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

“It was the first but not the last marriage of the future Reverend Willie Maxwell, and whatever else can be said about it, this much is true: it lasted, as he promised that day that it would, until death did them part.”

This ominous statement at the end of Chapter 1 demonstrates how Cep adds suspense to her work. This use of foreshadowing is one element of the book that reflects its true-crime roots.

“Violence has a way of destroying everything but itself. A murdered person’s name always threatens to become synonymous with her murder; a murdered person’s death always threatens to eclipse her life. That was especially true of an economically marginal black woman in Alabama.” 

Cep shows great self-awareness in this quote about how (and why) representations of crime and crime victims can further victimize people. In this particular case Cep acknowledges the role of race and class in determining what kind of justice a victim receives.

“For many of the Reverend’s neighbors, it was better to believe that, in the face of conjuring, there was nothing that law enforcement and the judicial system could do than to believe that, in the face of terrible crimes, they had not done enough. 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.”

The more sensationalistic element of the murders in Alexander City is that observers believed voodoo played a role in why Willie Maxwell escaped justice. In this passage Cep is highlighting what she sees as an element of superstition in Southern culture; she also offers an explanation for why superstition might have thrived in this case. This kind of cultural commentary and analysis is typical of literary nonfiction.

“Water, like violence, is difficult to contain.” 

Cep makes the point that environmental violence of the kind the Alabama power companies used to create Lake Martin can sometimes find expression in the culture that experiences this violence. Linking the environment to culture is a form of cultural commentary, and Cep uses this same tactic throughout her book to make the case that place shaped the outcome of the murders.

“As a rule, most southern towns are allergic to authority and resent any federal presence that isn’t a post office. But all of them welcome a courthouse, no matter what court it’s designed to house: city, county, district, federal, anything so long as you can put a building around it. As the Alabama chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America put it in 1860, there was no better way to advertise how civilized you were than ‘the erection of a courthouse in a new and virgin territory.’” 

Cep explains the symbolic importance of the courthouse in Southern states and towns. The fact that the courthouse is not a symbol of justice underscores Cep’s perspective that there is some primitivism at work in Southern culture.

“To win, Tom had decided, he needed the Reverend Willie Maxwell to be the witchiest witch doctor and voodooiest voodoo priest the South had ever known—a man so mysteriously powerful that no force of law could touch him and so feared that no neighbor would look him in the eye. And just as Tom needed his former client to be exceptionally bad, he needed his current one to be exceptionally good: a war hero whose patriotic bravery halfway across the world had made his sensitive heart and susceptible mind vulnerable to trauma back home.”

Cep describes Tom Radney’s approach to the trial of Robert Burns in this passage. His method is one that undercuts the idea of justice and the legal system as being governed by rationality.

“In only a few minutes of testimony, all the rumors of voodoo drained from the courtroom. There were no poisons or powders, no curses or charms or spells. Evil acts that for seven years had seemed supernatural now suddenly seemed all too human: a man had knocked on the door of another man and asked him to help commit murder.” 

During the trial, the testimony of people on the stand laid bare the pedestrian motivation of Willie Maxwell—he was after insurance money. This shift signals a moment of rationality in the court proceedings. Cep’s description of the courtroom’s atmosphere is another convention of the true-crime genre.

“At its core, the Burns trial had turned on two kinds of primitivism: belief in the supernatural and belief in vigilante justice. It wasn’t the first time that a white jury in Alabama had heard compelling evidence of murder yet reasoned their way to an acquittal. Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen’s duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties. Theirs was a society that not so long ago had written theft into legal treaties with Native Americans and bondage into legal deeds on the lives of African Americans; a society that until recently had believed the law elastic enough to bend without breaking, exempting lynching from the category of homicide.” 

Cep consistently casts the South as a primitive place in which the rule of law is undercut by a history of racial violence. The quote is a stinging indictment of the role race and racism play in the justice system in the South. In this quote Cep uses the history of genocide and slavery to explain how the jury managed to acquit Robert Burns despite his obvious guilt.

“While she paid to sit through lectures and fret over exams, people were paying Capote for every word that he wrote. He was a peacock strutting about the globe; she was a pigeon pacing the roost. Whatever she had told herself before about law school—about acquiring discipline or fulfilling her father’s dreams—it wasn’t enough anymore. Six weeks shy of graduation, Nelle Lee dropped out. It had become obvious to her that a writer is someone who writes, and also that sooner or later everyone disappoints their parents: better, she figured, to get started on both.”

Cep uses gendered language (the male peacock versus the female pigeon) to highlight how gender shaped the writing lives of Capote and Lee. The implication is that Lee’s trajectory was shaped in negative ways because she was a woman.

“All told, it took another two years for Tay Hohoff to convince Lee of the structural, political, and aesthetic changes necessary to rework Go Set a Watchman and The Long Good-Bye into the book that would ultimately be called To Kill a Mockingbird. ‘We talked it out,’ Hohoff said, ‘sometimes for hours. And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line.’” 

Cep’s description of the writing process undercuts the notion that the successful writer is a solitary genius who struggles alone to create masterpieces. What we learn instead in this passage is that it takes collaboration to produce a successful work.

“More than mere transcripts, Lee’s voluminous notes are those of a careful observer, a keen legal mind, and a tragicomic chronicler of American history [….] And she gave Capote the gift of notes on things that had nothing to do with the murders but everything to do with the place where they occurred—its cats, customs, charlatans, and seasons. More than most field notes, hers were a book waiting to be written.”

Cep’s description of Lee’s role in the creation of In Cold Blood further underscores how important collaboration is to success in the writing process.

“When asked about the freedom riders during a press event in Chicago, she said, ‘I don’t think this business of getting on buses and flaunting state laws does much of anything. Except getting a lot of publicity, and violence.’”

Cep’s account of Lee’s reticence about endorsing the aims and methods of the civil rights activists in the 1960s implies that Lee did not see social and political activism as a necessary part of the writer’s role. This moment is one of several in which Cep undercuts the reality of Lee’s politics from the myths surrounding To Kill a Mockingbird as a pro-civil-rights book.

“Anguish, shared and otherwise, had constrained and darkened Lee’s life for over fifteen years. Her editor was dead, her agent was dead, and a year after that People interview Annie Laurie Williams died, too. By May 1977, with the exception of the author, everyone who had helped bring To Kill a Mockingbird into the world was gone.”

Cep contrasts the successful publication of To Kill a Mockingbird with Lee’s unsuccessful effort to bring The Reverend to fruition. Her point here is that Lee was unsuccessful in producing that second book because she lacked collaborators and support. This theory contributes to how Cep answers the second major question of the book—why did Lee not publish a second book?

“Building on the work of John Hersey, Joseph Mitchell, and Lillian Ross, Capote borrowed the strategies of fiction writers in his nonfiction, rendering settings that were more than just datelines, crafting characters who were more than just quotations and physical descriptions, and identifying within his reporting, or imposing on it, moods and themes that made a story more than the sum of its parts. Although he called the resulting work a ‘nonfiction novel,’ he insisted—despite the obvious questions raised by the ‘novel’ part—that every line of In Cold Blood was pure fact. That, in itself, was not a fact.” 

Cep highlights one of the major tensions within the true-crime genre: the writer’s goal to tell an artful story and the writer’s obligation to embrace journalistic standards of truth and integrity. Cep contends that Capote’s untruths were a major inspiration for Harper Lee’s efforts to write The Reverend.

“[E]xcept for accounts of domestic violence, not many of the murders described in those books were representative of violent crime in this country. Their victims were typically wealthy and white, while murder victims, statistically speaking, are more likely to be economically disadvantaged and people of color; their killers were often calculating or deranged outsiders, while most homicide victims are killed by someone they know. Capote, in particular, had gone looking for what amounted to a horror story in the heart of white America: the murder of an entire middle-class household by total strangers.”

Cep critiques the true-crime genre by pointing out that it is frequently based on a distorted view of victims and perpetrators. If the genre were to truly reflect crime in the United States, then it would feature more diversity in race and socioeconomic backgrounds.

“The Maxwell case had a vigilante, too, but he was black and heralded as a hero not only privately but publicly. That made the politics of her new book less palatable than those of her previous one, and its plot contained far more complexities: an alleged black serial killer who was also the victim of violence; a crusading white attorney who was also profiting off black death; crimes that looked like murder but were mostly tried like fraud; white and black lives that existed almost side by side in small southern towns but were worlds apart. Yet because the story Lee had found was fact, not fiction, no editor could tell her it wasn’t believable or insist that she simplify it for her readers.”

Cep posits that there are multiple reasons why Lee was unable complete The Reverend, including Lee’s fears about the possible negative impacts of her subject matter on her literary reputation. The latter part of the quote highlights Lee’s vision of the South as a complex place that is frequently misrepresented in literature.

“The issue was that she had, as she would later say, ‘enough rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies for a volume the length of the Old Testament’—exactly what Harper Lee was hoping to keep out of her book.”

This quote illustrates Lee’s commitment to truth-telling as one of a writer’s responsibilities. Despite this commitment, the reality of working on a nonfiction book is that the truth is sometimes hard to find. Cep’s description of these difficulties provides a realistic portrait of the writing life for nonfiction authors.

“What Harper Lee knew about Tom Radney’s South instinctively, she could have learned about Willie Maxwell’s South only through patient research and ongoing conversations of the kind that very few white Americans, then as now, ever have.”

This quote identifies one of the limitations of Harper Lee’s vision of what it meant to be a writer: her cultural biases.

“Lee was no man’s wife. Instead, like those men, she was defined by her work, and free to spend all of her time reading and writing. No one could tell her what kind of reporting she should be doing, as they most certainly would have; true crime had plenty of female victims and the odd female murderess, but almost no female authors. She could devote an entire day to thinking if she wanted, or spend six hours with Sergeant William Gray and his wife, going over crime scene photographs that he had stashed at home, then stay up all night transcribing her notes on his memories of the death of the second Mrs. Maxwell.” 

By throwing off preconceptions about her place as a woman, Lee was able to work more freely. Her willingness to be an unconventional woman was hard-won, and Cep makes the point earlier in the book that her initial decision to be a conventional woman hampered Lee’s early career.

“Lee did want accuracy, but when she tried to start writing, she found that facts were in short supply. To begin with, it was difficult to reconstruct the life of a sharecropper’s son. History isn’t what happened but what gets written down, and the various sources that make up the archival record generally overlooked the lives of poor black southerners.” 

Cep points out that structural racism means the lives of black Americans are frequently underdocumented. This lack of documentation is one reason why representations of people of color tend to distort the reality of their lived experiences. Cep’s awareness of the impact of racism is just one of many insights she brings to her writing in a work of true crime about African Americans and explains why she, unlike Lee, was able to complete her book.

“Lee was repulsed by the idea of writing anything lurid or pulpy, never mind that true-crime books were generally violent and best sellers were generally page-turners. However intriguingly bloodless some of the deaths in the Maxwell case were, any writer chronicling the story was obliged to begin and end with horrific scenes: a woman bludgeoned to death; a man shot in the face. She didn’t want to disrespect the dead by making their deaths tawdry, but she also didn’t want to disappoint her readers, or let down her publisher.” 

Cep theorizes that Lee was uncomfortable with the idea of exploiting black death and suffering for profit. This passage is one of several in which Cep highlights the difficulties of writing in the true-crime genre.

“The shortage of facts, the lack of an ideal protagonist, her unfamiliarity with the lives of African Americans, a certain uncomfortable moral muddiness concerning black criminality in a criminally racist society, a related discomfort with her own deep delight in the self-serving mythologies of the southern gentry, the general difficulty of writing at all.” 

This quote is a good summary of all the challenges that likely prevented Lee from completing The Reverend. Since one of the two central questions motivating Furious Hours is why Lee did not finish her work, this quote is a crucial one.

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

Cep engages in substantial speculation about what happened to Harper Lee after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and why Lee never produced anything else of note. Cep’s point is that saying writer’s block was the primary cause is overly simplistic, which demonstrates her understanding of the reality of the lives of writers.