THE FAMILY MAN: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, by James Lasdun
When 19-year-old Paul Murdaugh drunkenly crashed his boat into Archers Creek Bridge, in the South Carolina Lowcountry, at around 2 a.m. on Feb. 24, 2019, killing a female passenger, he set in motion a chain of events so horrific that they would shock the entire country. Two years later, as Paul awaited trial on charges that included causing death by boating under the influence, he was murdered alongside his mother, Maggie, shot at their family’s hunting estate.
The gunman, as James Lasdun relays in “The Family Man,” his new book on the Murdaugh saga, was Alex Murdaugh — Paul’s father, Maggie’s husband and the scion of an aristocratic legal dynasty in South Carolina’s rural Hampton County.
For months, the story dominated the media. As Cory Fleming, a lawyer convicted of conspiring with Alex in a related financial crime, put it, “Everybody in the United States of America has an opinion on this case.” More than 10 books about the Murdaughs have been published to date, including Valerie Bauerlein’s pacey New York Times best seller, “The Devil at His Elbow.” By the time Lasdun arrived in Hampton County, he found some locals reluctant to talk: “Netflix and HBO had swept through the area, signing people to exclusives.” In 2023, Netflix aired a two-season docuseries, and last year Hulu released a drama based on the case. Lasdun’s own book grew out of his coverage of the case for The New Yorker. What more can there be left to say?
A novelist, poet and short-story writer, Lasdun notes at the outset that true crime — a genre he knows something about, having published a taut and horrifying memoir of being stalked — is “premised on destruction, dysfunction, malice, misery and loss.” Given this damning assessment, and Lasdun’s professed ambivalence about “the implications” of exploiting such material for personal gain, it’s a shame that he goes no further in discussing his qualms.
“The Family Man” does not pretend to reveal new evidence about the murders or to propose a different theory of the case. Instead, it tells the story of the precipitate fall of the house of Murdaugh in staggering, occasionally overwhelming detail. Alex had stolen vast sums from clients and embezzled from his own law firm, ostensibly to fund an opioid addiction so severe that it was costing him thousands of dollars a week. When Paul’s boat crash threatened to expose his financial crimes, Alex apparently saw no other option but to murder the wife and son he apparently adored. As Lasdun writes, “It will have occurred to him by now that the pain of bereavement will in fact be so shattering that no one will believe that he himself could have been the cause of it. Its very genuineness will be the proof of his innocence.”
While Lasdun has little choice but to accept the bizarre facts of the case, he struggles to come to terms with them. The killing of one’s own children is so unusual that, with the exception of a few recent examples — Lasdun cites Emmanuel Carrère’s “The Adversary” but could also have mentioned Michael Finkel’s “True Story” — he is forced to look to Greek mythology for comparisons: “Even in myth, where most of the passions that govern human life find expression, it is rare, showing up most famously as the ultimate revenge on a faithless spouse (Medea) or the high price of appeasing an offended god (Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter), neither of which sheds much light on the Murdaugh case.”
What “The Family Man” does illuminate to devastating effect is the way the case is emblematic of the direst aspects of contemporary American life: opioid addiction, litigiousness, brazen mendacity (and its bedfellow, gullibility), as well as guns. Lasdun refers to the Murdaughs’ gun collection, which they kept in a doorless cabinet, as a “military-grade arsenal.”
Like the country itself, the South portrayed in “The Family Man” is an unromanticized region of stark contrasts: people both very rich and very poor; fairy-tale landscapes straight out of a children’s adventure yarn — “vast marshes with their hallucinatory color scheme of emerald green spartina grass and purplish black needlerush” — alongside dumping grounds for medical waste. Not since “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” have I read so vividly wrought an account of the South.
At times, Lasdun lays on his meticulous research a little too thickly; I would have welcomed a dramatis personae to keep track of his many characters. But when the book reaches a crescendo in its stunning final chapters, the elaborate detail becomes the foundation for his chilling distillation of Alex’s crimes. Even so, residual doubts plague Lasdun to the end: “Regardless of the embezzlements, the idea of a person coldly murdering his wife and son on the off chance that it might buy him time to straighten out his affairs still made no sense to me.”
A lesser writer might lay the blame on the all-purpose abstraction of evil, but “The Family Man” considers seemingly every possible avenue toward a more satisfactory explanation. Lasdun understands that evil and stupidity can be hard to tell apart. Worn down by the years he has spent chronicling the case, he concedes that there is “no option, now, but to confront the stark horror of a seemingly loving father murdering his wife and son in the hope of staving off his legal and financial troubles.”
THE FAMILY MAN: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh | By James Lasdun | Norton | 417 pp. | $31.99
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