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

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep, a staff writer for New Yorker Magazine, is a work of literary nonfiction in the true-crime genre. Furious Hours was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller List. Published in 2019, the book is the story of Willie Maxwell, an Alabama preacher whose neighbors suspected him of using voodoo to murder his victims; Willie’s murder at the funeral of one of his victims; and Harper Lee’s failed attempt to write a book about these events. This guide is based on the 2019 Knopf print edition.

Cep organizes the book into three sections: “The Reverend,” “The Lawyer,” and “The Writer.” In Part 1, “The Reverend,” Cep establishes the setting for the events of the book and includes substantial research on Willie Maxwell, a minister from Alexander City, Alabama. Maxwell was widely believed by law enforcement and members of his community to be responsible for the murders of several of his wives and relatives for life insurance payouts, but the evidence in each case was never enough to convict him.

Maxwell’s acquittal on the sole murder for which he was indicted, and the mysterious circumstances of the other murders, convinced the community that only voodoo could explain how the minister managed to kill so many people with impunity. Cep also describes how the loosely regulated life insurance industry allowed Willie to engage in this fraud. This section closes with the murder of Maxwell on June 21, 1977, by Robert Burns, the uncle of one of the last victims, at a funeral in front of 300 people.

In Part 2, “The Lawyer,” Cep focuses on Tom Radney, a liberal Southern Democrat who started out as an idealistic politician in Alabama in the 1960s. After one term as a state senator and a failed run for lieutenant governor, Radney left politics due to threats of violence to himself and his family over his more moderate views on race. In the early 1970s Radney transformed himself into a country lawyer who successfully defended all comers. One of his primary clients was Willie Maxwell, whose civil lawsuits against insurance companies as they attempted to avoid paying out life insurance policies enriched Radney greatly.

When Robert Burns was indicted for murdering Willie Maxwell before hundreds of witnesses, Radney took the case despite his longstanding relationship with Maxwell. Radney convinced the jury to find Burns not guilty by reason of temporary insanity by arguing that Maxwell was a voodoo practitioner and serial killer whose presence in the community drove Burns insane. Burns was released from the local mental health care facility weeks after his acquittal.

In Part 3, “The Writer,” Cep attempts to answer how, given these sensational elements, Lee failed to produce her second complete work, tentatively titled The Reverend. Cep describes Lee’s early life, her decision to move to New York to pursue a career as a journalist and writer after college, and her friendship with Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood (1966) and a childhood neighbor of Lee’s from Alabama. Cep also describes the collaboration between Lee, her agents, and her editors to produce Go Set a Watchman, a flawed, unfinished work that wasn’t published for decades, and To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1961.

Overwhelmed by the burden of her own celebrity as the writer of the wildly successful To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee struggled with writer’s block, perfectionism, alcoholism, and depression. Capote, whose work and willingness to stretch the truth motivated Lee to write a more truthful tale, died on August 25, 1984. Having lost the nerve and motivation to complete The Reverend, Lee likely gave up writing and drinking in the 1980s. She then settled into a seclusion broken only by the acceptance of literary awards for the last decades of her life.

By 2015, Lee was likely suffering from dementia and was in poor physical health. Her agent and legal representative authorized the publication of Go Set a Watchmen, the incomplete and awkward first novel Lee’s publishers and agents had rejected decades before. Lee died on February 19, 2016. Cep closes the book by explaining that the material that allowed her to tell the story Lee could not came to Cep by chance; this material is the only part of Lee’s literary estate currently available to the public.