New Journalism, True Crime, and How Stories Impact Us

In November 1959, in a rural town towards the Southwest corner of Kansas, two ex-convicts murdered the Clutters—a well-respected farming family—in their own home. The story made national headlines, but we remember it not for the front page of any newspaper, but because of Truman Capote’s 1966 “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood.

The book is almost as mythologized as the murder itself. The murder is significant for its seeming arbitrariness: the murderers had never met the family they killed, and yet the murder itself felt intimate, as though they had been friends of the Clutters. Certainly, everyone believed a member of the local community had done it. Moreover, the 50s were a time of transformation in the national consciousness. New, post-Freudian ideas about psychology were changing how Americans viewed mental illness—within a post-War culture that was normative, homogenizing; a culture that actively quashed counterculture. What did it say about the American psyche that such a murder could happen—and, as a result, that the surrounding community members trusted each other a little less?

But In Cold Blood, perhaps Capote’s magnum opus, transformed the future of both American literature and American culture. I think these transformations offer insights in how nonfiction writers can view both the world and our own selves, and what our role to play as writers might be.

The Story

Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, recently-released ex-convicts from Kansas State Penitentiary, entered the unlocked door of the wealthy Clutter household and killed all its present family members: Herbert, the patriarch; his wife, Bonnie, who struggled with clinical depression; and their bright teenage children Nancy and Kenyon. An initial investigation revealed that a few items may have been stolen from the household, but the killers seemed to have an intimate knowledge of the house itself—they had to have known that the Clutters don’t own many valuables. It felt like a crime of passion, something personal. Who would want to kill them, and why?

Capote’s telling of the story unfurls like a novel, even though the story happened in real life. He braids narratives: as Hickock and Smith evade the police, the police struggle for clues, and the community of Holcomb dissolves in grief and suspicion. A central tension to the book is understanding why these two ex-cons committed the murder, and this understanding gets teased out with painful and delightful slowness.

In Cold Blood is part travelogue: Hickock and Smith tour America’s seedy Anytowns and glamorous waterfronts. Us readers traverse both Main Street and the back alley, luxury hotels and highway motels. We meet hitchhikers and addicts, fellow ex-convicts and, for Smith, fellow veterans. At moments, I find myself almost rooting for these people who, because of the murder they committed, are insanely, disgustingly, relatably human.

Moreover, as the story evolves, so do Capote’s narrative techniques. He switches lenses: he tells the story from the vantage of Hickock and Smith’s lawyers, from the perspectives of their cellmates, and, memorably to me, from the vantage of two street cats digging for dead birds in the hoods of parked cars. Towards the end of the book, Capote explores the state of the death penalty and the philosophical battle over the M’Naghten rule (a framework for understanding and applying the Insanity Defense in court).

In other words, this is a supremely American book, with deliciously American sentences. It borrows and subverts genre conventions, it organizes and integrates many diverse perspectives, and it tells a fantastic story that oozes spectacle.

At several points, I actually felt guilty enjoying In Cold Blood. I kept forgetting that it was nonfiction: Capote’s impeccable storytelling elevates these murders into the realm of fiction, in that it plays in the mind’s eye like television. How could I be so enthralled by a story that was fundamentally cruel—a story whose focus is murder, and whose intent is to transmogrify trauma into entertainment?

The Story About the Story

Why did Truman Capote want to write this story?

Capote was already a well-respected writer. A year before the Clutter murder, his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a huge success with both the American public and New York’s literary elite. In 1961, while Capote was working on In Cold Blood, the movie adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s came out. It starred Audrey Hepburn! And George Peppard! What could he possibly care for a small town Kansas murder?

The Pulitzer, of course.

I’m not saying Capote wrote In Cold Blood just to win awards. You can tell that the story fascinated him by the way he tells it, and he shows particular empathy towards Smith, one of the two murderers, whose troubled psychology and boyishly sensitive, poetic heart clearly left an impression on Capote’s conscience.

Nonetheless, it disappointed Capote for the rest of his life when he did not win a Pulitzer for In Cold Blood—a book he spent 6 years writing, accruing thousands of pages of research and traveling the country (with fellow writer Harper Lee) to document, in excruciating detail, every last element of this fantastically strange murder. (He did, however, throw a grand party at the Plaza Hotel with a who’s-who guest list to celebrate the book’s publication. If I had to choose, I’d take that over a Pulitzer.)

In hindsight, who can blame him for his chagrin? In Cold Blood undoubtedly transformed the American consciousness. It propelled the growth of both New Journalism and the True Crime genre—two terms I will define below—and left an indelible mark on how writers approach the craft of storytelling. It was an instant critical and commercial success, and it memorialized the names and tragedies of both the Clutters and their murderers alike.

New Journalism, True Crime, and How Stories Impact Us

In Cold Blood was published at the vanguard of two movements in American literature: New Journalism and True Crime.

New Journalism was an emerging technique of narrative journalism that privileged two aspects of storytelling: 1) documenting events in the moments they arise, rather than in the deliberate, researched aftermath of those events; and 2) allowing the I—the self, the ego of the narrator telling us the story–to be present in the story itself.

In other words, the skills of both fiction and nonfiction merge in an attempt to turn facts into stories. Thus, Capote termed his book a “nonfiction novel.” I’ve written before about New Journalism for this newsletter, and you can find a rundown of it vis a vis Joan Didion’s The White Album here.

In hindsight, it seems inevitable that True Crime would emerge in the context of New Journalism.

True Crime is a genre encompassing both books and TV/movies wherein crimes that happened in real life are presented as compelling and entertaining stories. It commands a large following. Especially for those of us whose lives are more mundane or conventional, True Crime is a safe window into an unsafe world in which crime runs rampant: murder, drugs, arson, assault, all dressed in espionage and intrigue. Why do they do it? We ask, locking our doors. Those people who murder and take drugs and commit arson and assault, often in a town that looks like ours. Why do they do it? Perhaps the next episode will tell us.

Capote’s In True Blood made bare the possibilities of this genre. It is an inquiry into the underbelly of human consciousness, yes, and society at large; it is also wildly commercially successful.

At the same time, I think True Crime makes us more afraid of the world.

Think of it this way. In 2024, the murder rate in the United States was about 5.17 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI. In other words, .00517% of the U.S. population was murdered last year. That is five thousandths of a single percent. The odds are 1 in 19,342 for the year 2024. Certainly, the murders that still transpired are a tragedy, and hopefully that number will one day be 0. But, this is an incredibly and historically low number.

Every week has 168 hours in it; about 100 of them are spent awake. So, if you spend an hour a week watching Dateline, listening to the podcast Sword and Scale, or reading about the Zodiac Killer, then 1% of your attention is spent on murder. Chances are, True Crime lovers spend more than an hour a week on the genre, and devote plenty of attention off-screen thinking about the murders they “witnessed.”

In other words, True Crime makes us much more aware of murder than murder actually happens. That 1 in 19,342 statistic is basically meaningless: I can’t relate that number to anything in my daily life. But when a piece of media makes an arbitrary crime feel like it happened next door to me, it is so easy to forget the vastness of this country, this life, and to think, technically, I could be the next victim.

What Is Our Responsibility as Seekers of the Truth?

Now, Capote is not responsible for a culture of paranoia. Although Capote humanized the Clutter murderers, he also made it clear that these people are not like most of us. Holcomb, KS could eventually rest once they knew their next door neighbors were not at fault.

But the True Crime genre has become successful precisely because it makes criminal behavior feel probable in the everyday. Chris Hansen, in particular, has built a journalist’s career off of documenting crimes in towns like yours: the pervert talking to your kid online, who looks like someone you’d see in the supermarket; the con man, the ID thief, the killer who also goes to the bank, to church, who drops their kid off at school in the morning or sees a movie at night. They’re probably not your neighbor or your coworker… but, they could be?

This suggestion, in my opinion, has led to a huge shift in American culture. We trust each other less. We are more likely to allow, consciously or unconsciously, some form of surveillance into every aspect of our private lives, whether that’s the cameras watching from every intersection or the microphone listening in our smartphones. And we accept this surveillance because we believe it will only be used on people who need surveilling, and we’re not doing anything that needs to be surveilled, aren’t we?

The difference between In Cold Blood and the modern day True Crime genre is a useful inquiry into our roles as truth seekers.

In Cold Blood:

• Is interested in interiority: the writing cares about the inner lives of its subjects and what informs those lives. The novel borrows from emerging ideas about human psychology, but uses mental illness as a doorway into understanding, rather than a category to discard people in.
• Humanizes its subjects: we can see ourselves in the story’s characters, even if they do things we would never do.
• Documents spectacle: Capote does, occasionally, embellish his story with details that did not occur in real life. But, he generally restrains his knack for invention precisely because life itself provides the story—he only needs to bear witness.

Whereas, the True Crime genre:

• Begins and ends with pathology: True Crime frequently analyzes its subjects along the lines of the DSM-V, seeing psychology as the endpoint of understanding, rather than a doorway into further inquiry.
• Fetishizes its subjects: True Crime categorizes its subjects into character archetypes. We recognize instantly these archetypes: damsels in distress, jealous ex-lovers, born-and-bred psychopaths, etc. When a person is denied their own complexity and nuance in art, they often become a fetishized subject—a person whose value is measured by their entertainment to the audience, even as their own personhoods are flattened.
• Cherrypicks spectacle: True Crime is both a genre and an industry. Thus, it must select only stories which will command attentions and generate revenue. This means that, instead of telling the full truth, True Crime is only interested in flattening real life into its most perverse, astonishing, and captivating details, turning spectacle into story while at the same time denying that story its full complexity, its mundane and quotidian elements.

You may never write about real life crimes or horrible occurrences. Certainly, I hope these things never happen to you. But, regardless of what story you tell, it matters how you tell it.

When we train our attentions on the full truth of things, we produce a richer understanding of the world, and the people and systems that govern this world. Conversely, when we give in to the temptation to invent or amplify only life’s most perverted pageantries, we produce fictions and nonfictional distortions. They may be commercially viable, but they can also make the world less safe, less joy-filled and wondrous, less open to inquiry.