Furious Hours

 

Any Good Books, May 2023

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

Casey Cep (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours is a story about a story, a book about a book that didn’t happen. It’s a thoroughly researched and beautifully written book about loose ends, ambiguous heroes, and lost drafts. This befits its subject, Nelle Harper Lee, who achieved literary success beyond her wildest dreams, only to find the fame deeply burdensome, and the wealth expensive.(The top tax rate was still 90% in 1960, when the royalties for To Kill a Mockingbird began flooding in. The book has been in print ever since.)

Cep’s book opens in Alexander City, Alabama, in 1977, at the trial of a man, Robert Louis Burns, who shot another man in front of three hundred people. The shooter and the victim, the Reverend Willie Maxwell, were black, as were most of the witnesses; the jury, the judge, and all of the lawyers were white men. Harper Lee sat among the press. She was there at the invitation of the defense lawyer, Tom Radney, whom she’d met in New York at a party connected to the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

The man who was shot, the Reverend Willie Junior Maxwell, lived a lavish life for a part-time preacher living in the wide spot in the road that was Nixburg, Alabama. In addition to preaching, he worked in a rock quarry, reducing rock to gravel and dust, and ran a pulpwood crew, delivering soft Alabama pine to paper mills, possibly the only man ever to do so in dapper three-piece suits.

In 1970, Maxwell’s wife, Mary Lou, was found beaten to death in her car, a short way from home. Her life was unusually well insured, and her husband was the prime suspect. The Reverend had policies with companies all over the country, not only on his wife, but on “...his mother, his brothers, his aunts, his nieces, his nephews, and the infant daughter he had only just legitimated.” The initial charges were dismissed for lack of evidence; the following summer, new evidence and a new indictment led to a not guilty verdict. Meanwhile, Tom Radney was helping the Reverend sue for Mary Lou’s death benefits, and taking a hefty cut when he won.

His first wife’s was not the only unresolved death. In the next two years, his older brother and his second wife also met suspicious ends. Some insurance companies had begun to refuse his business, but others paid some $80,000 on Mrs. Maxwell’s death. Then a nephew who worked on the pulpwood crew was found dead in a car; and then a teenage girl his third wife had taken in. It was at her funeral that Robert Burns drew a gun and shot Willie Maxwell three times at close range.

The trial chapters are riveting. “Two hundred people had come to watch the trial of Robert Burns, and the Alexander City Courthouse was packed tight as a box of crayons. The onlookers gasped at the coroners, laughed at witnesses, and whispered among themselves during any new testimony, their benches squeaking every time they leaned over to talk with their neighbors.”

Here was a story, after all those years, that called out to Harper Lee. She had grown up watching her father in courtrooms. She had gone to Kansas with Truman Capote to dig into the murders of the Clutter family for In Cold Blood. Her interview notes, and the way people opened up to her who found Truman Capote too exotic to deal with, contributed immeasurably to the success of that book. In Alex City, she spent time with Tom Radney, and became friendly with a young local journalist named Jim Earnhardt. She interviewed everyone who remembered Reverend Maxwell, including his killer. Burns had been declared not guilty by reason of insanity, but passed through the state mental hospital in short order, and was already home. She went home to New York to start writing with a hefty valise full of Radney’s files, and Earnhardt’s reporting scrapbook.

And then… what? “Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words, and no matter how many pages of notes and interviews and documents a reporting trip generates, the one that matters most starts out blank.” The tale was, in the first place, exceedingly tangled; where she needed facts, she had rumors, conjectures, and lies. She was lacking the help her first agent and editor had given her on Mockingbird. Those people were dead, and no one could replace them. And was the public ready for the story of a black serial killer, from the author of such a beloved book?

Casey Cep has done an exceptional job reconstructing all of this, especially the social and economic fabric of Alexander City. If we can’t have Lee’s book, I’ll gladly take this one.