You would never know it from my blog postings, but I’ve been mowing through the Eclectic Reader Challenge.  I now have five genres completed and sixth one started.  This translates into three books waiting patiently for their moment in the spotlight here at Whimsey Pie.  Over the next few days, I’m going to try to highlight all of them; I have a brief break in classes and want to mentally tidy up before diving back into school.  Besides, I am refusing myself permission to read any more books related to the Challenge until I catch up with my reviews.  Because I want to get reading, I need to get writing.

Let’s get things started with In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, my choice for the True Crime category of the challenge.

 { via goodreads }

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 awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a cluster of grain elevators rising gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

In this small western town, on the evening of November 15, 1956, Richard”Dick” Hickock and Perry Edward Smith enter the of home of Herbert Clutter, with the anticipation of finding a large chunk of money waiting for them in Herbert’s office safe.  When they realize the safe is empty (Herbert never kept large amounts of cash at home) they tie him up, along with his wife, and his two children still living at home and shoot each of them in the head with a shotgun.  The murderers flee to Mexico and then Florida before they are finally arrested six weeks later.  At their trials, they are convicted of mass murder even though they both plead temporary insanity and are executed by hanging five years later at the Kansas State Penitentiary.

It is this seemingly senseless crime that propels Truman Capote to Holcomb where he takes the quadruple murder and its consequences and turns it into one of the very first (and very best) true crime novels in existence. To research the crime, he (with the help of his friend Harper Lee) interviewed townspeople from Holcomb, policemen and investigators and even Hickock and Smith; it is believed that he wrote over eight thousand pages of notes.  The end result is a book six years in the making that paints a thorough and sympathetic picture of the crime, its setting, the events that surround it and its participants – victims and criminals alike.

In Cold Blood is dark and disturbing, yet I really enjoyed reading it.  Capote’s meticulous research is obvious, his detailed portraits of the killers are thought provoking and his writing is superb (as you can see for yourself above).  I highly recommend this book for readers of all kinds.

My progress in The Eclectic Reader Challenge:

• Award Winning
• True Crime (Non Fiction) – In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 4.5/5 stars
• Romantic Comedy – Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding  3/5 stars
• Alternate History Fiction
• Graphic Novel – Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi  5/5 stars
• Cozy Mystery Fiction
• Gothic Fiction
• War/Military Fiction
• Anthology
• Medical Thriller Fiction
• Travel (Non Fiction)
• Published in 2014