How In Cold Blood Invented the Genre It Couldn’t Contain

Long before true crime became a podcast industry, a Netflix category, and a late-night rabbit hole, it was a literary experiment. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, published in 1966, did not merely recount a brutal quadruple homicide in small-town Kansas—it redefined what nonfiction could do. In its ambition, its style, and its ethical murk, the book created a genre even as it defied it. The facts are straightforward: In November 1959, the Clutter family—Herb, Bonnie, and their two teenage children—were bound, shot, and killed in their Holcomb, Kansas farmhouse. No apparent motive, no warning. The killers, Perry Smith and Richard…