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

We just finished reading the fascinating Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, by Casey Cep. 

Cep sets herself three tasks. In the first section of the book, she investigates and tells the story of Reverend Maxwell. The Reverend, an African-American preacher, army veteran, and pulpwooder, was accused and exonerated in the killing his first wife. In turn, he cashed in on several life insurance policies he had placed on her. In the years that followed, more people around the Reverend died, including the husband of his second wife, that second wife, the Reverend’s brother and nephew, and the daughter of his third wife. Each death was followed by numerous, often contested, payments on life insurance policies taken out by the Reverend on the now dead. The Reverend is a larger-than-life figure, feared in his community not just for his association with these many deaths, but for his rumored voodoo powers. The climax of this section of the book is the death of Maxwell, shot at close range at the funeral of his stepdaughter by her sister’s husband.

The second section of the book tells the story of Tom Radney, an equally complex character in his own right. Radney was a progressive state senator in 60s Alabama. His early career was marked by one pivotal moment: his decision to identify himself as an icon of the New South and to support Edward Kennedy (and not George Wallace) for the presidential nomination. Vandalism and death threats followed, and Radney withdrew from politics. In 1969, he reentered, running for lieutenant governor, but he was defeated. Cep notes that Radney may have been not ahead of his time but “ahead of his place” (100). He wanted to bring change to Alabama, but he didn’t end up doing so in the legislative arena. Instead, he made his career as a trial lawyer. His office, called the Zoo, served rich and poor, white and black, and he thrived. In fact, Radney successfully defended the Reverend in the only murder charge he faced, for the death of his first wife, and worked to secure payment for the Reverend in his many disputed insurance claims. The climax of this section is Radney’s successful use of the insanity defense to secure exoneration for Robert Burns, the Reverend’s assassin.

The last section, and the one many English teachers and readers of Mockingbird will be most interested in, is the story of Harper Lee and her apparently unsuccessful attempt to write the story of the Reverend and Radney. Cep writes of Lee’s refusals of celebrity and conventionality, of her deep intellectualism and curiosity, and of difficult relationship with writing. In particular, Cep focuses on the ways in which Lee’s scrupulous dedication to accuracy, in contrast to Truman Capote’s practice with In Cold Blood, presents unique challenges: an absence of facts, self-serving memories by those involved, and confounding protagonists. Ultimately, for reasons that we may never fully understand, Lee seems to have found herself unable to write this story.

One moment in the final section is particularly striking in light of the persistent and thoughtful conversations about the politics of Mockingbird. Cep writes of Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, and her insistence that it would be “best to convert readers to the cause of racial justice with a child’s loss of innocence [rather] than to condemn them through the disillusioned voice of an adult daughter” (179). Hence the shift to the narrative voice of Scout, in Mockingbird, and away from the adult perspective of Watchman. In Watchman, Atticus is condemned by his daughter as a member of the White Citizens’ Council. In Mockingbird, Scout’s ability to criticize her father’s accommodationism and political complacency is limited by her age and her inability to see outside the world of Maycomb and the courthouse.

In an otherwise carefully nuanced and researched book, Cep states blandly that Atticus in Mockingbird remains “heroic forever” (178). It’s disappointing to see Cep render this simplistic reading of Atticus. Certainly she’s in good company. Mockingbird was received and canonized, just as Hohoff had hoped it would be, as “a redemptive story of tolerance” (178). The film version, probably more well-known in our culture, particularly for those who never actually read the book, bolsters this view of Atticus as heroic and the book overall as redemptive. (Teachers can find resources for undertaking a more complex consideration of Atticus in our volume on Mockingbird.)

Of course Tom Robinson, shot in the back seventeen times, does not receive redemption, and Atticus himself issues an ominous warning, not of redemption but of retribution: “Don’t fool yourselves—it’s all adding up [racial injustice] and one of these days we’re going to pay the bill for it.” The violence enacted on Scout and Jem at the end of the novel hints at exactly the kind of bill-paying to come in a society that complacently looks away from the brutality in its midst.

Perhaps Lee’s vision of the South was more complicated than the “palliative plot” (178) she, under the guidance of Hohoff, found herself telling as she transformed the story of southern racism in Watchman into Mockingbird. Was Lee’s attempt to take on the story of the Reverend her way of rejecting Hohoff’s politics and her own compromises? Certainly, taking on the tale of a black Alabama preacher who worked the insurance system to make himself a fortune and may or may not have murdered his family along the way, could not have been a more challenging choice for the author of the much-beloved Mockingbird.

Would the world have welcomed this sort of book from Lee? The vitriol surrounding the publication of Watchman probably suggests the answer.

In any case, Casey Cip has taken up Lee’s mantle, and we have Furious Hours. For those of us who find Lee, Mockingbird, and Watchman to be intriguing, complex pieces of the story of American literary and cultural history, the plot thickens.