But with a signal difference, Mr Capote has not written a novel. Stendhal found the données of The Red and the Black in a crime story reported in the press two of Dostoevsky's major novels sprang from an obscure grain of literal violence. For five years he immersed himself in the life of a small community on the far edge of the Middle West he came to know more about the affair than anyone else, dead or alive, bending over the evidence as if to test how far the mind of an observer can empty experience of its minutiae, of its secrets and brusque oblivion. Mr Capote's eye chanced across a brief newspaper report of the crime he felt intrigued by the seeming motivelessness of so black a deed in the heart of rural, Eisenhower America, and he went to have a look. As almost every man, woman and child literate enough to wade through a Sunday supplement knows by now, In Cold Blood is the exhaustive account of the murder of the Clutter family on their farm in Holcomb, Kansas (pop.270) on November 15, 1959, a sickeningly slow, aimless butchery for four ordinary human beings which netted the two murderers forty dollars and a small portable radio set.
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