Harper Lee carried out much of the reporting in rural Kansas for her friend Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," a book she abhorred because of Capote's fictionalized scenes.
The celebrated author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" sought to match Capote's "new journalism" classic by writing her own true-crime book, which would be rigorously based on facts. As with "In Cold Blood," she did extensive investigative work. But she never produced a book.
Lee found her subject in a curious case in her native Alabama. A rural black preacher named Willie Maxwell was accused of murdering five members of his family in the 1970s and receiving payments from insurance policies he'd taken out on them.
Some in Maxwell's hometown of Alexander City, Ala., believed him a supernatural practitioner of voodoo. Represented by the flamboyant Alexander City defense attorney Tom Radney, Maxwell kept getting acquitted and escaping insurance fraud charges.
Maxwell's final victim was his 16-year-old stepdaughter. During the child's funeral, her brother, Robert Burns, pulled out a pistol and shot Maxwell at point-blank range, killing him instantly.
Radney also represented Burns at his murder trial, winning him a verdict of non-guilty by reason of insanity.
A fervid supporter of the Kennedy family, Radney was known as Alabama's most prominent liberal Democrat, a former state senator who had unsuccessfully run for lieutenant governor.
Lee grew fascinated by the case, moving to Alexander City to witness the Burns trial, interview those who'd known Maxwell and conduct research on his murder cases.
The New Yorker writer Casey Cep delves into the Maxwell story, Radney's career and Lee's abandoned book in "Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee."
The first half of "Furious Hours" completes Lee's project. With superfluous digressions such as histories of life insurance and the insanity defense, Cep's Maxwell-Radney saga amounts to an extended magazine article, flavored by Southern Gothic accents and arcana about Alabama politics and history.
Cep's mini-biography of Lee in the book's second half broadens the appeal and energizes the narrative. Her portrait of Lee is one of the best in the growing corpus of books about Lee, especially Cep's revelations about the breakup of Lee's lifelong friendship with Capote.
While Capote gained literary fame before Lee, and produced several books considered classics, he was jealous of the extraordinary popularity of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Beginning in their childhoods in Monroeville, Ala., the model for Lee's Maycomb in "To Kill a Mockingbird," as well the setting for some of Capote's stories, their lives intertwined and diverged. They'd grown irrevocably apart when Capote died of a drug overdose, years before Lee's death.
Trying to write her true-crime book, Lee like Capote battled acute alcoholism. Capote likewise died with a book unfinished, the long-promised "Answered Prayers," which alienated his New York City high-society confidantes because of his exposure of their secrets. That came in a short story published in Esquire, but the novel was never finished.
In Cep's view, Capote's death freed Lee from the need to write a successor to "To Kill a Mockingbird." Giving up alcohol, she found serenity in her later years, leading an increasingly private life in Monroeville and New York City.
Cep details Lee's diligent efforts to finish the book. During Burns' trial, Lee lived at the Horseshoe Bend Hotel in Alexander City, along with a cabin on nearby Lake Martin, formed by the 19th century damming of the Tallapoosa River, which Cep exhaustively documents.
Radney even gave her a briefcase with his complete file of defense documents on Maxwell and Burns. Lee never returned the documents to Radney, but Cep found them in Lee's possessions after the author's death and gave them to Radney's family.
Over the years, rumors surfaced that Lee had completed a Maxwell manuscript, that a book was forthcoming, that her publishers had refused to produce it because it was too racially incendiary. Only four pages have been found. Cep reports that Lee might have destroyed a manuscript.
When the literary world was jolted by reports late in Lee's life that she was publishing another book, many of her friends expected the Maxwell work. But the publication was "To Set a Watchman," Lee's first novel about Atticus Finch, narrated by his grown daughter Scout.
At the suggestion of her editor, Lee recast the book with Scout as a child narrator, producing "To Kill a Mockingbird." Cep gives a fresh look at the familiar details of how "To Kill a Mockingbird" came about.
"To Set a Watchman" depiction of Atticus as an aged racist dismayed "To Kill a Mockingbird" fans, and many thought the uneven manuscript should have remained unpublished. But it boosted interest in Lee's life.
Cep makes a convincing case that Lee abandoned her true crime project, unable to find a narrative shape for the massive amount of material she uncovered.
In Cep's gripping narrative, Lee's effort turns into a noble quest, like Atticus Finch's defense of the black defendant in "To Kill a Mockingbird."