These days, it is not that hard to invent a new genre, because publishers are always looking for more and more niche ways to describe things, which they can then forget about and conflate with each other in silly ways, like that bookstore that filed "The Diviners" under "Paranormal Romance." But back in the fifties (including the "long fifties," which includes half the sixties), when things were more conservative, it was harder to invent new genres, even though you'd think it would be easier since all the books written between the fifties and now hadn't been written yet. But Truman Capote did it anyway, inventing "narrative nonfiction" with his narrative nonfiction novel In Cold Blood.
In Cold Blood is a true-crime murder mystery, although it is not all that much of a mystery because one of the main POV narrative threads throughout the whole thing is with the killers, and while Capote doesn't come right out and say they murdered the family in question it is pretty obvious that there's no other reason we are hearing their story and that they are bad dudes. The book recounts the sensational and apparently senseless massacre of the Clutter family--an all-American nuclear family in a small-town farming community in the Midwest, all four of them tied up and shot, with no clear motive and barely anything even stolen from the house--and the subsequent investigation, trial, and execution of the murderers.
The book is beautifully written in a distinctly American idiom, and is pretty much everything great about American literature when American literature is being great (and is not being about how slavery is terrible for white people). While the murder itself is pretty weird--the lack of apparent motive and the fact that they *almost* got away with it and the general effect it had on the town is all pretty interesting stuff no matter how you tell it--what really makes the book unputdownable is the absolutely masterful storytelling. The way the tale is divided up and threaded together is extremly effective, and the human details that Capote includes--about the victims, the murderers, the townspeople, the detectives--brings the story to life very vividly and even manages to make you feel kind of sympathetic to the murderers Perry and Hickock, even though they are, without a doubt, both evil and losers.
The entire book, of course, comes with a giant trigger warning, not just for murder but also for rape and racism and pedophelia and pretty much every unsavory behavior that had been invented by 1959. None of it is treated in a sensationalistic or gratuitous manner, it's just that the story involves a lot of nasty people with very tragic lives who do very bad things.
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