor appointee of the Eisenhower Administration and Holcomb’s most prominent citizen, and when they failed to find the safe they had come to rob, coldly with four shotgun blasts took the lives of Clutter (after first cutting his throat), his wife Bonnie, and their two youngest children, Nancy and Kenyon.

JD

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John Gregory Dunne

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Masterpiece” is the word most commonly applied to Truman Capote’s powerful and disturbing new book In Cold Blood. It is a judgment with which I am willing to go along, but only with a rigid definition of the word. We all know the story without reading it, as one cannot help but know the story of a book that has had the unremitting publicity of a 100,000-copy first printing, serialization in the New Yorker, $500,000 movie and paperback sales, a Newsweek cover story, a huge take-out in Life complete with photographs by Richard Avedon, and finally, an event which Mr. Capote can surely dine out on until his next publication day, the celebrated altercation in “21” between a water goblet, Mr. Capote’s agent, and a Hollywood director who thought he should have been given the honor of bringing In Cold Blood to the screen.

It is a chilling story. One night in November 1959, on the remorseless tablelands of fundamentalist western Kansas, “a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’,” two ex-convicts broke into the farmhouse of Herbert William Clutter, a former minor appointee of the Eisenhower Administration and Holcomb’s most prominent citizen, and when they failed to find the safe they had come to rob, coldly with four shotgun blasts took the lives of Clutter (after first cutting his throat), his wife Bonnie, and their two youngest children, Nancy and Kenyon.