In Cold Blood

A nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood is broadly considered a prototypical example of true crime, a genre that focuses on the victims and perpetrators of actual crimes. In In Cold Blood, Capote turns his attention to the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Throughout, he describes the events leading up to the murders as well as their aftermath. Establishing the broader context of that tragic evening, he writes: 

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb [...] But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises [...]  At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again [...]

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