In Cold Blood

How the four parts keep the killers at a distance

The four part titles describe a movement from outside the crime to inside it. "The Last to See Them Alive" is about people who are about to die and the people driving towards them. "Persons Unknown" is the phrase a police force uses when it has a body and no suspect. "Answer" is the tip that closes the gap. "The Corner" is the prison. The sequence is the shape of an investigation, not the shape of a night.

That choice costs Capote the obvious scene and buys him something better. The killings are the one event every reader has come for, and the first part alternates towards them and then stops. Withholding the killing turns the second part into genuine suspense even though the outcome is known, because what is missing is not who died but what happened in the house. When the account finally arrives it comes as speech, from one of the two men who were there, which makes the reader take it on a killer's word.

Dialogue made out of interview notes

Everything anybody says in the book was said to Capote or to Harper Lee, or was taken from a court record, and then set on the page as dialogue. The effect is that a reader seems to overhear Kansas rather than be told about it. A farmer, a postmistress and a detective each get their own vocabulary and their own rhythm, and the differences between them do the work a novelist would otherwise do with description.

The method also creates the book's central problem, and Capote knew it. Speech recalled months later in an interview is not a transcript, and Capote worked without a tape recorder, on the strength of a trained memory. He had spent twenty years insisting that a story could be ruined by a faulty rhythm or a mistake in punctuation, so he was not a writer likely to leave a sentence alone because a witness had said it awkwardly. Phillip K. Tompkins put the objection in Esquire in June 1966, having gone to Kansas and asked some of the people concerned what they had actually said.

A true account: what the phrase promised

The claim is printed on the title page. The book is subtitled a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences, and Capote repeated the promise in interviews as he published. He had been working towards the idea for a decade. The Muses Are Heard, in 1956, was his account of a company touring the Soviet Union with George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. Capote conceived it as a short comic nonfiction novel, and called it afterwards the book that showed him the way.

I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale.

Naming the form mattered to him more than the phrase suggests. A novel is answerable to nobody outside itself, and a piece of reporting is answerable to the people in it. Capote wanted the freedom of the first and the authority of the second at once, and the subtitle is where he asks for both. Every argument about the book since 1966 has been an argument about whether a writer can have them together.

What has been disputed, and by whom

Challenges began within months and have come from three directions. Phillip K. Tompkins went to Kansas for Esquire in 1966 and reported that people quoted in the book denied saying or doing what Capote had them say and do. His example most often repeated is Josephine Meier, the undersheriff's wife, who denied hearing Perry Smith cry in her house or holding his hand.

The second challenge came from inside the investigation. Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent who led the case and became Capote's closest police source, said the closing scene in which he visits the Clutter graves was Capote's invention. Other residents of Finney County said over the years that they or their relatives had been mischaracterised. The reporter Jack Olsen went further and said Capote had fabricated quotations and whole scenes, to which Capote replied that Olsen was jealous.

The third came much later, out of a filing cabinet. In 2013 The Wall Street Journal reported on case files kept by Harold Nye, one of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents on the murders, and set them against the book. The report questioned the safe that Floyd Wells had described to Richard Hickock, stating that Herbert Clutter kept no safe and paid by cheque. It also said that Wells came forward of his own accord rather than being found by detective work, and that Alvin Dewey did not act on the tip at once.

None of that is settled, and a reader should be told so plainly. What is documented is that named people contradicted named scenes, and that the investigating agency's own paperwork does not everywhere match the book. What is not documented is a full account of which sentences Capote shaped and by how much, because his notes and the finished text cannot be laid side by side for most of the book. Read it as the founding work of a form, and read the objections beside it.