Book Review: Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep
How Harper Lee spent years not writing her true crime masterpiece
Everything about the South is complicated.
Author Casey Cep presents her reporting in three parts:
1. He got away with murder. Repeatedly.
2. Vigilante justice worked.
3. Harper Lee struggled with her material. Until she didn’t.
Of course, Cep didn’t use those section titles. I made them up.
The Preacher
True crime stories fascinate all of us. When we read about them at a distance, we find them compelling glances into human nature. When a serial killer is loose among us, we are filled with fear.
A small town in central Alabama in the 1970s became a cauldron of rumors about the attractive Reverend Maxwell, who used voodoo to murder his wife. Then his second wife. Then his brother. The list grew.
Despite persistent efforts of law enforcement, he was never found guilty or even tried for most of these crimes. He had a very good country lawyer named Tom Radney.
Eventually, Maxwell murdered his third wife’s teenage daughter, Shirley Ann, in June of 1977. But, as her funeral was about to start, her older sister said, loud and clear, “You killed my sister and now you gonna pay for it!”
Sure enough, shots rang out, and the Reverend died on the spot.
The Lawyer
Of course, the man who did it was guilty, and he needed a good lawyer.
Tom Radney had gotten Maxwell off every charge, and the preacher continued to collect life insurance payouts on his victims.
Radney had just lost his most lucrative client and was pleased to defend the murderer.
Radney settled on the only course open to them: claim temporary insanity.
The small-town trial was filled with dramatic moments as the defense lawyer battled the DA in the fight of their careers.
Radney and his witnesses effectively presented the murderer as a righteous vigilante delivering overdue justice.
Despite the DA’s pleading for the jury to find for law and order, they chose otherwise. The case was now closed.
The Writer
Sitting in the courtroom, taking it all in, was Nelle Harper Lee, the area’s most famous person.
Despite her fame, she was incognito, as it were. She didn’t look famous.
After the trial, she stayed on and dug deeply into the stories of the Reverend and his murderer. Locals knew she was there interviewing folks, but she stayed low-key, researching every aspect of the crimes.
This third part brings together aspects of Harper Lee that I had not read before.
Cey details how Lee’s editor pushed and pulled her through several drafts of her first novel. Lee was young and inexperienced, and her story was poorly constructed, but Lippincott’s Tay Hohoff saw that “the spark of the true writer flashed in every line.”
Eventually, the novel was accepted, and while she was waiting for it to be published, her childhood friend, Truman Capote hired her to assist him in researching the Clutter family murders in Nebraska.
Capote could not have written In Cold Blood without her assistance in approaching the townspeople to learn about the culture and the murdered family.
Lee presented him her findings in 150 pages of typed notes in ten sections: “one on the town, one on the landscape, one on the crime, one on each of the four victims, one for the two surviving daughters, one on their interviews, and one on the trial.”
Almost everyone was surprised by the spectacular success of To Kill a Mockingbird when it was published in the summer of 1960.
With its continuing success, pressures mounted on Harper Lee to produce a second masterpiece.
Over the decades, Lee was always working. Always working on what was to be her true crime masterpiece on the dramatic stories of Preacher Maxwell and Lawyer Radney.
Eventually, everyone stopped asking her when it was coming, and it never came. She constantly wrote beautiful prose letters to friends, family, admirers, and students who were thrilled to hear from her.
In her last years, her letters reveal her ease in finally letting go of her intention to write that true crime nonfiction masterpiece. She could not achieve her standard that facts tell the stories.
She could not prove to her satisfaction what the courts had been unable to confirm. She noted that her digging had produced “a mountain of rumors and a molehill of facts.”
Everything about the South is complicated.
Note: In this review, I outline the structure of this unusual, hard-to-classify nonfiction book. I heartily recommend it for the many insights it holds about Alabama in mid-century, small-town lawyering, our culture of rampant fraud over the centuries, the true crime genre, and the writers Harper Lee and Truman Capote, who were inseparable during the two years he spent in Alabama when both were youngsters.
Casey Cep’s low-key, textured writing style transports her readers to the heat and complexity of central Alabama.
