MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

An anecdote that the graphic designer S. Neil Fujita tells about the iconic book jacket he made for In Cold Blood—a hat pin sticking into the book’s title in an austere Pistilli Roman font—intimates the degree to which Truman Capote paid attention to and cared about design. When Capote saw the book jacket for the first time, he asked Fujita to change the color of the hatpin because, Capote said, “It can’t be red, because it wasn’t a new death, it didn’t just happen.” Design is, perhaps unexpectedly, as important to the crime narrative within the book’s covers as it is for its outer jacket and similarly revolves around a contrast between the old and the new. In Capote’s telling of the Holcomb, Kansas murders in 1959, he takes pains to detail the mid-century, “modernistic” home belonging to the victims. Capote also carefully chronicles the path of the fleeing murderers through an American landscape—a haphazard journey from Midwest “Washaterias” to the Fontainebleau in Miami to rundown hotels of Las Vegas. Amidst Capote’s account of the criminals’ flight through modern and postmodern American spaces, a medieval design—that of the gallows—not only provides the inevitable conclusion to their capture and conviction but also allows Capote to juxtapose an older form of punishment with a scandalous, seemingly unprecedented type of crime. The detailed descriptions of design elements within In Cold Blood suggest design was no afterthought for Capote; instead, objects, built spaces, and matters of craftsmanship all play a pivotal role in Capote’s ability to represent the murders and weigh questions of justice. Design, moreover, surfaces as an indispensable trope for comprehending the ways in which Capote narrates the novel’s murder-mystery plot and the degree to which material culture informs the documentary style of his innovative non-fiction novel.