Book's accuracy to real events

On November 16, 1959, The New York Times published an account of the murders, which began:


Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) — A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.
—The New York Times[8]

This 300-word article interested Capote enough for him to investigate the murders. Capote brought his childhood friend Harper Lee (who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird) to help gain the confidence of the locals in Kansas. Capote did copious research for the book, ultimately compiling 8,000 pages of notes. After the criminals were found, tried, and convicted, Capote conducted personal interviews with both Smith and Hickock. Smith especially fascinated Capote; in the book he is portrayed as the more sensitive and guilt-ridden of the two killers. The book was not completed until after Smith and Hickock were executed.

An alternate explanation for Capote's interest holds that The New Yorker presented the Clutter story to him as one of two choices for a story, the other being to follow a Manhattan cleaning woman on her rounds. Capote supposedly chose the Clutter story, believing it would be the easier assignment. Capote later did write a piece about following a cleaning woman, which he entitled "A Day's Work" and included in his book Music for Chameleons.

50 years after the book was published, it is still of interest to readers. Capote's research also included letters from Smith's Army buddy, Don Cullivan, who was present during the trial.
Veracity of In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood brought Capote much praise from the literary community; despite the book's billing as a factual account, critics have questioned its veracity, arguing that Capote changed facts to suit the story, added scenes that had never taken place, and manufactured dialogue.Writing in Esquire in 1966, Phillip K. Tompkins noted factual discrepancies after he traveled to Kansas and talked to some of the same people interviewed by Capote. In a telephone interview with Tompkins, Mrs. Meier denied that she heard Perry cry and that she held his hand as described by Capote. In Cold Blood indicates that Meier and Perry became close, yet she told Tompkins she spent little time with Perry and did not talk much with him. Tompkins concluded:


Capote has, in short, achieved a work of art. He has told exceedingly well a tale of high terror in his own way. But, despite the brilliance of his self-publicizing efforts, he has made both a tactical and a moral error that will hurt him in the short run. By insisting that ‘every word’ of his book is true he has made himself vulnerable to those readers who are prepared to examine seriously such a sweeping claim.

True crime writer Jack Olsen also commented on the alleged fabrications:


I recognized it as a work of art, but I know fakery when I see it,  Capote completely fabricated quotes and whole scenes... The book made something like $6 million in 1960s money, and nobody wanted to discuss anything wrong with a moneymaker like that in the publishing business.

Nobody except Olsen and a few others. His criticisms were quoted in Esquire, to which Capote replied, "Jack Olsen is just jealous."

That was true, of course,  I was jealous—all that money? I'd been assigned the Clutter case byHarper & Row until we found out that Capote and his cousin [sic], Harper Lee, had been already on the case in Dodge City for six months. That book did two things. It made true crime an interesting, successful, commercial genre, but it also began the process of tearing it down. I blew the whistle in my own weak way. I'd only published a couple of books at that time—but since it was such a superbly written book, nobody wanted to hear about it.

Alvin Dewey, Jr., the lead investigator portrayed in In Cold Blood, later said that the last scene, in which he visits the Clutters' graves, was Capote's invention, while other Kansas residents whom Capote interviewed have claimed they or their relatives were mischaracterized or misquoted. Dewey said that the rest of the book was factually accurate. Further evidence indicates that the book is not as “immaculately factual” as Capote had always claimed it to be. The book depicts Dewey as being the brilliant investigator who cracks the Clutter murder case, but files recovered from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation show that when Floyd Wells came forward naming Richard Hickock and Perry Smith as likely suspects, Dewey did not immediately act on the information, as the book portrays him doing, because Dewey still held to his belief that the murders were committed by locals who "had a grudge against Herb Clutter".
Publication[edit]

In Cold Blood was first published as a four-part serial in The New Yorker, beginning with the September 25, 1965 issue. The piece was an immediate sensation, particularly in Kansas, where the usual number of New Yorker copies sold out immediately. In Cold Blood was first published in book form by Random House in January 1966.The book, however, was copyrighted in 1965, and this date appears on the title page of most printings of the book and even in some library indices as the original publication date. The Library of Congress lists 1966 as the publication date and 1965 as the copyright date.

The cover was created by S. Neil Fujita and features a hat pin with what appeared originally as a red drop of blood at its top end. After Capote first saw the design, he requested that the drop be made a deeper shade of red to represent the passage of time since the incident. A black border was added to the ominous image.


Writing for The New York Times, Conrad Knickerbocker gave praise to Capote's talent for detail throughout the novel and declared the book a "masterpiece" - an "agonizing, terrible, possessed, proof that the times, so surfeited with disasters, are still capable of tragedy".

In a controversial review of the novel published in 1966 for The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann, criticising Capote's writing style throughout the novel, states that he "demonstrates on almost every page that he is the most outrageously overrated stylist of our time" and later asserts that "the depth in this book is no deeper than its mine-shaft of factual detail; its height is rarely higher than that of good journalism and often falls below it".

Tom Wolfe wrote in his essay "Pornoviolence": "The book is neither a who-done-it nor a will-they-be-caught, since the answers to both questions are known from the outset... Instead, the book's suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end."

In The Independent's Book of a Lifetime series, reviewer Kate Colquhoun asserts that "the book – for which he made a reputed 8000 pages of research notes – is plotted and structured with taut writerly flair. Its characters pulse with recognisable life; its places are palpable. Careful prose binds the reader to his unfolding story. Put simply, the book was conceived of journalism and born of a novelist.