Books
Feeling through the dark
A new book about the Irish killer Malcolm Macarthur is about as good as true crime gets—in part because it recognises the genre’s limitations
by LUCY SCHOLES
When, in autumn 2020, the journalist and writer Mark O’Connell first visits the Dublin apartment of Malcolm Macarthur—the socialite who served 30 years in prison for the murder of two strangers in 1982—he’s distracted by the fact that both the television and a long, low bookshelf are entirely wrapped in black plastic bin liners. O’Connell asks Macarthur what the deal is. It’s the most efficient way to keep the TV and his books dustfree, Macarthur explains. Surely it would be more straightforward just to dust the room, O’Connell suggests. “I hadn’t realised your line of questioning would be so forensic,” Macarthur replies, entirely without irony.
If you’re familiar with the work of the late American critic Janet Malcolm, New Yorker staff writer and the author of some of the most coolly polished yet penetrating interviews of the 20th and 21st centuries, it’s impossible to read O’Connell’s description of this encounter without hearing echoes of Malcolm’s writing. She was always observer as much as she was listener, paying keen attention to what her interview subjects were doing, and how they were doing it. Take her aside about Ingrid Sischy’s “inefficient” manner of chopping tomatoes in her 1986 profile of the then twentysomething editor of Artforum magazine, who was shaking up the New York art scene. Or her inclusion, in her profile of Eileen Fisher, of the detail about the “bad” cat—who fought with Fisher’s other cats and peed on the carpet—whom the famous fashion designer “expelled” from her house despite the freezing weather outside.