Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York, New York: Signet,  1965.

“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. p. 14

Holcomb, Kansas

Chinese elms

“ACAPULCO connoted deep-sea fishing, casinos, anxious rich women; and SIERRA MADRE meant gold, meant Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a movie he had seen eight times.” p. 25

“Since childhood, for more than half his thirty-one years, he had been sending off for literature (“FORTUNES IN DIVING! Train at Home in Your Spare Time. Make Big Money Fast in Skin and Lung Diving. FREE BOOKLETS…”), answering advertisements (“SUNKEN TREASURE! Fifty Genuine Maps! Amazing Offer…”) that stoked a longing to realize an adventure his imagination swiftly and over and over enabled him to experience: the dream of drifting downward through strange waters, of plunging toward a green sea-dusk, sliding past the scaly, savage-eyed protectors of a ship’s hulk that loomed ahead, a Spanish galleon –a drowned cargo of diamonds and pearls, heaping casket of gold.
A car horn honked. At last–Dick.” p. 27-28

“”Anybody wearing the fraternity pin,” he added, and touched a blue dot tattooed under his left eye–an insigne, a visible password, by which certain former prison inmates could identify him.” p. 35

“she had taken an apartment, then found a job–as a file clerk at the Y.W.C.A. Her husband, entirely sympathetic, had encouraged the adventure, but she had liked it too well, so much that it seemed to her unchristian, and the sense of guilt she i consequence developed ultimately outweighed the experiment’s therapeutic value.” p. 39

“A bookmark lay between its pages, a stiff piece of watered silk upon which an admonition had been embroidered: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.”” p. 42

Dick “The tattooed face of a cat, blue and grinning, covered his right hand; on one shoulder a blue rose blossomed. More markings, self-designed and self-executed, ornamented his arms and torso: the head of a dragon with a human skull between its open jaws; bosomy nudes; a gremlin brandishing a pitchfork; the word PEACE accompanied by a cross radiating, in the form of crude strokes, rays of holy light; and two sentimental concoctions–one a bouquet of flowers dedicated to MOTHER-DAD, the other a heart that celebrated the romance of DICK and CAROL,” p. 42

Dick “his eyes not only situated at uneven levels but of uneven size, the left eye being truly serpentine, with a venomous, sickly-blue squint that although it was involuntarily acquired, seemed nevertheless to warn of bitter sediment at the bottom of his nature.” p. 43

Perry “Blue-furred, orange-eyed, red-fanged, a tiger snarled upon his left biceps; a spitting snake, coiled around a dagger, slithered down his arm; and elsewhere skulls gleamed, a tombstone loomed, a chrysanthemum flourished.” p. 44

Dodge City, Kansas

“A hundred miles west and one would be out of the “Bible Belt,” that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces, but in Finney County one is still within the Bible Belt borders, and therefore a person’s church affiliation is the most important factor influencing his class status.” p. 46

Mr. Clutter “he had no use for card games, golf, cocktails, or buffet suppers served at ten–or, indeed, for any pastime that he felt did not “accomplish something.” p. 47

“Not far from River Valley Farm there is a mysterious stretch of countryside known as the Sand Hills; it is like a beach without an ocean, and at night coyotes slink among the dunes, assembling in hordes to howl. On moonlit evening the boys would descend upon them, set them running, and try to outrace them in the wagon; they seldom did, for the scrawniest coyote can hit fifty miles an hour, whereas the wagon’s tip speed was thirty-five, but it was a wild and beautiful kind of fun, the wagon skidding across the sand, the fleeing coyotes framed against the moon–as Bob said, it sure made your heart hurry.” p. 51-52

“nuns, and anything pertaining to them, were bad luck, and Perry was most respectful of his superstitions. (Some other were the number 15, red hair, white flowers, priests crossing a road, snakes appearing in a dream.)” p. 55

“You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you.” p. 57

“Moreover, unlike Willie-Jay, he was not critical of Perry’s exotic aspirations; he was willing to listen, catch fire, share with him those visions of “guaranteed treasure” lurking in Mexican seas, Brazilian jungles.” p. 58

“A full moon was forming at the edge of the sky.” p. 63

****Susan “But when we got there–I didn’t want to do it. Go inside the house. I was frightened, and I don’t know why, because it never occurred to me…We walked in, and I saw right away that the Clutters hadn’t eaten breakfast; there were no dishes, nothing on the stove. Then I noticed something funny: Nancy’s purse. It was lying on the floor, sort of open. We passed on through the dining room, and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Nancy’s room is just at the top. I called her name, and started up the stairs, and Nancy Ewalt followed. The sound of our footsteps frightened me more than anything, they were so loud and everything else was so silent. Nancy’s door was open. The curtains hadn’t been drawn, and the room was full of sunlight. I don’t remember screaming. Nancy Ewalt says I did–screamed and screamed. I only remember Nancy’s Teddy bear staring at me. And Nancy. And running…”” p. 75

“There’s been some kind of accident.’ Then we went in the house, the three of us. Went through the kitchen and saw a lady’s purse laying on the floor, and the phone to Nancy’s room, I noticed he kept his hand on it, ready to draw.” p. 78

***”We stepped back into the hall, and looked around. All the other doors were closed. We opened, and that turned out to be a bathroom. Something about it seemed wrong. I decided it was because of the chair–a sort of dining-room chair, that looked out of place in a bathroom.” p. 78

“I remember the sheriff searched around to see if he could find the discharged cartridge. But whoever had done it was much too smart and cool to have left behind any clues like that.” p. 79

“‘Where the devil can Herb be?’ About then we heard footsteps Coming up the stairs from the basement. ‘Who’s that?’ said the sheriff, like he was ready to shoot. And a voice said, ‘It’s me. Wendle.’ Turned out to be Wendle Meier, the undersheriff. Seems he had come to the house and hadn’t seen us, so he’d gone investigating down in the basement.” p. 79-80

“Well, I took one look at Mr. Clutter, and it was hard to look again. I knew plain shooting couldn’t account for that much blood. And I wasn’t wrong.” p. 80

“What he was pointing at was a bloodstained footprint. On the mattress box. A half-sole footprint with circles–two holes in the center like a pair of eyes.” p. 81

“A stocky, weathered widow who wears babushka bandannas and cowboy boots (“Most comfortable things you can put on your feet, soft as a loon feather”), Mother Truitt is the oldest native-born Holcombite.” p. 82

“For, feeling it their duty, a Christian task, these men had volunteered to clean certain of the fourteen rooms in the main house at River Valley Farm: rooms in which four members of the Clutter family have been murdered by, as their death certificates declared, “a person or persons unknown.”” p. 93

“not the slightest echo of gun thunder” p. 94

****”But the diary notation that most tantalized Dewey was unrelated to the Clutter-Rupp, Methodist-Catholic impasse. Rather, it concerned a cat, the mysterious demise of Nancy’s favorite pet, Boobs, whom, according to an entry dated two weeks prior to her own death, she’d found “lying in the barn,” the victim, or so she suspected (without saying why), of a poisoner: “Poor Boobs. I buried him in a special place.” On reading this… He determined to find the “special place” where Nancy had buried her pet, even though it meant combing the vast whole of River Valley Farm.” p. 101

“Outside, Dick said, “So you’re getting married next week? Well, you’ll need a ring.” … Perry was sorry to see them go. He’d began to half credit the make-believe bride, though in his conception of her, as opposed to Dick’s, she was not rich, nor beautiful; rather, she was nicely groomed, gently spoken, was conceivably “a college graduate,” in any event “a very intellectual type.”–a sort of girl he’d always wanted to meet but in fact never had.” p. 116

Perry “had lost his mother as well, learned to “despise” her; liquor had blurred the face, swollen the figure of the once sinewy, limber Cherokee girl, had “soured her soul,” honed her tongue to the wickedest point,” 153-154

“In Alaska, Tex taught his son to dream of gold, to hunt for it in the sandy beds of snow-water streams, and there, too, Perry learned to use a gun, skin a bear, track wolves and deer.” p. 155

“It would have been O.K. if only I hadn’t grown up; the older I got, the less I was able to appreciate Dad.” p. 155

“I had this great natural musical ability. Which Dad didn’t recognized. Or care about. I liked to read, too. Improve my vocabulary. Make up songs. And I could draw. but I never got any encouragement–from him or anybody else.” p. 155

“Well, while I was still in the Army, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, I’d bought a motorcycle (murdercycle, they ought to call them), and as soon as I got discharged I headed for Alaska. Got as far as Bellingham. Up there on the border. It was raining. My bike went into a skid.” p. 156

Letter from Perry’s sister Barbara “”Now, first, & most important–Dad is not responsible for your wrong doings or your good deeds. What you have done, whether right or wrong, is your own doing… Your letter implies that the blame of all your problems is that of someone else, but never you.” p. 163

Courthouse Pete “Pete, a tiger-striped tom weighing fifteen pounds, is a well-known character around Garden City, famous for his pugnacity, which was the cause of his current hospitalization; a battle lost to a boxer dog had left him with wounds necessitating both stitches and antibiotics.” p. 172

***”During this visit Dewey paused at an upstairs window, his attention caught by something seen in the near distance–a scarecrow amid the wheat stubble. The scarecrow wore a man’s hunting cap and a dress of weather-faded flowered calico. (Surely an old dress of Bonnie Clutter’s?) Wind frolicked the skirt and made the scarecrow sway–make it seem a creature forlornly dancing in the cold December field.” p. 177

“And listening to Dick’s conceited chatter, hearing him start to describe his Mexican “amorous conquests,” he thought how “queer” it was, “egomaniacal.” Imagine going all out to impress a man you were going to kill, a man who wouldn’t be alive ten minutes from now” p. 198

to read:

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi

to watch:

In Cold Blood (1967) dir. Richard Brooks. DP: Conrad Hall

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