Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

by Casey Cep

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This “superbly written true-crime story” (The New York Times Book Review) masterfully brings together the tales of a serial killer in 1970s Alabama and of Harper Lee, the beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who tried to write his story.

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members, but with the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative assassinated him at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend himself. Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who spent a year in town reporting on the Maxwell case and many more trying to finish the book she called The Reverend.

Cep brings this remarkable story to life, from the horrifying murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South, while offering a deeply moving portrait of one of our most revered writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101972052
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	34,571
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Casey Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with her family. Furious Hoursis her first book. www.caseycep.com

Read an Excerpt

Excerpted from Furious Hours:

Nobody recognized her. Harper Lee was well known, but not by sight, and if she hadn’t introduced herself, it’s unlikely that anyone in the courtroom would have figured out who she was. Hundreds of people were crowded into the gallery, filling the wooden benches that squeaked whenever someone moved or leaning against the back wall if they hadn’t arrived in time for a seat. Late September wasn’t late enough for the Alabama heat to have died down, and the air-conditioning in the courthouse wasn’t working, so the women waved fans while the men’s suits grew damp under their arms and around their collars. The spectators whispered from time to time, and every so often they laughed—an uneasy laughter that evaporated whenever the judge quieted them.

The defendant was black, but the lawyers were white, and so were the judge and the jury. The charge was murder in the first degree. Three months before, at the funeral of a sixteen-year-old girl, the man with his legs crossed patiently beside the defense table had pulled a pistol from the inside pocket of his jacket and shot the Reverend Willie Maxwell three times in the head. Three hundred people had seen him do it. Many of them were now at his trial, not to learn why he had killed the Reverend—everyone in three counties knew that, and some were surprised no one had done it sooner—but to understand the disturbing series of deaths that had come before the one they’d witnessed.

One by one, over a period of seven years, six people close to the Reverend had died under circumstances that nearly everyone agreed were suspicious and some deemed supernatural. Through all of the resulting investigations, the Reverend was represented by a lawyer named Tom Radney, whose presence in the courtroom that day wouldn’t have been remarkable had he not been there to defend the man who killed his former client. A Kennedy liberal in the Wallace South, Radney was used to making headlines, and this time he would make them far beyond the local Alexander City Outlook. Reporters from the Associated Press and other wire services, along with national magazines and newspapers including Newsweek and The New York Times, had flocked to Alexander City to cover what was already being called the tale of the murderous voodoo preacher and the vigilante who shot him.

One of the reporters, though, wasn’t constrained by a daily deadline. Harper Lee lived in Manhattan but still spent some of each year in Monroeville, the town where she was born and raised, only 150 miles away from Alex City. Seventeen years had passed since she’d published To Kill a Mockingbird and twelve since she’d finished helping her friend Truman Capote report the crime story in Kansas that became In Cold Blood. Now, finally, she was ready to try again. One of the state’s best trial lawyers was arguing one of the state’s strangest cases, and the state’s most famous author was there to write about it. She would spend a year in town investigating the case, and many more turning it into prose. The mystery in the courtroom that day was what would become of the man who shot the Reverend Willie Maxwell. But for decades after the verdict, the mystery was what became of Harper Lee’s book.

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

Part 1 The Reverend

1 Divide the Waters from the Waters 7

2 Minister of the Gospel 16

3 Death Benefits 29

4 Seventh Son of a Seventh Son 41

5 Just Plain Scared 50

6 No Exception to the Rule 62

Part 2 The Lawyer

7 Who's in the Stew? 79

8 Roses Are Red 88

9 The Fight for Good 96

10 The Maxwell House 101

11 Peace and Goodwill 110

12 Tom v. Tom 120

13 The Man from Eclectic 130

14 What Holmes Was Talking About 142

Part 3 The Writer

15 Disappearing Act 149

16 Some Kind of Soul 153

17 The Gift 165

18 Deep Calling to Deep 180

19 Death and Taxes 192

20 Rumor, Fantasy, Dreams, Conjecture, and Outright Lies 209

21 Coming Back Until Doomsday 222

22 Horseshoe Bend 238

23 The Long Good-Bye 256

Epilogue 275

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 281

Bibliography 307

Reading Group Guide

1. How did the book change the way you think about Harper Lee and her literary legacy? What were you most surprised to learn?

2. One of the most disturbing aspects of Reverend Maxwell’s murder spree was the connection between him and his victims. How does Cep bring to life the horror of crimes committed within a family and a small Southern community?

3. Discuss how race played into the case of the Reverend Willie Maxwell.

4. What were your first impressions of Tom Radney? How did your perception of him change as you read the book?

5. What do you think about the morality of Robert Burns’s decision to murder the Reverend Willie Maxwell?

6. Did you know anything about the Maxwell murders before reading the book? Why do you think it took so long for them to get this kind of public attention?

7. What does Cep’s portrait convey about Truman Capote? Which traits stand out?

8. How did Harper Lee and Truman Capote’s relationship play into the larger story? How do you think Lee’s experience with In Cold Blood shaped her approach to writing her own true crime tale?

9. Why do you think the Maxwell case captivated Lee’s attention enough to dedicate years of her life to writing it? Do you think she finished it? If not, what do you think stopped her? What do you think happened to whatever existed of the manuscript?

10. Furious Hours combines the horror and mystery of a true crime tale with the in-depth history and detail of a biography. How does Cep integrate the two different pieces of the book?

11. How does Furious Hours distinguish itself from other nonfiction books you have read?

12. How does the reading experience and group discussion differ with a nonfiction book like Furious Hours compared to novels?

Editorial Reviews

One of the Best Books of the Year
The New York Times * The Washington Post * Time * Dallas Morning News * The Economist

“Captivating. . . . A spellbinding true crime story.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A triumph on every level. One of the losses to literature is that Harper Lee never found a way to tell a gothic true-crime story she’d spent years researching. Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce fidelity to the truth.” —David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon

“An enthralling work of narrative nonfiction. . . . Cep delivers edge-of-your-seat courtroom drama while brilliantly reinventing Southern Gothic.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“The sort of story that even Lee would have been proud to write.” —Michael Lewis, The New York Times

“A marvel.” —Time

“Impossible to put down.” —Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk

“Remarkable, thoroughly researched. . . . Cep manages the feat that all great nonfiction aspires to: combining the clean precision of fact with the urgency of gossip.” —The New York Review of Books

"Fascinating. . . . Lyrically composed." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Stunning." —Financial Times

“A rich, ambitious, beautifully written book.” —The Washington Post

“[A] well-told, ingeniously structured double mystery.” —The Economist

“A gripping, incredibly well-written portrait of not only Harper Lee, but of mid-20th century Alabama. . . . What I didn’t see coming was the emotional response I’d have as I blazed through the last 20 pages of the book—yet there I was, weeping.” —Ilana Masad, NPR

“A brilliant take on the mystery of inspiration and the even darker mysteries of the human heart.” —People

“A compelling hybrid of a novel, at once a true-crime thriller, courtroom drama, and miniature biography of Harper Lee.” —Southern Living

“There’s a stirring poetry to Furious Hours that eludes most contemporary nonfiction. . . . [The book] fills in the gap of Lee’s post-Mockingbird career with insatiable curiosity and impressive research. It reveals not just her intellectual interests, but within them, her personal relationships and motivations.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Gripping and meticulous, Cep’s work doesn’t make us choose between fidelity and style.” —Vulture
 
“This riveting account of both the murders and Lee’s reporting, writing, and editing process is fascinating for its behind-the-scenes look at one of the South’s cherished creative minds.” —Garden & Gun

“Essential reading.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Cep paints a vivid picture of the political and social makeup of a small Southern town, where family trees and the organizational charts of local institutions intersect often; where memories are long; and where the collective conscience of a community sometimes carries more weight than the law.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 
“A riveting true crime story, and a dazzling biography of one of America’s most beloved writers.” —Bustle

From the Publisher

★ 04/22/2019

Journalist Cep makes her debut with a brilliant account of Harper Lee’s failed attempt to write a true crime book. Part one follows the career of Alabama preacher Willie Maxwell as five family members over several years die under mysterious circumstances, all with large life insurance policies held by the reverend, rumored also to be a voodoo priest. On June 18, 1977, Maxwell was shot dead in front of 300 people at his stepdaughter’s funeral in Alexander City, Ala. Part two focuses on his killer’s trial later that year, which Harper Lee attended. Along the way, Cep relates the history of courthouses, voodoo, Alabama politics, and everything one needs to know about the insanity defense. Part three charts the To Kill a Mockingbird author’s efforts to write about the trial, but in Alexander City she finds only myths, lies, and her own insecurities. By many accounts, Lee wrote a book and may have rewritten it as fiction, though no manuscript has ever been found. As to what happened to the years of work Lee did on the story, Cep notes, “Lee... was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries: not only what she wrote, but how; not only when she stopped, but why.” Meticulously researched, this is essential reading for anyone interested in Lee and American literary history. Author tour. Agent: Edward Orloff, McCormick Literary. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Narrator Hillary Huber uses a slow, even pace and authoritative tone in her narration of this twisted true-crime story set in Alabama. What makes this audiobook even more engaging is that it is also a literary biography of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD’s Harper Lee, who leaves an unfinished manuscript based on the incidents. That manuscript, THE REVEREND, was supposed to be similar to Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD, a nonfiction novel, but Lee failed to capture the story. Huber allows both the tension and the anticipation of what might have been to color her delivery. This is likely not the book Lee would have written, but the strange twists and unbelievable outcome, and Huber’s steady and professional delivery, are a pleasure. R.O. 2020 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

2019-02-28

Cep's debut recounts how a series of rural Alabama murders inspired Harper Lee to write again, years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Death surrounded the Rev. Willie Maxwell. Following his wife's mysterious murder in 1970, four more of Maxwell's family members were inexplicably found dead within seven years. Locals blamed voodoo, but a deeper investigation pointed to fraud: Maxwell, said Lee, "had a profound and abiding belief in insurance," and he collected thousands in death benefits. He was a suspect in his wife's case (charged and curiously acquitted), but years later, before the police could make another arrest, he was killed in a public fit of vigilante justice. In a further twist, the same lawyer who helped clear Maxwell's name decided to represent his killer. Lee, still uncomfortable over the embellishments of her friend Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, wondered "whether she could write the kind of old-fashioned, straitlaced journalism she admired, and whether it could be as successful as the far-bending accounts of her contemporaries." In this effortlessly immersive narrative, Cep engagingly traces how Lee found the case and began—and ultimately abandoned—a project she called The Reverend. Cep writes with the accessible erudition of podcast-style journalism; she breathes not only life, but style into her exhaustive, impressively researched narrative. She relies heavily on the backstories of each of her narrative threads, which transforms her book into a collection of connected preambles. Short histories of fraud, Southern politics, and urban development take shape alongside a condensed biography of Lee. This kind of storytelling may feel disjointed, but there's a reason for it: By fully detailing the crimes before Lee even appears, Cep allows readers to see the case through Lee's eyes and recognize its nascent literary potential. Above all, this is a book about inspiration and how a passion for the mysteries of humanity can cause an undeniable creative spark.

A well-tempered blend of true crime and literary lore.

Kirkus Reviews