Mark O’Connell’s Intimate Portrait of a Murderer

There’s a moment midway through Mark O’Connell’s latest book, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, in which O’Connell is lounging on his young daughter’s bed shortly before her bedtime. He’s watching her thumb through her baby pictures on his phone when the phone begins vibrating. The pictures disappear and the name Macarthur appears onscreen. O’Connell takes the phone from his daughter and allows it to ring out before handing it back to her.

The caller was Malcolm Macarthur, a man who had spent three decades in jail for double murder, and whose life and likeness the Irish novelist John Banville had used as the basis for the protagonist of three of his novels. O’Connell knew these novels intimately—he had written his dissertation on Banville’s fiction. He’d quite literally spent thousands of hours thinking, reading, and writing about the fictionalized version of the man who was now calling him.

Macarthur was calling, as he occasionally did, for a chat, or to clarify a detail he had previously provided O’Connell, who was interviewing him for the book he was writing on Macarthur. O’Connell is unsettled, but his daughter is oblivious. The moment’s purity has been tainted by the intrusion.

“There was this strange sense of the subject seeping into my life,” O’Connell explained over Zoom, from his home in Dublin. O’Connell, 44, is thoughtful when he speaks, occasionally running a hand through his shock of greying hair. When we spoke, it was still several weeks away from publication day and he seemed calmly concerned about how his subject would interpret the book—itself an interpretation of Macarthur’s life and crimes—and how that might further complicate their already awkward relationship.

“If anything,” he says with a look of genuine surprise, “my relationship has become even stranger since I stopped interviewing him.” I get the distinct impression that O’Connell couldn’t have imagined, when he first began the book over three years ago, that he would still be speaking to Macarthur several months after he finished it. “It’s the most complicated relationship I’ve ever had.”

*

O’Connell was born in 1979 in Kilkenny, a small city in south-eastern Ireland, a hundred or so miles from Dublin. Born into a family of pharmacists (his brother runs the pharmacy founded by his grandfather), O’Connell