In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
349 Rating(s)
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In Cold Blood

Author: Truman Capote

Narrator: Scott Brick

Unabridged: 14 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/03/2006


Synopsis

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.

About The Author

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans on September 30, 1924. He rose to international prominence in 1948 with the publication of his debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. His other works of fiction include Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Tree of Night, The Grass Harp, and Summer Crossing, the author’s long-lost first novel, which was rediscovered in 2004 and published by Random House in 2005. His nonfiction novel In Cold Blood is widely considered one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. Capote twice won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died on August 25, 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffrey on May 10, 2023

"How much money did you get from the Clutters?" "Between forty and fifty dollars." Top Picture Hickock, Richard Eugene (WM)28 KBI 97 093; FBI 859 273 A. Address: Edgerton, Kansas. Birthdate 6-6-31 Birthplace K.C., Kans. Height: 5-10 Weight: 175 Hair: Blond. Eyes: Blue. Build: Stout. Comp: Ruddy. O......more

Goodreads review by Michael on May 31, 2022

I just wonder why it took me so long to get this masterpiece on my currently-reading shelf. What a breathtaking story! And told in the most amazing novelistic style! The cold-blooded murders in Kansas in 1956 are described by a cold, distant narrator via the interviews of the family, acquaintances,......more

Goodreads review by David on May 14, 2020

This story made a huge impact on my life. There were six of us kids and come summer my mother couldn't handle all of us so she farmed me out every year to the aunts. One aunt lived in Indio. My mother put me on a Greyhound bus and nine years old; all alone with my brown paper grocery bag as luggage.......more

Goodreads review by Will on October 11, 2023

Truman Capote - image from the NY Post This is one of the great ones. Capote blankets Holcomb, Kansas with his curiosity. The root of this work is a ghastly crime. Two recently released convicts, seeking a fortune that did not exist, invade the Clutter family home, tie up the four family members pr......more

Goodreads review by JEN A on March 21, 2020

I know this book is considered a masterpiece. I know that I’m supposed to love it and be touched by its revolutionary take on the True crime genre but for some reason I just kept falling asleep while reading it. The novel addresses many key points about crime in the late 50s, about our justice syste......more


Quotes

“A masterpiece . . . a spellbinding work.”Life

“A remarkable, tensely exciting, superbly written ‘true account.’”The New York Times

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