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

Every once in a while the universe makes it so that you read one book that prepares you for another one. A couple of months ago, I read Janet Malcom's intricate, thoughtful meditation or reporting and interviewing, "The Journalist and the Murderer." It's well-nigh impossible not to think of that book while reading Mark O'Connell's "A Thread of Violence."

O'Connell describes to the reader how he contrived to bump into, and then establish a relationship with Malcom Macarthur, perhaps modern Ireland's most infamous murderer. In 1982, Macarthur murdered a nurse and a young farmer as part of a preposterous scheme to hold up a bank. He was later found in the private apartment of a friend, a minister of the government. The crimes themselves show more were brutal, but the story is, in a sense, as weird as that summary makes it sound. Macarthur, an arty aristocratic dilettante, was running out of money and hatched his scheme in part because he had never held a job. It seems that he decided that if the IRA could rob banks, he could rob one, too. One of the investigating officers perceptively called Macarthur's actions "a frenzy of tomfoolery." The fact that he never thought to remove his signature bowtie does not really say much for Macarthur's relationship with reality.

O'Connell is good at describing Macarthur's background and how it might have contributed to his crime. It's fair to say that growing up in an emotionally cold environment with a possibly abusive father did little for Macarthur's development. He's also good at describing why this incident shocked Ireland -- a small, relatively safe country -- so much. But -- getting back to Janet Malcom -- we see O'Connell wrestle with the same questions that Joe McGinnis did when he wrote "Fatal Vision" about potential murderer Jeffrey R. MacDonald. O'Connell is clued into Macarthur's verbal evasions and various ellisons, but he also wants to keep him talking and is keenly aware that Macarthur, a free man but a social pariah, would like somebody to talk to. O'Connell also senses that, under most circumstances, it wouldn't be unthinkable that he might enjoy Macarthur's company, at least for a while. As McGinnis did, O'Connell struggles to keep his personal feelings separate from his professional identity, but hits a wall when, as always, the interview process slowly devolves into rote repetition. As Malcolm noted, humans are complex, but they're often unimaginative when they tell their own stories. O'Connell knows what he's got, though: the first real look that the Irish public have ever gotten at a particularly notorious murderer and, by and large, his book succeeds. "A Thread of Violence" gives us a good idea of who Malcolm Macarthur is, offers more than plausible rationales for why he did what he did, and, perhaps most importantly, comes to a halt before it gets too repetitive or it is taken over completely by its own subject. Recommended to both j-school students, true crime fans, and lovers of quality narrative nonfiction. show less

GUBU—an acronym for "grotesque, unusual, bizarre, and unprecedented"—is a term that entered the Irish cultural lexicon in the 1980s in the wake of a series of horrific crimes that almost brought down the government of the time. Malcolm MacArthur—a bow-tie-sporting, would-be-intellectual with an Anglo-Irish accent and a lifestyle that outstretched his means—murdered two people as part of a cock-eyed bank robbery scheme, but his arrest in the home of Ireland's then Attorney General put paid to that. The fall-out from all of this created a media sensation, so much so that even though I wasn't alive at the time of the murders I do remember hearing about them growing up.

In A Thread of Violence, Mark O'Connell tries to both unpack show more what happened in the summer of 1982 and, through a series of conversations with MacArthur, to come to a better understanding of why he did what he did. In showing the contexts which shaped MacArthur's life and the public response to his crimes, O'Connell is successful; in his grapplings with MacArthur himself, he is less so. MacArthur's aesthetic quirks and the faded glamour of his landed gentry background helped to give his case a sordid allure—as O'Connell points out more than once, no one would have fixated on what happened so much if MacArthur had been from the Dublin inner city—and a sense that there must be something complex, sophisticated, multi-layered there to figure out. But I don't think it's that hard to understand what happened, at least on an intellectual level: MacArthur was raised with an over-weening sense of entitlement and class privilege, and when he no longer had the money to enable the life of leisure he felt he deserved, he lashed out in anger. Bridie Gargan and Donal Dunne just happened to be the people in his way when he did so. Sociopaths aren't that complicated, no matter how much pop culture might push us to believe otherwise. MacArthur is fairly banal, but O'Connell doesn't seem able to let himself accept that.

Then again, he does have a book to sell.

I might be somewhat less cynical about that aspect of things if O'Connell's musings on the interconnections between fiction and reality, and the impossibility of truly knowing or reconstructing things which happened in the past hadn't been so... well, at the "bright undergraduate" level. Critiquing the Rankean wie es eigentlich gewesen ist stance isn't exactly what you'd call a new stance at this point. show less

There is a plotline in the movie Broadcast News I kept thinking about as I listened to this. For those who have not seen the movie (you should, it is really good though a bit dated) the action takes place in the DC newsroom of one of the big networks. Holly Hunter is a scrupulous, rule following, brilliant but very black and white producer. William Hurt is the very handsome, not so smart but very dedicated reporter/anchor everyone loves, and Albert Brooks is the intrepid field reporter, smartest guy in every room, diligent, brave, yet still somehow a bit of a nebish. In this storyline Hunter learns that Hurt (with whom she is romantically involved) had forced himself to cry so the cameraperson could film it and the editor could flash to show more him crying as this woman tells her story of being raped to pull at the viewer's heartstrings. He makes the story about him. Hunter goes ballistic because a cardinal rule of reporting is that it is about the subject, never about the reporter. The reporter is there to bring out the information and be invisible and the audience can decide how they feel themselves.

I related this bit of film summary because, though this book is a very good piece of literary true crime for the most part, it is the author, Mark O'Connell who is at the center of it rather than the murderer Malcolm Macarthur. Macarthur murdered two people in 1982 and was released just before Covid lockdown. At the beginning O'Connell shares many reasons for his fascination with Macarthur. He goes on for a bit about Macarthur's "aristocratic forehead" his foppish hair, his bearing and gait and how as a result Macarthur does not look like a murderer. Really? Do murderers have darker skin? Do they have the aged skin of a laborer who works outside? Are they poorly dressed due to poverty? I do understand that O'Connell is grappling with the idea that murderers may look and act like him. Trinity educated men with money and consequent leisure (this is a central topic throughout the book) who travel through life acquiring knowledge to no particular end and consorting with other men of this ilk. It is a potentially interesting topic for a memoir. I recently read The Best Minds which I loved, and it addresses some similar issues (though it is a very different book and story in all other ways.) Both authors are asking "Why did this person who is so much like me do this when I could never do so. The Best Minds was, in large part" clearly a memoir though it is blended with other genres. This though is not a memoir. O'Connell does not share enough of himself for this to work as a memoir, and too much of himself to be reportage. I know that lines between genres get greyer and greyer all the time, often to wonderful effect. Here this was done to more varying effect. Because O'Connell leans into his own life so hard in the first 25% of the book I did not feel like the book was about the crime or its impact at all, until suddenly it was. After that first quarter O'Connell began to blend self examination with the examination of the crime, its victims (not just those murdered, but all the others who felt its impact) and the murderer himself.

I liked that for the portions where O'Connell is actually talking with Macarthur he did keep that journalistic distance. He made clear that his observations were his observations. They were not fact, but rather perception. This is something that is very rarely done in true crime, and one of the reasons I rarely read true crime. One other thing I liked was that all discussion of the crime itself did maintain distance. True crime is often revoltingly lurid. It tries to put you there as the crimes happen. Firstly, who wants to be there? Secondly, no one knows what happened in most crimes, if there were witnesses there would be little mystery to write about. True crime books often tell you what the victims are thinking and feeling in the moment. No one knows that though. What the reader is usually getting in these depictions is what some true crime enthusiast made up for their "entertainment. ." None of that happens here. O'Connell is scrupulous about including only fact, and then clearly saying that his perception of the event is X and he thinks that because of A.B, and C, but he can't know for sure. I loved that approach.

I need to mention one thing -- O'Connell's interviews with Macarthur happened during Covid lockdown. It is very much a part of the story that both the author and the subject were starved for company and industry. This deep dive with a man whom O'Connell, seemingly quite rightly, often compares to Tom Ripley would likely not have happened in any other time. (The story here is quite different from Talented Mr. Ripley, but Macarthur's cold wholly logical inhuman approach to achieving a set end, and the tragically illogical results that follow are strikingly similar to the inner Ripley.)

In the end, O'Connell gets to some truly universal questions, some existential questions, and I found those questions very compelling. It is all pretty metaphysical. If the tree falls and you don't see it or hear it it still happened, but not to you. O'Connell is brilliant, interesting, and so thoughtful about the topic and his prose is just phenomenal.

I started out annoyed and a little bored with this book but was eventually drawn into it. I came to understand why O'Connell approached it this way. I wish he would have laid out the story a bit more clearly in the beginning and fitted in bits of info about himself rather than introducing into the text huge chunks of information about himself at the start, but the book ended up being an extremely thoughtful and compelling read that led me to think about many things including what happens if we bifurcate basic humanity from efficient problem-solving. (Something most of us do all the time and will do more with the rise of generative AI.) Recommended for sure. show less

In this 2023 book, Mark O’Connell, a Dublin based nonfiction author, presents the story of one of Ireland’s most notorious murderers. Malcolm Macarthur was an Irish aristocrat who, in 1982, finding his inheritance was drying up, decided to rob a bank. To do so, he needed both a car and a gun. In the process of stealing the vehicle, he brutally attacked its owner, a young nurse sunbathing in a Dublin park, with a hammer. She later died from her injuries. Then, when he answered an ad for a farmer selling a shotgun, he used the weapon to kill him with a blast to the face. Soon after, he met an acquaintance who just happened to be the country’s attorney general. Not knowing that Macarthur was involved in these crimes, he offered him a show more place to stay in his flat. This was where the police tracked Macarthur down shortly afterwards. Because of his involvement, the attorney general was forced to resign, and the resulting fallout later brought down the government as well.

Given a life sentence, Macarthur spent the next thirty years behind bars. Because of good behavior, he was released from prison in 2012. During the COVID-19 pandemic, O’Connell encountered Macarthur on a Dublin street and struck up a conversation with him. This led to a series of interviews during which the author learns of Macarthur’s early life and what led to the murders. Throughout their talks, Macarthur is reluctant to discuss the killings, asserting that his criminal episode was an aberration. While regretful of what he did, he offers no apologies. In telling Macarthur’s side of the story, O’Connell shows where it differs from the known facts of the case. This is a fascinating look at how such a cultured individual, with a mixture of truths and inventions, deals with the aftermath of his crimes. Insightful and disturbing, A Thread of Violence is a portrait of a man who readily admits he murdered two people, while at the same time disassociating himself from what he considers an anomaly from his true personality. show less

This is not a story of the murders but a story of the quirky man who committed the murders and the author's obsession with him.

Malcolm Macarthur és l'assassí més inquietant de la història d'Irlanda. I potser també el més fascinant; el que més tinta ha fet córrer i el més indesxifrable. Han passat quaranta anys dels seus homicidis, i en fa deu que Macarthur va sortir de la presó; en tot aquest temps, el mite d'intel·lectual salvatge que envolta l'assassí no ha parat de créixer, però fins avui ningú havia aconseguit accedir-hi, fer-lo parlar i treure a la llum els clarobscurs de la seva «versió». Mark O'Connell aconsegueix guanyar-se la confiança de Macarthur i entrar durant mesos al cau del monstre, que arriba a tractar l'escriptor com un amic. N'ha sortit una narració magnètica i una reflexió ètica impecable sobre les relacions entre show more veritat i ficció, bondat i maldat; sobre la necessitat i els perills de baixar a les tenebres de la ment humana. PREMI A MILLOR LLIBRE DE NO-FICCIÓ DEL 2023 ALS IRISH BOOK AWARDS «No s'oblida en setmanes. L'estranya relació entre el periodista i l'assassí continua el llegat de Janet Malcolm i de Truman Capote» —Caitlin Doughty «Del panteó d'escriptors fascinats per criminals, Mark O'Connell ha demostrat ser-ne un dels més brillants» —Emmanuel Carrère «Una fita excepcional, i una contribució valuosa als intents literaris d'entendre la propensió humana a la maldat» —The Guardian show less