Word: holcombes
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...typical Americans, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, methodically shotgunned a family of four to death for no apparent reason, on November 14, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. Five years later in Manhattan, for even less apparent reasons, the New Yorker sustained an equally violent, scattershot attack by teddy-boy journalist, Tom Wolfe...
...American letters, and even more speculation on the legitimacy of the pre-publication million dollars Capote has earned for his pilgrimage to Kansas. The outstanding fact of the achievement is, however, that Capote read the newspaper clipping years ago and without hesitation took the considerable step from Manhattan to Holcomb to record and explore the phenomenon of inexplicable and unpredictable violence. This project was to be the test of his self-training in listening--not to areas and people familiar to him--but to total strangers. The killers, lawmen, relatives and acquaintances had to be charmed out of hostility, diffidence...
...mass murder lies in a double mischance; first, that Hickock and Smith should ever have found one another, each being the perfect complement in a mutuality predicated on a "big score"; second, that the Clutter family should have been chosen as victims, so incongruous a happening that it made Holcomb, Kansas, feel "like being told there...
...Cold Blood is a minor national epic, illuminating many affecting portraits--allowing to share young Nancy Clutter's poignant diary: "Summer here. Forever I hope"; to witness the shock of her boyfriend's agony, by which an adolescent learns adult numbness; to be harassed by the posturing gruffness of Holcomb's postmistress: ". . . the sane thing to do is to shut up. You live until you die and it doesn't matter how you go--dead's dead": to appreciate Mr. Clutter's Midwest-pastoral dream: "an apple-scented Eden"; to wince before the senior Hickock's A History...
...flakes on us has given us In Cold Blood as well. The America that Capote has suggested in his immortalization of Hickock and Smith engulfs the America which Wolfe and others have so stridently proclaimed as, indeed, it engulfs us all; those, who like a bright-eyed Capote in Holcomb, respond to this fact with interest and humility, will find In Cold Blood one of those rare documents which irrevocably focuses our attention on the facts and fate flying overhead