A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder

"A Thread of Violence is about a man called Malcolm Macarthur who murdered two people in Dublin in the 1980s. He was sentenced to a life term but had been released and was living in Dublin again when Mark O’Connell thought of writing a book about him. O’Connell met him, befriended him and interviewed him over a long period. It’s an extremely reflective book—about what it means to commune with a murderer but also to translate his life into a story, and whether this is to honor him, to make him more important than he should be or even to exploit him. It’s about the difficulties—moral, emotional, imaginative—of writing a book like this. It’s extraordinarily acute and thoughtful about all those processes and the dangers as well as the allure of this kind of work. John Banville wrote a novel, partly inspired by his case, called The Book of Evidence . I’m always interested in the way that violent acts, bizarre happenings and sensational stories are created in part by the culture in which they take place, but then go on to shape that culture: they feed back in and become part of our stereotypes, of tropes, of story arcs. This book explores that, too. It is. O’Connell is charting the unfolding of the murders and their origins, trying to trace where they came from, what the motive was, and what shaped this man. But the reader also turns the pages to find out about the relationship between the writer and the murderer. The drama arises partly from the crime story but also from the encounter between these two men. How will it end? What forms of betrayal, regret or intimacy will emerge from it?"