One of the two books we picked to include in our Autumn 2024 box, curated around the theme 'wrong', was A Thread of Violence by Mark O'Connell. It's a great piece of non-fiction writing: journalistic, linguistically precise, free-roaming and as much about the process of trying to write about another human being, particularly one who has committed a heinous crime, as it is about a life gone wrong.
At the heart of the story is Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small Irish estate who, finding himself running out of money, decides to rob a bank, a decision that leads to a brutal double murder. He's a fascinating protagonist: intellectual and willing to examine his life but also apparently living in a fantasy, with no real understanding of what he did or why.
Squaring up to him is Mark O'Connell, an Irish journalist and essayist. O'Connell takes us on a tense journey through the process of how his life crosses paths with Macarthur, his growing obsession with locating Macarthur and getting him to talk, which he famously never has, and then the painstaking job of meeting with him over the course of two years to try to tease out the truth.
We spoke to author Mark O'Connell to find out more.
What was it like to sit in close proximity with Macarthur? Was it ever possible to fully relax? Were there times when you felt afraid of him? Did you find him likeable at any moments during your time talking?
In some sense, the book itself is an attempt to answer this question - the question of what it was like to spend time with him. Because it's a complicated business, with a lot of conflicting and conflicted emotions at play. It was often very frustrating, because Macarthur usually took a long time to get the point of what he was saying, and had a tendency to filibuster and deflect questions. Having to listen to his disquisitions on every topic under the sun was often extremely boring, but even at its most boring, it was often, paradoxically, thrilling - because I knew that everything he said was contributing to the sense of an extraordinary presence.
It provoked a lot of emotions in me - frustration, profound curiosity, empathy, pity, and sometimes even outright anger - but fear was never really a factor. I sometimes found the language he used about the murders chilling in its abstraction, but I never felt personally threatened by him.
Given the fragility of the arrangement - knowing that he might pull the plug at any time - how challenging was it to tread a line between keeping him on board whilst still probing for answers?
I was aware that he could easily have decided to pull the plug at any moment, but it was never that much of a concern for me, perhaps because of sheer complacency.
I knew he relished our conversations on some level - although perhaps 'audiences' might be a better word - and that he wanted them to continue, in his own way, as much as I did. I never felt the need to go in all guns blazing, demanding answers - partly because it would have been counter-productive, and might have caused him to abandon the whole thing, but largely because it's just not my style.
What was your process for interviewing, listening back to sessions, writing and planning your next meeting? Did you have expectations about where you wanted to go or what you might discover? And did you notice details or hear things differently when listening back to the recordings than you were able to take in in the moment?
Mostly, I tried to keep him to covering his story in a basically sequential and chronological manner - childhood, adolescence, university, the years of his life before and after the murders.
I tended to leave a couple of weeks between meetings, ten days at least, because I wanted to give him time and space, and also to give myself time to think through the things he's said and their implications. And I wrote as I went along.
I kept a journal while I was writing which amounts to probably a couple of hundred pages, and that journal is really the raw material of the book. I would go home after our meetings and just write down everything I could remember about them, and the immediate recollections would spiral off into reflections and counter-reflections.
And yes, listening to the recordings was a quite different thing to the conversations themselves. Very often I would find things in there - intonations, evasions, whole asides - that I had missed while we were talking, because my mind was drifting or I was focused on something else, or I was keen to move him on to some other topic. That's always the case in one way or another with the kind of work I do, but it was especially the case with Macarthur.
Macarthur gives the impression of a person who believes he is driven by intellect and reason but he seems actually to be living in a fantasy world where he manages to evade difficult or real feelings. How hard was it to get to the 'real' Macarthur? Did he ever show you any authentic or spontaneous emotions and do you think he feels any real remorse for his victims or understands the reality of what he did?
This is the most painful thing for Macarthur, because really refuses to see himself in this way; he finds it impossible to conceive of himself as an illogical man, driven (like the rest of us, but more so) by forces he is not fully aware of. He is very much living in a fantasy world, in this sense. But at the same time, this is precisely the real Macarthur.
There's a line in the book where I say something like 'a lie was more revealing than a mere truth could ever have been.' And I stand by it. There's a line in John Banville's The Book of Evidence, appropriately, where Freddie Montgomery, who is of course based on Macarthur (or on the idea of him), says 'This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.' I think it's certainly true of Macarthur.
Lots of people from privileged and wealthy backgrounds have unloving and traumatic childhoods but they don't commit murder. In her book The Devil You Know, Dr Gwen Adshead talks about the bicycle lock theory, where contributing factors can be in place but there needs to be a final defining moment that springs the lock and triggers a violent episode. Is it possible to isolate a final trigger that sprang the lock for Macarthur? Might he still have turned back, even after he'd approached Bridie Gargan?
That is such a fascinating question - about such a fascinating book. I read it when I was writing A Thread of Violence, and it informed how I thought about Macarthur and his life. And yes, I think the trigger that sprang the lock was quite simply running out of money.
But of course it wasn't that simple at all: running out of money meant something else, it meant a threat to his sense of himself as a free-floating quasi-aristocrat, as someone who was above the grubby contingencies of earning a living. I think there may have been a deep connection in his mind, too, between anxiety about money and violence, stemming from the incidents he witnessed between his parents as a child.
None of which is to suggest any kind of psychological determinism: he could at any point have turned back. Certainly, after murdering Bridie Gargan, it would have made sense - morally, tactically - to have abandoned the plan for his heist. But he didn't. And there is a vast chasm between the act of killing one person and killing two people.
Presumably Macarthur will have been psychologically assessed as part of his parole but do you know if he was ever diagnosed with a specific mental health issue or issues?
Apparently he was not diagnosed with any condition, although it's hard to say with any certainty because such things are not publicly released. Certainly people, including psychological professionals, have their theories about what is going on with him. But I was always keen to leave that whole discourse out of the book, because I was wary of seeming to explain Macarthur by laying him out on the specimen table with a page from the DSM-5. (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition).
Were you frustrated not to be able to speak to Macarthur’s partner and son? What might they have added to the picture and did he give you any clues about what they think about him or what he did?
Yes, it was one of many frustrations. Brenda Little, his partner (or ex-partner), is a total blank. She has managed to never to have her image shown in the media, or to be interviewed or even doorstepped by any journalist, which seems a pretty extraordinary achievement to me.
I would absolutely love to have spoken to her, but it was a condition of Macarthur's agreeing to speak to me - in fact he felt sure that she would have insisted he stop talking to me if she had known he was doing so.
How did your sessions with Macarthur end? Did you wrap things up once you had enough material or did he call things to a halt? Was it an amicable ending?
I wrapped it up, eventually - although long after the point where the book ends. I would hesitate to call it amicable, because there was a lot of stress and anxiety on Macarthur's part about the effect the publication of the book might have on him, and when it did come out, he was angry about the way I had represented him in its pages. But we are still in touch, and I have told him my door is open if he wants to air his grievances.
Is the Macarthur story anything more than a notorious double murder that captured a nation’s imagination, with an eccentric and elusive character at the centre? Does it have something wider to tell us about class or the criminal justice system, or perhaps how anyone is capable of doing terrible things when life goes wrong and they feel they have lost control?
That's a hard question to answer. I do think it is about much more than this one strange story, though, yes. I think it is, among other things, about the murky and perhaps illusory line between the categories of fiction and non-fiction, between reality and fantasy. I think it's about the unknowability of the truth of another person, and the way that we hide the truth from ourselves. It's about the mysterious roots of violence, and the ethically perilous act of representing it. Perhaps above all, it's about writing. It's a book about itself, in other words.
This interview appeared in our Autumn 2024 Drift + Focus subscriber magazine.