Six Degrees of In Cold Blood

True crime has long exercised a guilty fascination over readers: warped as a murderer's mind may be, something in us wants to know how such a twisted logic works and how it can lead to unspeakable acts. In Cold Blood may very well be both the first and the best true crime book ever written. This tale of four grisly murders on one Midwest November night was serialized in its entirety in... four issues of the New Yorker in 1965, causing those issues to quickly sell out and making the book the talk of New York. When it was published in 1966 it became a sensation, catapulting Truman Capote to new heights of fame and made into a 1967 movie. The book's success was so overwhelming that it even intimidated its author the murders that it is based on would fascinate Capote for the rest of his life, and he never completed another book after In Cold Blood. That's the kind of legend that's tough to live up to, but In Cold Blood walks the talk. Capote's telling of a completely unanticipated quadruple-homicide that shocked a sleepy Kansas town in 1959 blends the shock of true crime with the imaginative license of the best fiction. After compiling over 8,000 pages of notes, Capote built these two murderers and their victims into nuanced individuals Perry Smith, the nave accomplice to psychopath Dick Hickcock, is among the most fully realized characters of the 20th century. Capote also painted a portrait of a 1950s small town in crisis, a whole patch of middle America trying to comprehend what these murders meant and how they could have happened. Capote claimed to be inventing a new genre with In Cold Blood the so-called nonfiction novel. Though his proclamation may have been a little bit overstated (he certainly perfected the genre, if not quite creating it), the book was nonetheless groundbreaking. Among its greatest legacies is that it inspired a cadre of writers known as the New Journalists among them Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion who used his lessons to write some of the most distinctive nonfiction of the last 40 years. Its waves continue to ripple through our culture today, most recently with a 2005 Oscar-winning film based on the time Capote spent writing of In Cold Blood. More than 40 years after its publication, In Cold Blood remains not just a riveting read, but also a penetrating psychological portrait and a book that will cast much of what you read today in a new light.

The day before Capote died, he worked on a story about meeting Willa Cather for the first time as an 18-year-old at the New Yorker. It was no mistake that the meeting stuck in Capote's mind for his entire life: after the meeting, Cather became Capote's mentor, and her novel My Antonia was one of the books that most influenced his development as a writer. Cather's 1918 novel of rural immigrants staking... out lives in Nebraska makes an ideal accompaniment to In Cold Blood: whereas Capote evaluates the Midwest from midcentury, My Antonia is regarded as the first book to establish the Midwest as a palpable, lifelike place worthy of a reader's attention. Both books in their own way seek to understand the meaning of the quiet heartland, and reading each in turn you can watch Cather's post-WWI hardscrabble immigrants develop into Capote's 1950s rurals, displaced within a modernizing superpower. Collectively the two books build up a story about the changing shape of America, a story that continues to this day as a rank of contemporary novelists attempt to plumb the depths of the American heartland.

At first glance, Philip Roth and Truman Capote have little in common: Roth's a self-infatuated hedonist who writes cerebral dramas of outlandish heterosexual appetites; Capote was a flamboyant gay man who wrote vaguely surreal books about the lives of outsiders. And yet, In Cold Blood and American Pastoral really should be read together. Capote's searing contemplation of the disquiet at the heart of the picturesque 1950s Midwest is taken in a fruitful... new direction by Roth, whose American Pastoral details a pleasant American family that's derailed when the daughter becomes a terrorist protesting the Vietnam War. The novel presents two views of the American Dream gone horribly wrong, aka "the American berserk." Roth coined the term in American Pastoral, referring to the simmering chaos that exists beneath the seemingly placid American lifestyle. This term has since been applied to everything from the David Lynch's creepy suburban drama Blue Velvet to the potent music of contemporary composer John Adams, but it arguably got its first and best treatment in Capote's In Cold Blood. Capote and Roth present distinct visions of America in two very different times and places, but the similarities are ripe for consideration, and the books force us to wonder: is the most American thing about us our fear that the American Dream is impossible to attain?

In a 1976 essay simply titled "Pornoviolence," writer and Capote-disciple Tom Wolfe decried In Cold Blood as creating a new kind of writing that he termed pornoviolence: books that draw you forward by promising violence, just as pornography keeps your interest by promising sex. Wolfe blames Capote for clearing the way for the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, entertainments that have no other value than to tempt you with sadism.... (If Doom had been invented back then, Wolfe surely would have chalked that up to Capote too.) Whether Capote "invented" pornoviolence or merely caught wind of the cultural zeitgeist, Wolfe does have a point: since In Cold Blood, violence has become increasingly more mainstream as literature. There is no better example of that than Cormac McCarthy's violence-ridden high art spectacles. For the curious, No Country for Old Men is a good place to start. One of McCarthy's shorter, less prolix novels, the book involves a madman who just might be the devil on a murder spree in the New Mexico desert, a cowboy who stumbles on $2 million in drug money (which the madman wants), and an oldtimer sheriff who should have taken early retirement. There's a reason the Coen brothers adapted this into a successful movie the fluid plot rips right along and the suspense is deadly but the book's also a serious entry into McCarthy's canon of violent fantasias set in the American Southwest borderlands. Variously regarded as a parable about chance and free will, a vision of hell, or a dispatch from the war on drugs, No Country for Old Men is a strange and titillating experience, albeit one that surely qualifies for pornoviolence.

If there's one tragedy that fits as the In Cold Blood of our time, it just might be the story of two lost teens who opened fire on their classmates one spring day in 1999. Utterly shocking, senseless, and downright terrifying, the murders at Columbine High captured a nation's attention just as Capote's tale of the killings in Holcomb did four decades previously. Both books force us to read on with the... same two questions: what happened and why? With Columbine, Cullen shows his debt to Capote (Cullen's book won many comparisons to In Cold Blood when it was released), but he also shows the growth of narrative nonfiction in the forty years since. More than just the story of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the book expands to encompass criticism of the media frenzy in response to the massacre, an examination of the many myths created in the aftermath, and a dissection of how the nation tried to understand this unprecedented event. Cullen shows how the murders were not merely another school shooting but in reality an attempt at domestic terrorism (the assailants had rigged up bombs and hoped to kill hundreds, instead of thirteen). He also provides the decade-long story of church martyrdom, lawsuits, and personal anguish that occurred after that deadly day. Though the tragedy at Columbine High sadly demonstrates that the kind of psychopathic deviance Capote plumbed in 1966 is still with us today, it nonetheless offers us a remarkable look into that psyche.

Capote's storied tenure at the New Yorker demonstrated that fiction writers can often make for the most innovative journalists. It also showed just what a top drawer magazine can do for a serious writer: had Capote not come to Holcomb equipped with the prestige, funding and literary support of the New Yorker, it's likely that In Cold Blood never would have seen the light of day in its present form. The unique... results that can come about when a gifted novelist and a premiere magazine work together was again demonstrated by the collaboration between David Foster Wallace and Harper's magazine in the 1990s, which gave rise to a name-making series of essays collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Consider the Lobster was Wallace's highly anticipated follow-up, his madcap, insightful report from throughout the America of the 2000s. The book is absurdly far-flung in its investigations (from the porn industry's annual awards to Presidential candidate John McCain to the ethics of cooking lobsters), and throughout Wallace showcases his much-remarked-upon ability to make the hapless, endlessly intrigued narrator of these pieces (Wallace himself, or a version of Wallace) the center of attention. Just as In Cold Blood inspired a group of imitators and innovators, so has Wallace changed the face of American journalism. Reading Consider the Lobster is a chance to see this process in action and to wonder what will come next.