{"product_id":"in-cold-blood-isbn-9780679745587","title":"In Cold Blood","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The most famous true crime novel of all time \"c\u003cb\u003ehills the blood and exercises the intelligence\" (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003eand\u003c\/b\u003e haunted its author long after he finished writing it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In one of the first non-fiction novels ever written, Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, generating both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. \u003ci\u003eIn Cold Blood\u003c\/i\u003e is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.\"A masterpiece ... a spellbinding work.\" —\u003ci\u003eLife\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A remarkable, tensely exciting,  superbly written 'true account.' \" —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"The best documentary account  of an American crime ever written ... The book chills the blood and exercises  the intelligence ... harrowing.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eTruman Capote \u003c\/b\u003ewas born September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. After his parents’ divorce, he was sent to live with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. It was here he would meet his lifelong friend, the author Harper Lee. Capote rose to international prominence in 1948 with the publication of his debut novel, \u003ci\u003eOther Voices, Other Rooms.\u003c\/i\u003e Among his celebrated works are \u003ci\u003eBreakfast at Tiffany’s, A Tree of Night, The Grass Harp, Summer Crossing, A Christmas Memory,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eIn Cold Blood,\u003c\/i\u003e widely considered one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. Twice awarded the O. Henry Short Story Prize, Capote was also the recipient of a National Institute of Arts and Letters Creative Writing Award and an Edgar Award. He died August 25, 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Last to See Them Alive\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    THE village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a  lonesome area that other Kansans call \"out there.\" Some seventy miles east  of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and  desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle  West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand  nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers,  Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the  views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of  grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long  before a traveler reaches them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to  see--simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by  the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on  the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced \"Ar-kan-sas\")  River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by  prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the  streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the  direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the  roof of which supports an electric sign--DANCE--but the dancing has ceased  and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another  building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty  window--HOLCOMB BANK. The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms  have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two \"apartment  houses,\" the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of  the local school's faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority  of Holcomb's homes are one-story frame affairs, with front porches.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide  jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post  office. The depot itself, with its peeling sulphur-colored paint, is equally  melancholy; the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by every day, but  these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do--only  an occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations,  one of which doubles as a meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other  does extra duty as a café--Hartman's Café, where Mrs. Hartman, the  proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks, and 3.2 beer.  (Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is \"dry.\")\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb  School, a good-looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the  appearance of the community otherwise camouflages: that the parents who send  their children to this modern and ably staffed \"consolidated\" school--the  grades go from kindergarten through senior high, and a fleet of buses  transport the students, of which there are usually around three hundred and  sixty, from as far as sixteen miles away--are, in general, a prosperous  people. Farm ranchers, most of them, they are outdoor folk of very varied  stock--German, Irish, Norwegian, Mexican, Japanese. They raise cattle and  sheep, grow wheat, milo, grass seed, and sugar beets. Farming is always a  chancy business, but in western Kansas its practitioners consider themselves  \"born gamblers,\" for they must contend with an extremely shallow  precipitation (the annual average is eighteen inches) and anguishing  irrigation problems. However, the last seven years have been years of  droughtless beneficence. The farm ranchers in Finney County, of which  Holcomb is a part, have done well; money has been made not from farming  alone but also from the exploitation of plentiful natural-gas resources, and  its acquisition is reflected in the new school, the comfortable interiors of  the farmhouses, the steep and swollen grain elevators.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few  Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the  motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the  Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never  stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and  seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist  inside ordinary life--to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend  school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the  earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain  foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises--on the keening  hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing,  receding wail of locomotive whistles. 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--those somber explosions that stimulated fires of  mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other  strangely, and as strangers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    THE master of River Valley Farm, Herbert William Clutter, was forty-eight  years old, and as a result of a recent medical examination for an insurance  policy, knew himself to be in first-rate condition. Though he wore rimless  glasses and was of but average height, standing just under five feet ten,  Mr. Clutter cut a man's-man figure. His shoulders were broad, his hair had  held its dark color, his square-jawed, confident face retained a  healthy-hued youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained and strong enough to  shatter walnuts, were still intact. He weighed a hundred and fifty-four--the  same as he had the day he graduated from Kansas State University, where he  had majored in agriculture. He was not as rich as the richest man in  Holcomb--Mr. Taylor Jones, a neighboring rancher. He was, however, the  community's most widely known citizen, prominent both there and in Garden  City, the close-by county seat, where he had headed the building committee  for the newly completed First Methodist Church, an  eight-hundred-thousand-dollar edifice. He was currently chairman of the  Kansas Conference of Farm Organizations, and his name was everywhere  respectfully recognized among Midwestern agriculturists, as it was in  certain Washington offices, where he had been a member of the Federal Farm  Credit Board during the Eisenhower administration.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Always certain of what he wanted from the world, Mr. Clutter had in large  measure obtained it. On his left hand, on what remained of a finger once  mangled by a piece of farm machinery, he wore a plain gold band, which was  the symbol, a quarter-century old, of his marriage to the person he had  wished to marry--the sister of a college classmate, a timid, pious, delicate  girl named Bonnie Fox, who was three years younger than he. She had given  him four children--a trio of daughters, then a son. The eldest daughter,  Eveanna, married and the mother of a boy ten months old, lived in northern  Illinois but visited Holcomb frequently. Indeed, she and her family were  expected within the fortnight, for her parents planned a sizable  Thanksgiving reunion of the Clutter clan (which had its beginnings in  Germany; the first immigrant Clutter--or Klotter, as the name was then  spelled--arrived here in 1880); fifty-odd kinfolk had been asked, several of  whom would be traveling from places as far away as Palatka, Florida. Nor did  Beverly, the child next in age to Eveanna, any longer reside at River Valley  Farm; she was in Kansas City, Kansas, studying to be a nurse. Beverly was  engaged to a young biology student, of whom her father very much approved;  invitations to the wedding, scheduled for Christmas Week, were already  printed. Which left, still living at home, the boy, Kenyon, who at fifteen  was taller than Mr. Clutter, and one sister, a year older--the town darling,  Nancy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In regard to his family, Mr. Clutter had just one serious cause for  disquiet--his wife's health. She was \"nervous,\" she suffered \"little  spells\"--such were the sheltering expressions used by those close to her.  Not that the truth concerning \"poor Bonnie's afflictions\" was in the least a  secret; everyone knew she had been an on-and-off psychiatric patient the  last half-dozen years. Yet even upon this shadowed terrain sunlight had very  lately sparkled. The past Wednesday, returning from two weeks of treatment  at the Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, her customary place of retirement,  Mrs. Clutter had brought scarcely credible tidings to tell her husband; with  joy she informed him that the source of her misery, so medical opinion had  at last decreed, was not in her head but in her spine--it was physical, a  matter of misplaced vertebrae. Of course, she must undergo an operation, and  afterward--well, she would be her \"old self\" again. Was it possible--the  tension, the withdrawals, the pillow-muted sobbing behind locked doors, all  due to an out-of-order backbone? If so, then Mr. Clutter could, when  addressing his Thanksgiving table, recite a blessing of unmarred gratitude.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ordinarily, Mr. Clutter's mornings began at six-thirty; clanging milk pails  and the whispery chatter of the boys who brought them, two sons of a hired  man named Vic Irsik, usually roused him. But today he lingered, let Vic  Irsik's sons come and leave, for the previous evening, a Friday the  thirteenth, had been a tiring one, though in part exhilarating. Bonnie had  resurrected her \"old self\"; as if serving up a preview of the normality, the  regained vigor, soon to be, she had rouged her lips, fussed with her hair,  and, wearing a new dress, accompanied him to the Holcomb School, where they  applauded a student production of Tom Sawyer, in which Nancy played Becky  Thatcher. He had enjoyed it, seeing Bonnie out in public, nervous but  nonetheless smiling, talking to people, and they both had been proud of  Nancy; she had done so well, remembering all her lines, and looking, as he  had said to her in the course of backstage congratulations, \"Just beautiful,  honey--a real Southern belle.\" Whereupon Nancy had behaved like one;  curtsying in her hoop-skirted costume, she had asked if she might drive into  Garden City. The State Theatre was having a special, eleven-thirty,  Friday-the-thirteenth \"Spook Show,\" and all her friends were going. In other  circumstances Mr. Clutter would have refused. His laws were laws, and one of  them was: Nancy--and Kenyon, too--must be home by ten on week nights, by  twelve on Saturdays. But weakened by the genial events of the evening, he  had consented. And Nancy had not returned home until almost two. He had  heard her come in, and had called to her, for though he was not a man ever  really to raise his voice, he had some plain things to say to her,  statements that concerned less the lateness of the hour than the youngster  who had driven her home--a school basketball hero, Bobby Rupp.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mr. Clutter liked Bobby, and considered him, for a boy his age, which was  seventeen, most dependable and gentlemanly; however, in the three years she  had been permitted \"dates,\" Nancy, popular and pretty as she was, had never  gone out with anyone else, and while Mr. Clutter understood that it was the  present national adolescent custom to form couples, to \"go steady\" and wear  \"engagement rings,\" he disapproved, particularly since he had not long ago,  by accident, surprised his daughter and the Rupp boy kissing. He had then  suggested that Nancy discontinue \"seeing so much of Bobby,\" advising her  that a slow retreat now would hurt less than an abrupt severance later--for,  as he reminded her, it was a parting that must eventually take place. The  Rupp family were Roman Catholics, the Clutters, Methodist--a fact that  should in itself be sufficient to terminate whatever fancies she and this  boy might have of some day marrying. Nancy had been reasonable--at any rate,  she had not argued--and now, before saying good night, Mr. Clutter secured  from her a promise to begin a gradual breaking off with Bobby.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Still, the incident had lamentably put off his retiring time, which was  ordinarily eleven o'clock. As a consequence, it was well after seven when he  awakened on Saturday, November 14, 1959. His wife always slept as late as  possible. However, while Mr. Clutter was shaving, showering, and outfitting  himself in whipcord trousers, a cattleman's leather jacket, and soft stirrup  boots, he had no fear of disturbing her; they did not share the same  bedroom. For several years he had slept alone in the master bedroom, on the  ground floor of the house--a two-story, fourteen-room frame-and-brick  structure. Though Mrs. Clutter stored her clothes in the closets of this  room, and kept her few cosmetics and her myriad medicines in the  blue-tile-and-glass-brick bathroom adjoining it, she had taken for serious  occupancy Eveanna's former bedroom, which, like Nancy's and Kenyon's rooms,  was on the second floor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The house--for the most part designed by Mr. Clutter, who thereby proved  himself a sensible and sedate, if not notably decorative, architect--had  been built in 1948 for forty thousand dollars. (The resale value was now  sixty thousand dollars.) Situated at the end of a long, lanelike driveway  shaded by rows of Chinese elms, the handsome white house, standing on an  ample lawn of groomed Bermuda grass, impressed Holcomb; it was a place  people pointed out. As for the interior, there were spongy displays of  liver-colored carpet intermittently abolishing the glare of varnished,  resounding floors; an immense modernistic living-room couch covered in nubby  fabric interwoven with glittery strands of silver metal; a breakfast alcove  featuring a banquette upholstered in blue-and-white plastic. This sort of  furnishing was what Mr. and Mrs. Clutter liked, as did the majority of their  acquaintances, whose homes, by and large, were similarly furnished.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Other than a housekeeper who came in on weekdays, the Clutters employed no  household help, so since his wife's illness and the departure of the elder  daughters, Mr. Clutter had of necessity learned to cook; either he or Nancy,  but principally Nancy, prepared the family meals. Mr. Clutter enjoyed the  chore, and was excellent at it--no woman in Kansas baked a better loaf of  salt-rising bread, and his celebrated coconut cookies were the first item to  go at charity cake sales--but he was not a hearty eater; unlike his  fellow-ranchers, he even preferred Spartan breakfasts. That morning an apple  and a glass of milk were enough for him; because he touched neither coffee  or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was  he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course  he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to  avoid people who had--a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle  as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by  the members of Garden City's First Methodist Church, a congregation totaling  seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could  desire. While he was careful to avoid making a nuisance of his views, to  adopt outside his realm an externally uncensoring manner, he enforced them  within his family and among the employees at River Valley Farm. \"Are you a  drinking man?\" was the first question he asked a job applicant, and even  though the fellow gave a negative answer, he still must sign a work contract  containing a clause that declared the agreement instantly void if the  employee should be discovered \"harboring alcohol.\" A friend--an old pioneer  rancher, Mr. Lynn Russell--had once told him, \"You've got no mercy. I swear,  Herb, if you caught a hired man drinking, out he'd go. And you wouldn't care  if his family was starving.\" It was perhaps the only criticism ever made of  Mr. Clutter as an employer. Otherwise, he was known for his equanimity, his  charitableness, and the fact that he paid good wages and distributed  frequent bonuses; the men who worked for him--and there were sometimes as  many as eighteen--had small reason to complain.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300665446629,"sku":"NP9780679745587","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679745587.jpg?v=1767729910","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/in-cold-blood-isbn-9780679745587","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}