The true-crime story that Harper Lee tried and failed to write

Back in the 1970s a story had caught her eye. A true-crime story, that belonged on the shelf more or less created by In Cold Blood

Harper Lee was funny and profane and hard-drinking and seemingly uninterested in the role she created for herself: the famous writer who refused to write. She’d been 34 years old when she published To Kill a Mockingbird. It had sold several millions of copies — over 40 million to date — and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, plus an Oscar for Gregory Peck in 1963. Then she’d gone silent. She maintained her silence for the next 50-odd years, until her death in 2016. If she was seeking to optimise other people’s interest in her she couldn’t have