Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ revisited
Here’s the evocative, elegiac opening to Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood: 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, …