The New Yorker:

By Patrick Radden Keefe

In 1972, on “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson asked Truman Capote about capital punishment. Capote had written, in unsettling detail, about the hanging of two killers, Dale Hickock and Perry Smith. Carson said, of the death penalty, “As long as the people don’t have to see it, they seem to be all for it”; if executions occurred “in the public square,” Americans might stop doing them. Capote wasn’t so sure. His hands laced together professorially, he murmured, in his baby-talk drawl, “Human nature is so peculiar that, really, millions of people would watch it and get some sort of vicarious sensation.”

Capote’s book “In Cold Blood,” which began, in 1965, as a four-part series for this magazine, was preoccupied both by the peculiarity of human nature and by the vicarious sensations that peculiarity can arouse. Perusing the Times in 1959, Capote noticed a story, “wealthy farmer, 3 of family slain,” about the apparently random murder of Herb and Bonnie Clutter and their two teen-age children in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote set off for the high plains.

He was fascinated, as he later explained, by “the homicidal mentality,” and felt confident that readers would share his interest. Lurid tales of real-life murders were a staple of pulp magazines. But Capote wanted to elevate this tawdry genre into art, using careful reporting, subtle characterization, and (in his own immodest explanation) his “20/20 eye for visual detail.” He announced (with further immodesty) that “In Cold Blood” marked the advent of a new form, the “nonfiction novel,” which employed “the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual.”

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