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A long briefcase containing research literature on the beginnings of a real Harper Lee crime book was discovered, confirming that the author of To Kill's Mockingbird had made a substantial start on a book that , in the opinion of some, exists somewhere in its field.
Writing in The Guardian Review about his new book Furious Hours, which describes in detail his hunt for Lee's manuscript, author and journalist Casey Cep reveals the breakthrough achieved in 2017. Cep is one of the rare people to have read the only known chapter of Lee's unpublished book, The Reverend, on the case of Reverend William Maxwell. A preacher in Alexander City, Alabama, Maxwell was suspected of murdering two of his wives, his brother, a nephew, a neighbor, and one of his half-daughters, but was never convicted.
Cep revealed that in 2017, she had been contacted by the family of Maxwell's lawyer, Tom Radney, who had helped Lee in search of his unfinished book and kept in touch with it for decades. Radney's family said that Lee's estate was finally handing over a case belonging to the lawyer, who died in 2011. Radney had handed him all his files on the case in 1977, but Lee's estate had long denied he had kept it. . In response to a request from Radney to send him back in 2013, Lee's lawyer, Tonja B Carter, wrote, "Unfortunately, Miss Lee does not have a record of your grandfather. I'm sorry, we could not help. "
The briefcase was made by the Lee Estate to Tom Radney's family in 2017. Photo: Casey Cep
Cep had access to the briefcase, which contained records, depositions, transcripts, letters, maps, newspaper clippings, and so on. It was a shocking discovery, she writes in Guardian Review: "The briefcase had been entrusted to her until her death; She was covered with dust, but was full of legal records and other documents from Lee – from the catalog of an occult bookstore where she had bought voodoo books for the tape recorder guarantee she had used to cover the Maxwell case. I had spent years trying to reconstruct his work on The Reverend, and here are his records, his photocopies, his documents and his research. "
The "most significant" discovery was a note page from Lee, detailing his interview with a sister of Maxwell's first wife, whose style was identical to that of his work on In Cold Blood, the clbadic crime of his true Truman Capote friend, dating from 1966.
"For the first time," writes Cep. "I had material evidence of their perfect echo with his reports to Alexander City."
After spending nearly two decades out of the public eye while fighting the success of his award-winning Pulitzer Prize novel, Lee first heard about Maxwell in 1977 when he was shot in the head at the funeral of his last alleged victim, his daughter-in-law Ann Ellington. Maxwell was killed by a member of the Ellington family, Robert Lewis Burns, who was later acquitted for foolishness. The following year, Lee began questioning police, lawyers, judges, reporters and relatives of Maxwell's victims for the purpose of writing a book.
In his research, Lee learned that Maxwell had earned thousands of dollars by subscribing dozens of insurance policies to his victims. "He may not have believed in what he preached, he might not have believed in voodoo, but he believed deeply in the insurance," she wrote.
A month after the announcement of a second book on Lee, Go Set a Watchman, in 2015, Cep revealed to the New Yorker that the Radney family owned a chapter of Lee that she had sent him some decades ago. Consisting of four typewritten pages and bearing the title "The Reverend" handwritten by Lee in the margins, the chapter sees Lee referring to Maxwell, while renaming Radney "Jonathan Larkin" – a possible sign that Lee was planning to treat him. case in a fictitious way.
It has long been debated how far Lee has come with the project. In 1987, she also wrote to another writer doing research on the case: "I think Reverend Maxwell murdered at least five people, that he was motivated by greed, that he had an accomplice for two of the murders and an accessory for one. The person I believe to have been his accomplice / accomplice is alive and well and does not live 150 miles from home … I do not have enough concrete facts about the actual crimes for a long account.
But Radney and his family have long claimed that Lee told him he had written most of a book. In 1997, Radney told a reporter, "I always talk to Nelle twice a year and every time we talk, she says she's still working on it."
While the Radney family was hoping that the Reverend would be found after the announcement of Go Set a Watchman, his estate was sealed since his death in 2016. Cep believes that everything that exists in The Reverend will remain unpublished and unknown until his death. That it is sealed.
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