For more than a century, three generations of the flame-haired Murdaugh (pronounced “Murdock”) family oversaw the administration of justice in South Carolina’s 14th Judicial Circuit, making it the longest-serving prosecutorial dynasty in US history. In The Family Man, James Lasdun examines how that dynasty collapsed, undone by Alex Murdaugh, who in 2023 was convicted of murdering his wife and younger son and of stealing millions of dollars from clients who trusted him to represent them. Since the book’s completion, however, the South Carolina Supreme Court has overturned the murder convictions and ordered a retrial after ruling that a court clerk improperly influenced the jury.
Sweating gamely through a Southern summer in a banana-republic linen suit, Lasdun attempts to bring his rational, literary sensibility to a case in which reality repeatedly outstrips plausibility. The underlying tension of the book is shaped by his instinctive resistance to the idea that a seemingly loving father and husband could cold-bloodedly murder his nearest and dearest: “It was a feeling that the human species itself was being libelled in some way.” Lasdun, an Englishman who moved to New York more than 30 years ago, has a keen eye for the trappings of generational entitlement. His description of Paul Murdaugh, the young man supposedly killed by his father with “his sculpted red hair and haughtily commanding expression evocative of some Roman boy-emperor”, is characteristic of his scavenger-like attention to detail.
Lasdun notes that he was drawn to the true-crime genre from the early 2000s, when he himself was stalked by a former student. That experience led to his 2013 memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, after which he became “increasingly uninterested in books that didn’t revolve around some real or imaginary act of malice”. For The Family Man, he has to contend with not being able to interview Alex Murdaugh, who remains off-limits through his lawyers, a constraint that becomes part of Lasdun’s interpretation of the case’s convoluted evidence.
When he arrives in Hampton, the Murdaugh seat for more than a century, he is struck by the number of billboards advertising personal injury lawyers and opioid-addiction services. Bill Nettles, the US attorney in South Carolina under President Barack Obama, tells him: “It’s important to understand how isolated this part of the world is. It’s insanely poor. There’s no industry, aside from suing people.” Litigation has become a local economy in its own right, one in which Murdaugh siphoned millions from clients over many years, much of it feeding his own long-standing opioid addiction.
Many of the local inhabitants are unwilling to speak to Lasdun about the Murdaughs. A young gay man with connections to Alex’s elder son Buster is found dead on the side of a road; Murdaugh’s housekeeper dies under mysterious circumstances after falling down a flight of concrete steps. Such incidents helped create what Lasdun describes as “a growing public perception of the Murdaughs as a kind of gothic malignancy spreading destruction over the local populace”.
There are rumours and counter-rumours about the murders. One might have expected Lasdun to probe more deeply into Murdaugh’s earlier life in search of clues, but he is more interested in Murdaugh the opioid addict, a man whose apparently devoted relationship with his wife Maggie was nevertheless complicated by repeated infidelities. What appears to have rattled Murdaugh most was the impending release of his financial records, which had been subpoenaed after his younger son Paul was involved in a boating accident that left a woman dead. Lasdun suggests that the looming exposure of Murdaugh’s financial crimes offers the most plausible explanation for why he might be guilty of the murders.
Ultimately, Lasdun’s book is less an attempt to resolve the Murdaugh case than to inhabit its contradictions. Denied the kind of access Truman Capote had for In Cold Blood (1966), he turns limitation into method, treating gaps in evidence as part of the story itself. The result is a portrait not only of a fallen legal dynasty, but of a mind struggling to impose rational order on a reality that stubbornly refuses to be pinned down. The case remains opaque, and Lasdun’s account is a bravura study of that opacity.
The Family Man
James Lasdun
Jonathan Cape, 432pp, £22
[Further reading: Andy Burnham still has everything to prove]