In Cold Blood
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free In Cold Blood trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In Cold Blood begins on an ordinary Saturday in November 1959, on a prosperous wheat farm outside Holcomb, Kansas. By Sunday morning four members of the Clutter family are dead and nobody in town can think of a reason why. Truman Capote spent years reconstructing the crime, the manhunt and the two drifters behind it, and the result reads like a thriller even though readers know the ending from the first chapter. This quiz follows the book in order. Questions on Part One, The Last to See Them Alive, cover the Clutters' final day and the long drive of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. Part Two, Persons Unknown, brings the stalled investigation and the killers' wanderings south of the border. Part Three, Answer, covers the tip that breaks the case, the arrests and the confessions, and Part Four, The Corner, the trial and the years of appeals. A smaller group looks at famous lines, at how Capote researched and published the story, and at the films it inspired. Students can use it as a part-by-part reading check or an end-of-book review for an English class, and teachers get a ready-made multiple choice set. The opening questions are the gentlest, later ones reward close readers, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In In Cold Blood, which prize-winning dessert does Nancy Clutter teach young Jolene Katz to bake on her last morning?
Cherry pie
Cherry pie was Nancy's specialty. She squeezed the lesson into a Saturday that also held a younger girl's trumpet solo to coach, three errands for her mother and bridesmaids' dresses to sew.
Q 02Which novelist and childhood friend went to Kansas with Truman Capote to help him research In Cold Blood?
Harper Lee
Harper Lee helped Capote win the confidence of wary Holcomb locals. Dill, the boy next door in her own To Kill a Mockingbird, is widely thought to be modelled on the young Capote.
Q 03In In Cold Blood, what creature rescues Perry Smith in his recurring dream of a diamond tree guarded by a snake?
A yellow parrot
A yellow parrot 'taller than Jesus' has come to Perry in times of need all his life. He tells Dick about the snake but hides this ending, afraid of being laughed at.
Q 04How much cash did Dick Hickock and Perry Smith actually carry away from the Clutter home in In Cold Blood?
Under $50
Under $50 was the entire haul from a robbery that took a drive of more than 400 miles across Kansas. Four people died for it.
Q 05In In Cold Blood, what did a former cellmate wrongly tell Dick Hickock that Herb Clutter kept in his office?
A safe
A safe stuffed with cash was the whole reason for the crime, yet it never existed. Herb Clutter was locally famous for never carrying money, a habit his neighbors joked about.
Q 06In In Cold Blood, what does Herb Clutter buy from salesman Bob Johnson only hours before he is murdered?
Life insurance
Life insurance worth $40,000, doubling for accidental death, was signed for that Saturday afternoon. The agent honored the policy although the first payment had not yet been banked.
Q 07In In Cold Blood, the Clutters' watchdog Teddy has one flaw: he cowers at the sight of what?
Guns
Guns made Teddy drop his head and tuck in his tail, though nobody knew why. Capote plants the detail on the family's last day, when five armed pheasant hunters walk onto the farm.
Q 08In which city are Dick Hickock and Perry Smith finally arrested in In Cold Blood, six weeks after the murders?
Las Vegas
Las Vegas police seized the pair on December 30, 1959, minutes after Perry collected a box of his belongings from the post office. A prison informant had already named them both.
Q 09In In Cold Blood, what does Perry Smith call 'meaningless' and 'inappropriate' in his last words, then do anyway?
Apologizing
Apologizing came only at the very end of his statement, after he had called capital punishment wrong 'morally or legally'. He also said that maybe he 'had something to contribute'.
Q 10Which British actor played killer Perry Smith opposite Toby Jones in Infamous, the 2006 film about In Cold Blood?
Daniel Craig
Daniel Craig was a very late addition after Mark Wahlberg and Mark Ruffalo both fell through. The film was held back a year so that it would not open against the rival Capote.
Q 11In In Cold Blood, which church do the Clutters belong to, the reason Herb opposes Nancy's romance with a Catholic boy?
Methodist
Methodist faith ran deep in the house: Herb had headed the building committee for Garden City's new church and touched neither alcohol, coffee nor tea.
Q 12In In Cold Blood, which boyfriend of Nancy Clutter was the last visitor to see the family alive that Saturday night?
Bobby Rupp
Bobby Rupp watched television with the Clutters and drove home at about 10:30. He and Nancy had just made a date to see the film Blue Denim the following evening.
Q 13In In Cold Blood, which best friend of Nancy Clutter enters the house with Nancy Ewalt and finds her body?
Susan Kidwell
Q 21In In Cold Blood, what does the local hardware store struggle to keep in stock in the days after the Clutter murders?
Locks and bolts
Locks and bolts sold out in a town where people had seldom troubled to fasten their doors. Many families also left every light burning through the night.
Q 22In In Cold Blood, how does Dick Hickock raise cash in Kansas City for the escape to Mexico with Perry Smith?
Passing bad checks
Passing bad checks was Dick's specialty. Telling shop clerks that Perry was about to be married, he bought a suit, a ring and more on worthless paper, then pawned the lot.
Q 23When Perry Smith wonders in In Cold Blood what is wrong with them, Dick Hickock snaps 'I'm a' what?
Normal
Susan Kidwell said she remembered Nancy's teddy bear staring at her but not her own screams. She had come to Holcomb from California with her mother, the school's music teacher.
Q 14In In Cold Blood, what does Perry Smith chew, liking the taste, to dull the pain in his badly scarred legs?
Aspirin
Aspirin was an addiction, in Capote's word: Perry shakes out three tablets at a time and chews them slowly. His legs had been broken in five places seven years before the murders.
Q 15In In Cold Blood, what kind of accident left Perry Smith in hospital for half a year with both legs shattered?
A motorcycle wreck
A motorcycle wreck in Washington State also put Perry on crutches for a further six months. Cookie, the nurse who befriended him in hospital, ended up as a tattoo on his right biceps.
Q 16In In Cold Blood, what is the Clutter family's fat old work horse called, later auctioned to a Mennonite farmer?
Babe
Babe let three or four children ride on her broad back at once. Watching her led away, months after the murders, was more than one of Nancy's friends could bear.
Q 17In In Cold Blood, what is Kenyon Clutter varnishing in the basement den as a wedding present for his sister Beverly?
A hope chest
A hope chest of mahogany lined with cedar was Kenyon's latest piece. The den around him was furnished almost entirely with his own carpentry, from shelves and stools to a ping-pong table.
Q 18According to the opening sentence of In Cold Blood, what do other Kansans call the lonesome plains around Holcomb?
Out there
'Out there' is Capote's first note of isolation. Holcomb lies some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, in country he says feels 'rather more Far West than Middle West'.
Q 19In In Cold Blood, what is the name of Herb Clutter's prosperous wheat and cattle spread just outside Holcomb?
River Valley Farm
River Valley Farm was built up by a former county agent whose 'university notions' the old-timers once mocked. At times it employed as many as eighteen hands.
Q 20In In Cold Blood, which Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent, a friend of the Clutters, leads the hunt for the killers?
Alvin Dewey
Alvin Dewey had been a state trooper, an FBI agent and the sheriff of Finney County before the case. Capote makes him the book's detective hero, and John Forsythe played him in the 1967 film.
Normal is the word Dick clings to all through the book. 'Deal me out, baby,' he tells Perry at a roadside picnic in Mexico, then gleefully swerves the car to hit a dog as they drive on.
Q 24In In Cold Blood, what encases the Clutters' heads at the funeral home, sprayed to twinkle 'like Christmas-tree snow'?
Cotton
Cotton hid the wounds, wound into what Capote calls 'a swollen cocoon'. Two teenagers who loved Nancy drove to Garden City the day before the burial to see her one last time.
Q 25In In Cold Blood, off which Mexican resort does Perry Smith land a huge sailfish from a rich German's boat?
Acapulco
Acapulco gave Perry one of his few happy hours, but the money was nearly gone. Dick soon sold the car, ran through the proceeds in three days and bought two bus tickets north.
Q 26In In Cold Blood, what weapon does Perry Smith falsely claim he once used to beat a man to death?
A bicycle chain
A bicycle chain featured in a murder Perry made up to impress Dick, who decided his cellmate was that rarity, 'a natural killer'. Dick planned the Clutter job around the boast.
Q 27In In Cold Blood, which chaplain's clerk does Perry Smith call his 'real and only friend' in the Kansas penitentiary?
Willie-Jay
Willie-Jay sang tenor in the prison choir and tried to steer Perry toward religion. Perry came back to Kansas hoping to meet him on his release and missed him at the bus terminal by five hours.
Q 28In In Cold Blood, which habit of Dick Hickock's does Perry Smith keep correcting as they plan the robbery?
His grammar
His grammar gets corrected even as Dick promises to 'blast hair all over them walls'. Perry, a stickler for proper English, longs to be taken for an intellectual.
Q 29In In Cold Blood, what does Nancy Clutter keep smelling in the house that makes her worry about her father?
Cigarette smoke
Cigarette smoke was unthinkable in a home without a single ashtray, since Herb opposed every stimulant. Nancy's closest friend found the idea that he had taken up tobacco ludicrous.
Q 30In In Cold Blood, which prison inmate and former Clutter farmhand finally gives the authorities the killers' names?
Floyd Wells
Floyd Wells was serving time for stealing lawnmowers when he heard of the murders. Afraid of being marked as a snitch, he held back until a fellow inmate helped him reach the deputy warden unnoticed.