Author takes over lost cause novel

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

By Casey Cep, Penguin Random House NZ, $38

.. .. .. .. .. .. Harper Lee will always be remembered as a one-hit wonder author with To Kill A Mockingbird, now approaching its sixth decade, remaining as popular as ever it was.

Its prequel, Go Set A Watchman, was released only six months before Lee’s 2016 death. Publishers turned a cold shoulder on it when she first submitted it, sending her away to have a second go.

Lee did their bidding with Mockingbird turning her into a

Pulitzer prize winner.

But that was that — try as hard as she could, including time as wing man for childhood friend Truman Capote as both researched his true crime work, In Cold Blood, the writing part of Lee’s mind remained frozen.

But she never stopped trying to thaw it. Learning of the Alabama trial of serial fraudster, rumoured voodoo practitioner and suspected murderer, the Revered Willie Maxwell, the plot for her next book gestated.

Adding to her fascination was that Maxwell had been shot dead in front of 300 witnesses during his third wife’s funeral service.

The man who pulled the trigger, fellow African American Robert Burns, never denied the killing.

That both were defended by the same counsel, aspiring state politician Tom Radney, fascinated Lee.

She took a place on the press bench at Burns’ trial, befriended Radney and began the background work for the book she planned to call The Reverenced.

However, like all her full length writings post Mockingbird, it was never to see the light of day.

That could well have been that but along came New York writer Casey Cep who joined the dots Lee never did. Cep’s debut book intertwining the two trials, their surprising outcomes and Lee’s struggle to produce the words that wouldn’t come is a masterpiece.

It will be a literary injustice if a Pulitzer doesn’t come Cep’s way for this definitive Lee biography. She’s brilliantly married this with the events in Lee’s native American south that almost certainly would have returned her to the top of the bestseller list.

That placing now goes to Cep, as it should. — Jill Nicholas