Friday 26th January

Here we are at Friday already. It's been a funny day actually, because half of it has been lost to sleep - the medication the doctor has given me for the pain left by the fall leaves me very drowsy, and I feel like I've slept half of the day away, although actually I haven't. I did my exercise today by taking a short walk to my nearest Boots in search of strapping for my knee. And it was totally pointless, because they didn't have the size of strapping I need, only the silly little rounds of tape that you use to secure a bandage. I bought some, 'cos I'm out of the bigger roll that I had, but the little rolls are useless because to get the effect of the larger size I need to use virtually the whole roll. And I will not spend 17 pounds on a neoprene knee support - I have no idea whether it would work, the odds are that it wouldn't, and it would be a total waste of money. So at some point, I need to go to a centre of town type Boots and buy several rolls of the larger size strapping to tape up my knee. Life is nothing but a pain at the moment.
So ok, I haven't written much about this fall. To be honest, that's because, well, it was a fall, and a fall's a fall right? But it was wet, raining and I was hurrying home from a night shift. I hit a very slippy part of pavement and my foot went out from under me, and I ended up flat on the back on the pavement, very comedy pratfall, with my knee and calf at about 45 degrees from my thigh, my spine twisted right around (it felt like, but I didn't actually break my back!) and the agonising sensation that I had also ripped my ligament in my hip again. I damaged it about 20 years ago, and frankly, I mad as hell about it, 'cos it's been a good two years since it ripped, and I just know I'm back to square one with this thing. For those of you who have never torn a ligament, it's very painful, and takes months if not years to heal.

So, the current book. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. I dare say there'll be a fair few of you who will have seen the film, Capote, and will have a good idea of what this is about. Other's of you may have read the book. I have read it before - I couldn't get to see the film when it came out (although I've seen it since) and I got interested in it, and I bought a biography of Capote. As a consequence of that, I bought the book.
I don't want to give you the impression that I read nothing but murder mysteries, or heaven forfend, true crime. The only other book that I have that comes anywhere near to true crime is Gita Sereny's books on Albert Speer, and I think I've read the Mary Bell book.

In Cold Blood is very far from a standard 'true crime' book. To judge by the biography I've read (and I've only read the one, so I can't give any type of accurate impression) this particular book may well be the original of the 'true crime' style. Basically (PLOT) there was a horrendous murder of an entire family in the depths of the American farmland, and following this, Capote went to the town, talked to pretty well everyone who lived there, and then, following the capture of the murderers, attended the trial, and got to talk to them following the trial. I say following, because I haven't reached that part yet, so I can't remember if he talked to them whilst they were actually on trial. Capote became very invested into this book - I haven't read anything else of his, but by and large, it seems to be referred to as his masterpeice. Because of the appeals system that they have in the states, he had to wait about seven years before the death sentance was carried out, and he became deeply emotionally involved with one of the two men who had committed this terrible crime.

So far, I've got as far as the immediate investigation following the discovery of the family's bodies. A huge part of the beginning of this book is given over to a description of the community in which they lived, and the roles they played in that community, as well as a description of the earlier life of the two crims, and the journey to the farm. There's a clever peice of pacing in spacing the journey to the farm in between the description of the place, and the speed of this journey is matched by the slow sense of life in this place. His description is lyrical - Capote grew up in different places, but he had a fine sense of small town life. I came away from this book initially with the sense that Capote created a large part of the media image of smalltown American life. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's Waltonish, but a lot of what he wrote here has been utilised in things that are presented to the rest of the world as stereotypical American life. The book's in the bedroom and I'm still not up to staggering in there to check on the date of it, but from what I remember I think it's late 40s, possibly 50s, and written in the 60s. At least, he would have edited his drafts in the 60s I think.

I think another huge contributor to the success of this book - and it is a masterpeice - is that Capote was absolutely an outsider looking in. It's almost anthropological at times, almost an ethnographical study of a community under crisis. Capote was for his times an extraordinary figure, a gay man living at a time when it was not yet politic to come out, yet he made no attempt to hide what he was. I think he must have been one of those people for whom it is not possible to hide what he was, and also not have been able to hide from himself. To the people of Holcombe, (the little town where this happened) one can only wonder what they made of him. He arrived there essentially as a journalist, which he wasn't. He had pitched the idea of writing the book after reading about the murders in the papers, and even though his idea had received considerable support (to the extent of being more or less commissioned), he was still an outsider - not a part of the mass of journalists who had descended on the town. He was also already a known figure, a writer of some repute, so he was doubly that outsider. Not a part of the mob, not a part of the town, not a part of the officials tracking the suspects. Being that outsider gave him an opportunity to view it all, from the physical country itself to the people involved in all aspects of the incident. It could have been a disaster, he could have been so ostracised as to be unable to gather the information that he needed to write, but his ace in the hole so to speak was taking his old childhood friend Harper Lee with him. Incredible as it is, Capote grew up with Harper Lee, the writer of To Kill a Mockingbird - what an extraordinary thing that two writers of such ability grew up knowing each other. Undoubtedly she gave him his in, made him acceptable to the locals. Capote was charming and a skilled raconteur no doubt, but she made him acceptable. She would have talked to these people in their own language, the language of a small town. As a woman, she removed the fear he would have initially caused. (You get the impression that he was very camp.) And then, they made friends with the local sherrif.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me read some more, and I'll come back to you to carry this on. It's a fascinating story, made much better by knowing some of the surrounding lifeline of the people involved. It's been quite a while since I read this, and I'm very interested by it.