Books: The Country Below the Surface

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The result is a thoroughgoing work of journalism that also deeply penetrates what Capote calls "the country below the surface." On the dark eddies that led to the fatal surface conjunction of events in Holcomb, In Cold Blood plays a light that illuminates the interior climate of murder with intense fidelity. Capote has invested the victims with a dignity and reality that life hitherto had confined only to the closed circle of their friends, and he has thrust the act of violence itself before the reader as if it were happening before his very eyes.

Lofty Future. The assignment spent the reporter physically and emotionally. At the gallows, Perry Smith called for Capote and kissed him goodbye. For three days afterward, Capote cried. Later, he paid for the headstones that mark the killers' graves in a private cemetery in Leavenworth. "I had to live all of it to get all of it," he says.

The book may not break new literary ground, but it seems assured a loftier future and a longer public reign than most crime stories enjoy. It is already a popular success; serialized last fall in The New Yorker, it broke the magazine's record for newsstand sales. New American Library has paid $500,000 for reprint rights, Columbia Pictures $400,000 for film rights. In the hardcover edition, a first printing of 100,000 is selling at a bestseller clip. If nothing else, In Cold Blood justifies another Capote conviction: that when reportage commands the highest literary skills, it can approach the level of art.