A Thread of Violence
A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder
-
-
3.5 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- €7.99
Publisher Description
From an award-winning author comes a tale of a notorious double-murder, for readers of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, or Emmanuel Carr�re's The Adversary.
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this true crime gem, journalist O'Connell (Notes from an Apocalypse) recounts a year he spent interviewing one of Ireland's most notorious killers. Socialite Malcolm Macarthur came from landed gentry: confidants described him as unfailingly polite and fond of silk bow ties. But in 1982, with his inheritance dwindling, he planned to rob a bank and murdered two people in pursuit of a car and a gun for the task. After pleading guilty, making headlines, and serving almost 30 years in prison, Macarthur was released and went on to a quiet life in Dublin. O'Connell manages a fascinating portrait of his deliberately elusive subject: "There were places he would much rather have been, but he had done what he had done," he writes of Macarthur's attitude toward his time in prison. "The murder had, in a sense, originated in his refusal to relinquish a life of leisurely learning and reading;... in incarceration, he had found something strangely like this freedom." Swirling together dogged reporting with questions about the media's coverage of crime, O'Connell manages a gripping account that casts a skeptical eye on its own genre. Even readers put off by profiles of killers will be piqued.
