Casey Cep

One of the great mysteries of American literature is why didn’t Harper Lee write another book after the incredible success of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, a publishing phenomenon and the winner of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize. Writer Casey Cep attempts to answer that question in her book FURIOUS HOURS: MURDER, FRAUD, AND THE LAST TRIAL OF HARPER LEE. It seems that the reticent Lee really did attempt to write another book about a real life murder case in her native Alabama more than a decade and a show more half after her first novel. What happened, and why no other published work came of it all is quite a story, one of those gothic tales that that is simply in the cultural DNA of the American South.

My paperback copy comes in at just over 300 pages, and is divided into three separate story lines centered on the three main characters. I give Cep credit for not introducing Lee into the narrative right away, but instead letting us meet the Reverend Willie Maxwell, a Black Baptist minister in Alexander City, Alabama in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Over the course of some years, five members of Maxwell’s family (including two wives) died under mysterious circumstances. All five of these individuals had life insurance policies taken out on them by the good Reverend Maxwell, with himself as the sole beneficiary. The second central character is Tom Radney, the White lawyer and Southern progressive politician, who represented Maxwell when dealing with the insurance companies and the suspicious local law enforcement who suspected, but could not prove, that all those deaths were not coincidental. Ultimately, there is a murder trial with Radney leading the defense, but it is not the trial we expected when the story began. This is the point when Nelle Harper Lee appeared, as she attended the trial, and did detailed research afterward with the intent to write a book based on these true life events. But that book never happened, and Lee never explained why, not that anyone ever got the chance to ask her as she avoided all interviews and publicity for most of the second half of her life.

If Cep’s book is about a mystery that never quite gets solved, it is rich in detail, and in the details we may glimpse an answer. The author does a great job of giving the reader a sense of time and place, especially George Wallace era Alabama, and the White and Black cultures that lived side by side, and the lines that didn’t get crossed lightly. There are sections which explain the importance of hydroelectric power to the development of post-Reconstruction Alabama. There’s a brief history of the insurance industry and how the voodoo religion flourished alongside Christianity in the lives of many Black Alabamians. Cep does an especially good job with giving us a picture of who Willie Maxwell and Tom Radney were, and the issues of race and class that colored their relationship. Of course, the most compelling part of the book for me was the section dealing with Harper Lee, the daughter of a small town Alabama lawyer, the tomboy who befriended the odd little boy who grew up to be Truman Capote. Some familiar ground gets covered in the retelling of how Lee accompanied Capote to Kansas in 1959 to help with research on the murder of the Clutter family that ultimately resulted in Capote’s masterpiece, IN COLD BLOOD. What I found interesting is the details of how TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD came to be. Most importantly, how agents and editors were critical in its development. The success of the book made Lee something of a taxophobe after it made her a multi-millionaire, and created an expectation of a follow up novel, and there were stories of excessive drinking. None of this fully explains why she never produced a book about the Maxwell case after putting in years of preliminary work, and as FURIOUS HOURS comes to its conclusion, the reader is left with a profound sadness for what might have been. It is apparent that Lee intended to write a “nonfiction” fiction work similar to IN COLD BLOOD, and I was left wondering if it never came to be because there was no longer an agent or an editor to push her to succeed. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD stands as one of the great American novels, and perhaps Harper Lee, when she put pen to paper after writing it, found her words lacking. Near the end of that great book, Scout remembers what her father Atticus has told as she stands on Boo Radley’s front porch: that to understand somebody, you have to stand in their shoes and walk around in them. Nobody could stand in Harper Lee’s shoes, much less walk anywhere in them, but Casy Cep’s book comes as close as we’re likely to do so. show less

Part true crime, part social history, part biography, this was simply an excellent, engrossing non-fiction read. In June of 1977, in a small town in Alabama, during the funeral of a 16-year-old murder victim, one black man pulled out a pistol and shot another 3 times in the face, in full view of more than 200 witnesses. The dead man, the Reverend Willie Maxwell, was suspected of being the girl's killer, as he had previously been suspected in the deaths of two of his wives, one of his show more brothers, a nephew, and the disabled husband of the woman who later became his second wife. Maxwell had been tried and acquitted of the bludgeoning death of his first wife, but despite the best efforts of law enforcement, there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges against him in any of the other cases. Two of the "victims" were buried without a definite cause of death having been determined. Willie Maxwell had taken out multiple life insurance policies on each of the decedents. When Robert Burns came to trial for publicly murdering Maxwell, he was defended by the attorney who had won Maxwell's acquittal and successfully overcome several insurance companies' challenges to paying out on those polices. The story of Burns' trial, and the events leading up to it, occupied Harper Lee for many years. After struggling with a second novel in the wake of the phenomenal success of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee was frustrated, depressed, occasionally drunkenly ill-behaved. She jumped at a chance to help her life-long friend Truman Capote research what he later called his "non-fiction novel" about the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, but she was disappointed in the book Capote ultimately published, which was not the factual journalistic narrative she thought she was helping to create. When the Burns/Maxwell case came to her attention after more unproductive writing years, she looked upon it as an opportunity to do the kind of in-depth true crime reporting that Capote had failed to deliver. Lee tried---she attended the trial, paid for a full copy of the transcript, spent months interviewing anyone who would talk to her about the Reverend and his alleged victims; became friendly with attorneys, journalists and judges, even gained unlimited access to Atty. Tom Radney's full files on his erstwhile client (material that was still in her possession at the time of her death). But the book simply would not come together. The Furious Hours is not only the account of Lee's ultimately abandoned efforts to make it do so, but the fullest version possible of the story she was trying to tell. Praised by both David Grann and Helen MacDonald, two mighty fine narrative non-fiction writers, this book belongs on the high shelf next to their best works. I hope Cep does not succumb to the same curse as Harper Lee, because I really want to read more of her writing. show less

I suppose I can't be too irritated with someone for putting out a book that's seemingly got no more "so what?" to it than the fact that the novelist Harper Lee has a connection to some of the people and events discussed here—after all, the mention of Lee in the book's subtitle is exactly what got me to pick it up in the first place.

But while there are some nicely written passages here, Casey Cep really didn't produce much more here than a heavily-padded New Yorker article that trades on show more Lee's fame and the faded notoriety of a fairly run-of-the-mill serial killer. (What serial killers do is horrific, but they themselves always remind me of Hannah Arendt's line about the banality of evil.) There are times when Cep gestures to a much more complex story that could be told about race in America—about how a white woman from a well-to-do background rose to fame and wealth thanks to a novel that made white progressives feel good about themselves, but who couldn't find a way to do justice to a more unsettling story about violence and fear within a Black community—but seems unwilling or unable to face those issues head on.

So what's left after that? Well, a story of multiple members of the extended Maxwell family, most likely murdered for life insurance money, but whose stories and legacy largely recede into the background; the story of a defense lawyer who seems more small town huckster than progressive crusader; and a writer who, when not writing, seems more than a little dull, if not outright unpleasant. Cep clearly hoped that the grouping of these three disparate topics together would generate its own kind of interest—but at the end of the book, I'm still left asking "so what?" show less

The murder, or, in this case, murders, are detailed in “The Reverend,” the first part of this absorbing book. Here readers meet rural Alabama preacher Reverend Willie Maxwell, a man with a predilection for taking out life insurance policies and a proclivity for having his wives die under mysterious circumstances.

Part Two details “The Lawyer,” looking at the legal successes and political ambitions of Tom Radney, the lawyer who successfully represents Maxwell against murder charges show more and helps in securing payments for him from several life insurance companies. When suspicion falls on Maxwell for the death of his adopted daughter, sixteen-year-old Shirley Ann Ellington, Robert Lewis Burns takes matters into his own hands, shooting and killing the reverend at the conclusion of the young girl’s funeral service.

Part Three, “The Writer,” looks at Harper Lee, the stunning success of the iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning “To Kill a Mockingbird,” her struggle to write a second book, and her determination to write “The Reverend,” a true crime story about Reverend Willie Maxwell.

Well-researched, detailed, and meticulous in its reporting, “Furious Hours” details the strange case of Willie Maxwell, but it’s as much about that case as it is about the elusiveness of justice, about truth, and about the unique cultural and political climate of the south. But, most importantly, it’s about the quest of a beloved author to tell that story. Laying bare the writers’ struggles and the costs paid in service to that craft, it is intriguing, compelling, and heartrending. Readers will find it difficult to set this book aside before turning the final page. This is one book that belongs on everyone’s must-read list.

Highly recommended. show less