Nonfiction Review: FURIOUS HOURS: MURDER, FRAUD, AND THE LAST TRIAL OF HARPER LEE (+Discussion questions)

In a 2024 survey, 12.6% of respondents named To Kill a Mockingbird as their all-time favorite book from a given list. In 2021 a British survey found that 13% of the respondents named TKAM as the most inspirational novel. In the 2018 PBS "The Great American Read" it was named as America's best-loved novel overall. All of these surveys took place over 50 years after 1960 when Harper Lee penned her famous book and still today people everywhere sing its praises. If I were asked what is my all-time-favorite novel I'd answer To Kill a Mockingbird, too. So why, with all this success, did its author not publish another book for the next 50 years? 

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper by Casey Cep attempts to answer that question but it also shows how Harper Lee did attempt to write another book, a true-crime book, but abandoned her attempt many years into the project.

Back in the 1960s and 70s there was a black preacher in Alabama named Willie Maxwell. He was well liked and often called Reverend Maxwell, even when he didn't have a church. Then in in August 1970s his wife's bloated, dead body was found in a car in a remote area off the highway. She has clearly been beaten to death and all signs pointed to the Reverend as the suspect in her murder. A neighbor reported that around 10 pm Mary Lou had told her that Willie had called and needed a ride home, that his car was broken down. She was the last person to see Mary Lou alive. It was well know that the Reverend had many lady friends but what wasn't known was how many insurance policies were written in Mary Lou's name with Willie being the beneficiary. In those days it was surprisingly easy to take out life insurance policies on anyone and name yourself the beneficiary. It took the state a surprisingly long time to bring charges against Willie and by then the neighbor had changed her story about what Mary Lou said to her the night of her death. What the jury didn't hear was by that time Willie and this neighbor had become friendly and were planning to get married.

A year after their marriage this second wife was also found dead in a car alongside a country road. She had seventeen life insurance policies in her name. "For the Reverend," writes Cep, "becoming a widower was quite a lucrative business." After her death the Reverend took out life insurance policies on his mother, his brothers, his nephew, his aunt, even his just legitimized infant daughter and the bodies started piling up. Everyone knew it was the Reverend but getting the charges to stick was another story. Eventually justice was found for the Reverend but not through the courts. 

Enter Harper Lee and the second half of the book. It's been fourteen years since TKAM was published. Everyone is bugging Lee to write another book. Why not write a true crime story and go about the research the way she did when she was helping Truman Capote do his research for In Cold Blood? 

Eventually Lee spent a year in town interviewing and going over all the evidence she could get her hands one for the Maxwell cases. She worked with the lawyer who had been Maxwell's attorney. She uncovered every stone there was to uncover then she went back to New York to write up her book she was calling The Reverend. Unfortunately, after years of trying she gave up the project admitting she just didn't know how to organize all the information. During the intervening years between TKAM and this project the editor, Tay Hohoff, who worked with Lee at J.B. Lippincott, and Co. had either died or was retired. She floundered without the guidance of such a strong and capable editor behind her. Oddly, Casey Cep, this books author, was able to put together the whole Maxwell Murders debacle into a very interesting and compelling account in the book's first part and went on to write an excellent biography of Harper Lee in the 2nd. 

Time Magazine's Lucas Wittmann writes, "In elegant prose, [Cep] gives us the fullest story yet of Lee’s post-Mockingbird life ... an account emotionally attuned to the toll that great writing takes, and shows that sometimes one perfect book is all we can ask for, even while we wish for another."

In some ways I'm sorry I read Furious Hours because Harper Lee, the author of my favorite book, didn't come out smelling like roses here. She drank an awful lot. I'm not sure, and it wasn't said in the book, but it sure sounded like she was an alcoholic. Whether she was or wasn't, alcohol use got in the way of her ability to write from Cep's reporting. After the collapse of the Reverend project, she never again attempted to publish anything other than a few letters or essays. In fact, just this year, a collection of stories and essays by Lee was published in The Land of Sweet Forever. And right after Lee's death in 2016 her sister published Go Set a Watchman, the book she wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a book she never wanted to publish (and many people wished hadn't been published since it casts the hero, Atticus Finch, in a very bad light.)

I read Furious Hours book for an upcoming book club, though it has been on my TBR for several years. I gave the book the rating of 4 stars.

Discussion questions for Furious Hours:

1. How did the book change the way you think about Harper Lee and her literary legacy? What were you most surprised to learn?

2. What were the most disturbing aspects of Reverend Maxwell’s murder spree and the connection between him and his victims? 

3. What surprised you the most about the life insurance policies and the way these companies did business?

4. Discuss how race played into the case of the Reverend Willie Maxwell.

5. What were your first impressions of Tom Radney? How did your perception of him change as you read the book?

6. What do you think about the morality of Robert Burns’s decision to murder the Reverend Willie Maxwell? Do you think his acquittal was right? 

7. How did Harper Lee and Truman Capote’s relationship play into the larger story? How do you think Lee’s experience with In Cold Blood shaped her approach to writing her own true crime tale?

8. Why do you think the Maxwell case captivated Lee’s attention enough to dedicate years of her life to writing it? Do you think she finished it? If not, what do you think stopped her? What do you think happened to whatever existed of the manuscript?

9. Furious Hours combines the horror and mystery of a true crime tale with the in-depth history and detail of a biography. How does Cep integrate the two different pieces of the book? Why do you think Cep was able to pull off what Lee couldn't?

10. How does Furious Hours distinguish itself from other nonfiction books you have read? What other narrative nonfiction books have you enjoyed reading and would recommend to others?

(These excellent discussion questions come from the Sarasota Springs Public Library. I tweaked them just a bit but credit to the librarians at that library.)

-Anne