Crime sublime: literary mercy and the Law in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood

By trying to leave no traces of the author's presence in the text, the rules of traditional American journalism seem to decree a sort of "lawful killing". From this perspective, the rule of the 5 Ws may be compared to the M'Naughten test, which established that defendants could reply only with a "yes" or "no" to the questions of the court. Although the new journalism did not stress the necessity of the reporter's militant involvement (as in the muckraking tradition), they pursued an aesthetic of saturation which only could render justice to the intricacy and multi-facetedness of contemporary experience and criminal behaviour. Using a term belonging to the law, here "parole" becomes a discourse about and around criminals which, unlike traditional journalism, makes them live in the very complexity of style.