For those who loved To Kill a Mockingbird, and pondered the mystery of Harper Lee.

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 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 Casey Cep’s book comes as close as we’re likely to do so.

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