FURIOUS HOURS

Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

By Casey Cep

Harper Lee was funny and profane and hard-drinking and seemingly uninterested in the role she created for herself: the famous writer who refused to write. She’d been 34 years old when she published “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It had sold several millions of copies — over 40 million to date — and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, plus an Oscar for Gregory Peck in 1963. Then she’d gone silent. She maintained her silence for the next 50-odd years, until her death in 2016. If she was seeking to optimize other people’s interest in her she couldn’t have adopted a better strategy. As the crowds formed at the front of the theater waiting for her show, she’d slipped out the back and told her driver to take her as far away as she could get. “Some people only have one book in them,” she would sometimes explain, in her later years, when in the mood.

But she didn’t always feel that way. Back in the 1970s a story had caught her eye. A true-crime story, that belonged on the shelf more or less created by “In Cold Blood.” She’d helped Truman Capote research that book and would now write her own. She worked for years on the thing, or said she did, but the book never got written. Until now. “Furious Hours” is that book, with a twist. Casey Cep has picked up where Lee left off: She’s written the true-crime story that Harper Lee never figured out how to write. But she’s used it as an excuse to study Lee herself — and the reasons for her long silence.

Image The Rev. Willie Maxwell Credit... Associated Press

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of May. See the full list. ]

It takes Cep about five pages to eliminate from the reader’s mind the possibility that the source of Harper Lee’s literary problems was lack of material. This story is just too good. Its protagonist is a black preacher named Willie Maxwell. He was born in rural Alabama in 1925 and grew up without anyone recording anything about him. “A silence characteristic of the historical record for African-Americans in that time and place,” Cep writes. Maxwell joined the Army and served as an aviation engineer on a base in Utah during World War II. After the war, he re-enlisted, driving trucks for the Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific theater, rising to the level of sergeant and earning a Good Conduct Medal. In 1947, he returned to Alabama, married, took one job in a textile mill and another as a sharecropper and somehow had time to spare to become a Baptist preacher. “Reverend Maxwell,” people called him.