Book Review

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, Penguin Modern Classics, £8.99

Capote is best known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, popular through its film version starring Audrey Hepburn. In Cold Blood is a very different book. Based on the true story of a Kansas farmer who, together with his wife and family, was murdered in 1959, it’s a relentlessly gripping tale of how two young men who kill have been fired by a desire to do something – anything – to prove, at least in their own minds, that they are capable of an extraordinary act.

Published in 1965, In Cold Blood was an instant bestseller. Re-published as a Penguin Classic, it remains a compulsive read because of its unflinching stare at a mental state that any normal person is going to find alarming, pitiful or downright repellent, according to their own views and experience. In our own age where terrorism has a terrible attraction for inadequate and discontented people, this seminal book is newly becoming a ‘must-read’. It’s not fiction. It travels in close-up through the lives of two young killers through their background, their loves, their deepest desires and their terrible inadequacy.

Capote’s day job was as a journalist with the New Yorker, and he writes with the punchy clarity of a good press man. His account of the careful murder of four members of the Clutter family is meticulous, but the book holds together because of a simmering anger about the way psychologically damaged people can get dragged through a criminal case with no real understanding of what is going on. Unputdownable. And thank God for Britain’s gun laws.

Alison Prince