"The last to see them alive"

"In cold blood" - документальный роман. Все места, персонажи и события - реальные. Однако, книга читается как полноценный fiction novel, благодаря литературному таланту Капоте. Все реальные факты облачены у него в богатую рамку пейзажей, портретов и развернутую сеть внутренних переживаний, которых не найти ни в одной газетной статье или полицейском докладе. Его высокохудожественный язык то придает событиям документальный натурализм, то превращает историю зверского убийства в историческую сагу of rural America.

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"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 it's hard blue skies and desert-clear 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 withpointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them." (p. 3)

"Untill one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans - in fact, few Kansans - had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had ever stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life - to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club."(p. 5)

"Always certain of what he wanted from the world, Mr. Clutter had in large measure obtained it." (p. 6)

"All the same, Dick was full of fun, and he was shrewd, a realist, he "cut through things," there were no clouds in his head or straw in his hair." (p. 44)

"Holcomb is twelve miles east of the mountain time-zone border, a circumstance that causes some grumbling, for it means that at seven in the morning, and in winter at eight or after, the sky is still dark and the stars, if any, are still shining - as they were when the two sons of Vic Irsik arrived to do their Sunday-morning chores. But by nine, when the boys finished work - during which they noticed nothing amiss - the sun had risen, delivered another day of pheasant-season perfection." (p. 58)