Delmarva Today: 10-30-20
Casey Cep, a writer for The New Yorker is today’s guest on “Delmarva Today” on Delmarva Public Radio WSDL 90.7. We discuss her book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the last trial of Harper Lee. It all begins with a gruesome series of murders and ends with a crime story “that didn’t want to be written.”
In the 1970s, an Alabama African-American, The Reverend Willie Maxwell, was accused of killing five of his family members, as well as a neighbor for insurance money. Victims included his adopted daughter Shirley Ann Ellington. Following her funeral service on Saturday, June 18, 1977, as mourners were leaving the church, and Maxwell waited in his pew, Robert Burns, in the pew in front, took out his Beretta and shot Maxwell in the head three times in front of three hundred witnesses. Attorney Tom Radney, who had defended Maxwell against the murder of his first wife and helped him secure the insurance money associated with the other five deaths was hired by Burns to defend him. Radney got him acquitted of Maxwell’s murder by reason of insanity.
The entire episode was sensational enough to attract the attention of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee who was looking for a subject for a second book. It had been seventeen years since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and there was enormous pressure on her to produce a second book. She had helped Truman Capote with the research and organization of In Cold Blood and was now challenged to write her own crime story, but in the old-fashioned, straitlaced journalism she admired. That is, not in the novelization of crime style in vogue. She struggled but failed to write this story. Harper Lee wrote a brilliant novel that has sold over forty million copies, why couldn’t she write a second book?
Casey addresses this issue and many others in her excellent book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the last trial of Harper Lee. She not only discusses the complex personal reasons why Harper Lee failed to write a second novel but also how To Kill a Mockingbird was produced, and what this sixty year old novel says to us about our own racism today. You really don’t want to miss this discussion, Casey Cep is exceptional.