One Read: Harper Lee travels blurred line between fact and fiction in "Furious Hours"

Editor's note: Each Sunday in September, Daniel Boone Regional Library's Ida Fogle will investigate a theme or angle of Casey Cep's "Furious Hours," the choice for this year's community-wide One Read program. Mild spoilers may be included. 

On Aug. 3, 1970, the Rev. Willie Maxwell’s wife, Mary Lou, was found dead in her car beside an Alabama highway. During the following seven years, four more members of Maxwell’s family died under similar circumstances, resulting in sizable life insurance payouts to the reverend. Those are established facts, as reported in “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee” by Casey Cep.

Harper Lee grew up with a father who was both a trial attorney and a newspaper publisher, instilling in her a devotion to documented truth. When she accompanied Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas to research “In Cold Blood,” she produced 150 pages of notes, going so far as to measure the heights of the kitchen cabinets in the Clutter family home.

But after Capote’s purportedly nonfiction book appeared in print, Lee lamented that her friend Truman had “put fact out of business.”

In her own true crime book, she was determined to report only details she could verify. However, as she started to dig through archives and conduct interviews in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, she found information wasn’t easy to acquire.

There was little documentation of Willie Maxwell’s life outside the court cases where he’d been accused of murder and insurance fraud. And while popular opinion might have held him guilty, the official record stated otherwise.

The blurred line between fact and fiction is a theme throughout the narrative of “Furious Hours.” Coroners sometimes disagreed about causes of death. Maxwell presented one public face as a minister, but the truth of his private life was altogether different. Rumors circulated that Maxwell had used voodoo both to commit murder and get away with it. It seemed everyone had their own story about where he learned the craft and what it involved.

Even the definition of voodoo was open to interpretation. Lee learned all she could, reading a stack of books on the subject, discovering a cultural schism between reality and perception. The word voodoo has been thrown around for a couple centuries to talk about hexes or magic spells. But Lee discovered in her reading that “voodoo was an extensive and sincerely held system of belief, with practitioners all around the world.”

While it was undisputed that Robert Burns killed Willie Maxwell, a jury would have to judge the truth of Burns’ insanity plea. Should they believe the story told by the prosecution, whose selected evidence showed a premeditated vigilante murder, or the story told by defense attorney Tom Radney, who presented pieces that added up to a picture of a man overcome with temporary madness? 

The task of winnowing out misinformation was daunting. At one point, Lee said she had gathered “enough rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies for a volume the length of the Old Testament.” Cep surmises Lee was especially sensitive about unconfirmed rumors due to childhood experiences with community gossip spread about her mother, who experienced bouts of mental illness. 

The trauma from this might also have contributed to Lee’s determined guarding of her own privacy. She gave few interviews and avoided discussing her one published book even with close acquaintances.

But near the end of her life, the spotlight found her and she became the subject of public speculation when her attorney, Tonja Carter, announced in 2015 that Lee would be publishing a second book. Carter claimed to have discovered the manuscript for “Go Set a Watchman” in Lee’s safe deposit box and said her client was “happy as hell” about its release. 

Some of Lee’s friends believed the author was being manipulated. She was 88 years old, had suffered a stroke, and lost most of her vision and hearing. In the press, Carter cast herself as a zealous defender of Lee’s interests, while others accused her of exploiting her elderly client for personal gain. Carter further muddied the waters by changing details of her story, something that can also be said about another attorney mentioned in Cep’s book. But that’s a topic for next week.

One Read discussions and programs will be held online throughout the month of September. Visit oneread.dbrl.org/events for more information.