A THREAD OF VIOLENCE A STORY OF TRUTH, INVENTION AND MURDER
MARK O'CONNELL
Granta, 288pp, £16.99
Reviewers were unanimous: this true-crime book was outstanding, surpassing its genre limits. Rob Doyle in the Guardian called it something new and dizzying, Borgesian’. O'Connell, he was delighted to discover, had not settled for being a reporter but had become an artist.
The key term all said readers had to understand was ‘gubu’, coined when the Irish Prme Minister, Charles Haughey described Malcom Macarthur's two murders in 1982 as ‘grotesque, unbelievable’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘unprecedented’.
Haughey's government would eventually be brought down by his association with Macarthur, an extravagant Dublin flaneur who had planned a bank raid to prop up his ailing finances during which he brutally murdered two young people.
‘He was a mash-up of Tom Ripley and Jeffrey Epstein’
He was arrested at the penthouse flat of Ireland's attorney general.
O'Connell won Macarthur's trust on his release from jail 30 years later and based his book on their conversations. Ronan Macdonald, The Guardian’s true crime editor, saw the murderer as an avatar from whom the author extracted his under-standing of ‘the darkness and violence that run beneath the surface of many lives’.
For Christopher Benfey in the New York Times, Macarthur was a mash-up of Tom Ripley and Jeffrey Epstein. Nothing he said was either true or untrue.
In analysing him, O'Connell had over-relied on Borgesian labyrinths, but it was a ‘rigorously honest book’ that gave no
