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

by Casey Cep

Later, around the time of the Great Fire, John Graunt, a London haberdasher who dabbled in demography, organized those bills, arranging twenty years’ worth of death into eighty-one causes and making it possible to see when people were most likely to die and what was most likely to kill them. Armed with population information for the first time, insurance companies began to get a handle on probability calculations, and soon

Supernatural explanations flourish where law and order fails, which is why, as time passed and more people died, the stories about the Reverend grew stronger, stranger, and, if possible, more sinister.

As with his political career, Big Tom’s legal career seemed like a way to reject his father’s cruelty and reflect his mother’s generosity, and whenever he did work for less than what it was worth, he felt that he was using his time and talents as she had taught him and as God wanted.

Neighbors gossiped about Frances playing piano at odd hours, shouting from the front porch, repeating herself often, and, conversely, sometimes staring off in silence, incapable of the pleasantries expected of southern women.

Sounds like we’d have been friends!

Monroeville was the kind of town where if your sister served cake on a Friday, she would be featured in the newspaper for having “entertained,” and if your friend’s eighth birthday party included fruit punch and prizes, it might merit its own headline plus five column inches.

Still is.

By the first grade, she could be counted on to have read both The Monroe Journal and The Mobile Press, a feat not many adults in Monroeville managed.

Still true also!

revealing not only the appetite she had for intellectual friendships but also the deep estrangement of a bright young woman from her hometown.

The apartment was a few blocks from the East River and what must have felt like a million miles from Monroeville: far enough away that she could wear tennis shoes and blue jeans without attracting stares, far enough away that she could forget about the law degree she had failed to get, far enough away that she could try to do something with words.

She claimed that while there could be “no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence,” there was also “no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed.”

Like many self-exiled people, she was betwixt and between—wanting to write about Alabama when she was in New York, and wanting to be in New York whenever she was home in Alabama.

She didn’t enjoy her peers any more at thirty than she had at ten: “Sitting & listening to people you went to school with is excruciating for an hour—to hear the same conversation day in & day out is better than the Chinese torture method.” Even worse, she confessed, “I simply can’t work here.” “Genius overcomes all obstacles, etc., and this is no excuse,” she said with characteristic self-deprecation that summer, but she also wanted, with increasing desperation, to be back at her makeshift desk in her make-do apartment, making things.

an aspiring writer from Alabama whose accent was still so strong she claimed to be afraid of consonants.

recorded the height of the kitchen cabinets and the titles of the books, the color of the walls and the patterns of the linoleum, the gauges of the shotguns in the closet, the autographs on framed pictures, the presence of a Ping-Pong table but the absence of Ping-Pong balls. She drew floor plans of the first story, the second story, and the basement, along with maps of the property and the landscaping.

Visual thinker

For Capote, they were a story; for Lee, they were a family.

But if Lee expected to be taxed at a 70 percent rate that year, she had probably already earned somewhere around $700,000 in today’s money—a huge amount for a novelist even now, and almost a hundred times the size of her advance. And that was before the book even came out.

By its first anniversary, To Kill a Mockingbird had already sold half a million copies.

She was right, and not just about the South. The kinds of people she described in her story weren’t only possible; they were prevalent.

Again….STILL ARE!!

Mockingbird had been read as a clarion call for civil rights, but Lee’s real views were more complicated than any editor wanted to put in print.

Lee herself stayed curiously silent on the subject of civil rights. Although her voice could have been one of the most powerful ones in the country, she did not lend it to the movement, even when it came riding through Alabama on buses, marching on Alabama’s streets, and registering African American voters in rural places exactly like Monroe County.

“He writes not to communicate with other people,” Lee said of any writer worth his salt, “but to communicate more assuredly with himself.”

“Sometimes I’m afraid that I like it too much,” she claimed, “because when I get into work I don’t want to leave it. As a result I’ll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I’ll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that’s it.” Writing, Lee argued, was a never-ending self-exploration for the writer, “an exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”

Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour to writing. In fact, it’s heartbreak most of the time.”

More bleakly, she told him, “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle.”

A kindergarten teacher had whacked Capote’s hand with a ruler for reading too well, Lee remembered to the reporter, a small episode but one that said plenty about the lives of brilliant misfits in their small southern town. It was in that interview that Lee said of them, evocatively and enigmatically, “We are bound by a common anguish.”

These pamphlets are the ancestors of what we now call true crime,

She understood that, of course, because it was something they had in common. Both were southerners unwilling to leave a region that would have preferred to do without them: an unmarried, unconventional literary woman; an in-your-face progressive. She could have stayed in Manhattan; he could have started a fresh political career almost anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But Harper Lee returned over and over again to the town where she was born, and Big Tom never really left; both of them were deeply loyal to the South, even when it disappointed them or disapproved of them.

While most women at that time had to mind what went into their mouths and what came out of them, Lee smoked and drank as much as any man and, as Madolyn said, “had several four-letter words she’d contribute to any conversation.”

and her five favorite novels: Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Instead his narrative concluded with the “engagements” between Andrew Jackson’s army and the Creeks, which, Lee said, “began to spell the end, which came, as we all know, in a few furious hours at Horseshoe Bend.”

Writer’s block is a symptom, not a disease. It describes only the failure to write; it does not explain it.

As Kierkegaard observed, we live forward but comprehend backward;

(4) I’m gonna tear Monroeville to pieces (1958 Monroeville)

In a strange inversion, the closer to done a book is, the more unfinished, in this sense, it feels.

“I’m gonna tear Monroeville to pieces (1958 Monroeville),” which is what she started but abandoned in the draft of Go Set a Watchman.

Her dislike of Monroeville’s annual production of a theatrical version of her novel had only increased as the audiences grew and the performances multiplied, and soon she had to contend with two competing films about the writing of In Cold Blood, both of which featured her as a central character,