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“A Different Story Entirely”: Crafting Confessions in Capote’s In Cold Blood and Atwood’s Alias Grace

Truman Capote’s self-proclaimed “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965) and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), a fictional retelling of a nineteenth-century Canadian multiple murder and its consequences, share a grisly focus. Capote’s text documents the murders of four members of the Clutter family by the ex-convicts Perry Smith and Dick Hickock in the early-morning hours of November 15, 1959. In Cold Blood describes the confessed killers’ capture and imprisonment, details their path through the American legal system, and includes an account of their eventual executions. Atwood’s Alias Grace is, by contrast, an openly fictional account of a notorious Canadian true crime: in 1843, homeowner Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/mistress, Nancy Montgomery, were murdered by Nancy’s fellow-servants Grace Marks and James McDermott. McDermott was convicted and hanged, but Marks’ deathsentence was commuted to life imprisonment because of her gender and age (she was only sixteen). Pardoned and released from prison in 1873, Grace Marks moved to the United States and disappeared; no record of her whereabouts after her release remains. In their respective approaches to writing novels that imaginatively describe non-fictional events and incorporate real-world texts and contexts, Atwood and Capote each mingle factual accuracy and literary artistry. As a result, In Cold Blood and Alias Grace are simultaneously referential and constructed, a textual feature that has been a source of critical debate since their publications. For many years and for many scholars, the narrative significance of these novels hinged almost entirely on the question of their reliability: how “accurate” could these texts really be, if their authors used a fictional genre (the novel) to represent non-fictional events? As Wolfgang Iser argues in “Feigning in Fiction” (1985), literary texts invoke, not “a contrast with reality,” but “conventions, which form the basis of a kind of contract between author and reader” (214). More recently, Michael Lackey has argued that “readers need to specify the nature” of this “implied contract”