The main character as this book begins is the Reverend Willie Maxwell: part-time preacher, full-time ladies' man. Handsome and well-dressed, Maxwell cut a swell figure in the late 1960s around Alexander City, Alabama. But when several of Maxwell's family members met untimely deaths, the grieving Reverend could barely see through his tears to claim the multiple life insurance policies he had taken out on each of them.
He managed to escape conviction for any involvement in the deaths, but suspicion lingered as the body count rose over the next few years (two wives, a neighbor, a brother, and a nephew). When Maxwell's teenage step-daughter also died in an “accident” in 1977, her uncle, Robert Louis Burns, snapped—and put down the Reverend with a .45 in front of all the mourners at her funeral. Burns never denied what he did, so the question was whether he would be convicted of murder for doing what many saw as a service to the community.
Casey Cep tells the story of the ensuing trial, and it has all the hallmarks of the archetypal Southern legal drama: the un-airconditioned Alabama summer courthouse, the charming liberal lawyer, the racial undercurrents (although, in this particular case, both the victim and the alleged killer were black).
It was a legal spectacle that Harper Lee hoped to write. Aged fifty, fifteen years after her literary triumph with To Kill A Mockingbird, she had yet to publish a second book. She installed herself in Alexander City to cover the trial and set about interviewing everyone involved. Her celebrity (and family connections) meant doors opened for her that would have been closed to others.
Cep retraces Lee's steps, as the book turns into her biography. Lee is an enigmatic figure: we know her as a child from the character of Scout Finch. But she guarded her adult life closely. Cep details her upbringing and college years, how she dropped out of law school and moved to New York to pursue writing. In late 1959, her career had yet to take off when her childhood friend, Truman Capote, asked her to accompany him to Kansas as he researched In Cold Blood. She served as his assistant, gleaning information from reluctant townsfolk and taking notes.
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