The central figure of The Family Man, the lawyer Alex Murdaugh (pronounced ‘Murdock’), spends his life getting implicated in so many heinous, melodramatic crimes that he seems cobbled together by a cabal of tabloid and commercial publishers, crime podcasters and providers of big budget cinematic sleaze. Memorably referred to by psychopathologists and public prosecutors as a ‘family annihilator’ (imagine a little bit of Medea, a little bit of the Menendez brothers and a whole lot of Oedipus Rex), he was arrested in 2021 for slaughtering his wife Maggie and their youngest son Paul with the same sort of high-tech military weaponry that he enjoyed wielding around his family compound to hunt hogs, and which visitors often found lying randomly about his home and gardens.  He even gave some of the guns nicknames.

Belonging to the fourth generation of a celebrated (and scandal-prone) South Carolina family, Murdaugh was charismatic, well-liked and extremely successful at litigating settlements for his clients. At the same time he was involved in decades of rampant illegality – embezzling from those same clients, fixing juries, evidence tampering and spending millions of dollars on opioids which he devoured himself or sold to fellow Carolinians and/or international drug cartels. (One of the many unresolved mysteries of this absorbing book is what Murdaugh did with all those millions in drugs.) In other words, Murdaugh may have achieved his first notoriety as a family annihilator, but he deserved to be recognised for much, much more. In fact he was such a successful and even popular dissembler that these other crimes weren’t discovered until police began investigating the murder of his wife and son.

When Murdaugh wasn’t committing crimes, he was apologising for them, even while committing further crimes

In many ways, Murdaugh is the perfect subject for James Lasdun’s crime investigation. An excellent writer of short stories and novels (notably The Horned Man and The Fall Guy),Lasdun has shown a special affection for a sort of middle-class Oxbridge youth who’s incapable of seeing himself as others see him – a Ripleyesque individual who makes up his own rules as he goes along and believes nobody else knows how deeply unpleasant he is. Murdaugh is almost an inversion of these anti-heroes – superficially charming and ruthlessly manipulative of both strangers and family, and someone who so successfully masks his repellent inner nature that his crimes grow increasingly brazen and unhinged.

Unlike Truman Capote or Norman Mailer, Lasdun doesn’t develop a relationship with this awful protagonist but keeps tabs on him from behind the bushes of smart, objective third-party reportage – detailed court transcripts, police investigations – and his own interviews with Murdaugh’s friends and associates. He also manages to keep a clear narrative track of Murdaugh’s various crimes and possible crimes – such as when, shortly after the murder of his wife and son, he hired a relative to shoot him in the head on a quiet country road in order (he claims) to provide his surviving son with the insurance money. (Miraculously, and quite accidentally, he survived with only minor injuries.)

When Murdaugh wasn’t committing crimes, he was apologising for them – often profusely – even in the midst of committing further crimes, with the result of, yes, more apologies. The most unsettling vision of him comes near the end of his trial for financial fraud, after he sits listening through days of testimony by family members and former clients (many of them quite poor) whom he stole from. He responds with hours of drippingly insincere apologies – making him seem like an annihilator of human patience more than anything:

I am so sorry that I destroyed my family’s reputation with these terrible things that I have done. I am so sorry that my actions that I am pleading guilty to here today somehow made people on social media and in the media think that it’s okay to falsely attack two of the three best men that I’ve ever known, and that’s my father and my grandfather …

Sitting in the public seats, Lasdun describes the performance with neither sympathy nor contempt:

On it went, remorse, pride, protestations of love, the superlatives heaped on his nearest and dearest, which had the effect of suggesting that he, too, would have been one of these paragons had he not been too proud to get help with his addiction. The restlessness in the courtroom turned to an increasingly bridling impatience. One of the prosecuting attorneys began conspicuously thumbing her phone. It was beyond unseemly for the victims to be subjected to this torrent of words that had nothing at all to do with them, and you could practically hear people wondering why the judge was allowing it.

The Family Man – initially begun as a series of articles for the New Yorker – might seem somewhat belated after two miniseries on the same story from Netflix and HBO, not to mention endless news coverage and several one-shot cable adaptations. But with Murdaugh’s recent successful appeal of his murder conviction, the book does what none of these other versions did: make clear how impenetrable the character of this man and his crimes remain – especially when he’s apologising for them.