A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder
Mark O’Connell
In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland’s Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland’s history.
Mark O’Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O’Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk.
As the two men circle one another, O’Connell is pushed into a confrontation with his own narrative: what does it mean to write about a murderer?
Mark O’Connell is an award-winning Irish writer. He is the author of To Be a Machine, which won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, as well as Notes From an Apocalypse, which was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
At what age did you know you wanted to become a writer?
In my late teens, I began to have some vague sense of myself as being some kind of writer. It wasn’t until my twenties that I started writing regularly, though, and I was in my thirties by the time the prospect of any kind of career started to take shape.
What was your favourite childhood book?
So many! But the ones that most captured my imagination were CS Lewis’s Narnia books. When I think of myself reading as a child, I think of those books.
Which is your favourite book of recent years?
An almost impossible question to answer. But I’ll go with the first thing that comes to mind: I think Ted Chiang is one of the greatest living writers, and his last collection Exhalation is a work of genius.
What three books would you take to your Desert Island?
It’s hard to imagine three better books to read as I died alone of malnutrition and boredom than Beckett’s trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable.
What is your ‘if you don’t like this, you can’t be my friend’ book?
I don’t tend to bring such stern criteria to bear on my social life, but if I did it would probably be Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.
Who or what have been your most important influences?
The real answer is probably “everything I’ve ever read”, but in the interest of brevity I’ll just throw a few out there: Jorge Luis Borges, Annie Dillard, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and Emmanuel Carrère. And in a way that has less to do with writing per se than with how I think about the world, about myself and other people––though I’m not sure that’s even a meaningful distinction––I would also have to give a shout out to the big dog, Sigmund Freud.
Which of the other shortlisted titles are you most excited to read?
If I hadn’t already read and loved The Bee Sting, I’d be excited to read that. Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap sounds amazing, and as an Anne Enright fan of long standing I’m very eager to read The Wren, the Wren, too.
If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?
I have no idea. Whatever it was, I probably wouldn’t be happy doing it, so I’d hope it would at least be something lucrative.
