The January Issue: ‘In Cold Blood’ and the Invention of True Crime

The Press Box

The Ringer

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4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2026

⏱️ 96 minutes

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Summary

Hello, media consumers! Welcome to the January Issue. This month, Bryan and David come together to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ being published by Random House. This episode is broken into four chapters, just like the non-fiction novel. Bryan and David start Chapter 1 by discussing Truman Capote himself, and how he was the podcast guest before there were podcast guests (03:20). They have a conversation about who is comparable to Capote in the modern age (09:09), why non-fiction with the style of fiction hits the reader the way it does (17:22), and why Capote wanted to combine these styles (21:04). In Chapter 2, the guys dive into the relationship between Capote and the killers of the Clutter family (26:41), Capote’s journalistic good luck (31:54), and his interviewing techniques (37:21). In Chapter 3, Bryan and David talk about what they made of ‘In Cold Blood’ after re-reading it (1:01:51), Truman Capote’s fabulism (1:05:48), and whether ‘In Cold Blood’ would have been as successful if Capote had said it was almost all true (1:12:14). In Chapter 4, Bryan and David take a look at the impact ‘In Cold Blood’ has had on the media (1:14:43). They discuss ‘In Cold Blood’ being the invention of true crime (1:16:06), and what the heirs of the book are (1:22:32). The January Issue ends with Bryan and David recommending other books you might like if you enjoyed reading ‘In Cold Blood’ (1:30:27). All that and more, here on The Press Box. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guests: Chip McGrath and Gerald Clarke Producers: Isaiah Blakely and Bruce Baldwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box. You've got Brian Curtis and producer Bruce Baldwin.
0:15.0	David Shoemaker is going to be here in just one second. But first, I want to welcome you to the January issue of the press box,
0:23.5	the latest in our monthly series where we take long looks into interesting corners of the media
0:28.3	world. Now, back in December, you will remember, David and I talked about The New Yorker.
0:34.5	This month, we're going to talk about a book that came out of the New Yorker's pages
0:37.9	and did an end run around its fact-checking department. The book is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood,
0:45.6	which was published by Random House 60 years ago this month. Now, if you've seen the Philip
0:51.3	Seymour Hoffman movie, you know the basics about how in cold blood was reported.
0:56.4	In 1959, Truman Capote, a novelist who was famous for writing Breakfast at Tiffany's and other books, went to Kansas to investigate the murders of four members of the Clutter family, who were shotgunned in their home in the middle of the night.
1:10.9	Capote made friends with the Kansas locals.
1:13.6	He even made friends with the murderers after they were caught.
1:16.9	And then he took his reporting and wrote in cold blood as what he described as a new literary species, a non-fiction novel.
1:26.9	As Capote said, it was a book that would read exactly like a novel,
1:31.7	except that every word of it would be absolutely true. Capote's literary experiment was a hit
1:39.0	as soon as it was published in 1966. It made millions of dollars. And as Capote tried to position the book,
1:46.3	he talked about in cold blood as the granddaddy of literary journalism, that high peak of
1:52.4	nonfiction that just about every magazine writer has tried to reach in the years since.
1:57.1	Here on the book's 60th anniversary, David and I want to think about in cold blood slightly differently.
2:03.0	We want to call it the granddaddy of true crime.
2:06.6	True crime, that genre that now stretches from Dateline NBC to David Grand,
2:11.3	from YouTube videos about random murders to podcasts like serial.
2:15.8	In In Cold Blood, Capote showed how a writer with a crime story could cut through the yellow
	...

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