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Capote, Truman

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, [44] 60; In Cold Blood, [86] 28

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20250601100014 Corin Throsby on In Cold Blood, SF Issue 86

Terror among the Wheatfields

Corin Throsby on Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

When the BBC asked me to make a radio programme about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), I had not yet read it, and didn’t want to. I’d mentally filed it in the same category as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and American Psycho: books that I might have liked in my teens and twenties but that now seemed insufferably macho. I’d not that long ago had a baby and I had no interest in reading about a family being murdered in their beds.
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Pastures of the Sky

Linda Leatherbarrow on Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I was 16 when I first read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but because this is a novella that begins with an ending, full of uncertainties and possibilities, I soon realized that this was a complex grown-up story in which there might be sadness as well as joy. The unnamed narrator – whom Holly calls Fred because he reminds her of a much-loved younger brother – sees that she is schooled in the dark arts of glamour and seduction yet is intrigued by the reckless bravado of her disclosures. Whatever you do, seems to be her message, do it with style, and ignore convention. ‘Leave it to me,’ she says. ‘I’m always top banana in the shock department.’

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