Damn, that was one fine performance. Philip Seymour Hoffman deserved his Oscar. The story was also riveting - I rented the movie to watch PSH, but ended up being just as fascinated by the story as by the actor.
I read In Cold Blood many years ago, and remember liking it very much. I’m wondering - did true crime writing as a genre even exist before this “nonfiction novel”?
A quick Wiki search states that while Capote claimed that he invented a new style of writing, there are claims that it started much earlier. Here’s an article about it
While Capote’s was an early example of book-length writing, “true crime” pulps existed long before he wrote ICB. They were highly sensationalized and for all I know pure fiction but they purported to be reports of actual cases.
Of course Capote didn’t set out to write a book. His intent was to write an article for The New Yorker not on the murders or the murderers, but on the effects on the community of the murders. Recall his line to Dewey to the effect of “it makes no difference to me if they’re caught or not.”
What blows my mind is that Capote, who was obviously a giant literary talent, never wrote another book after In Cold Blood came out in 1965, even though he lived until the early 1990s.
There were more than pulps. Books and articles about real-life crimes have been staples of publishing since the 19th century. They vary in quality as much as any other genre or type of writing. Some are sensationalized, true, but others were serious accounts of crimes.
True crime as a genre is as hard to pin down as mystery or science fiction. You have serious novels about crime, like Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy - based on a real 1906 murder, books on individual cases, like the Sacco and Vanzetti trial or the Jack the Ripper killings, books by lawyers about their clients, books on criminal activity, like Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, which Martin Scorsese made into a movie, short accounts of crimes, like Craig Rice’s 1952 collection 45 Murderers, crime reporter’s casebooks, accounts from police officers, and every other possible variation.
I don’t collect true crime and I’m not very interested in the genre, except to the extent that it crosses into mystery fiction territory, so I’m not the best source on its history. I do know that it existed long before Capote. However, he had the time, the funding, the editor’s patience, and the literary skills that most other true crime writers lacked, so he was able to produce a lasting work. I don’t think there was any other first about it.
I recently read the biography that *Capote *was largely based on, and even Capote’s “official” biographer acknowledges that *ICB *wasn’t the very first of its kind. It was, however, *massively *successful, and was therefore the first commercially significant example of the genre. Capote’s claim of revolutionary status was more that he made the genre “respectable”; he raised it to “literary” status. Though there’s no question of Dreiser’s literary stature, An American Tragedy was based *loosely *on a real event; *ICB *was ostensibly more transparently reportorial. Lots of gray areas here, but even so Capote’s own claims, surprise, were somewhat inflated.