The extraordinary case of Malcolm MacArthur

Non-fiction tells you what happened, fiction affirms the kinds of things that happen. According to Aristotle, anyway. So while journalism seeks out unlikely events, fiction creates pleasing inevitabilities. The problem as it pertains to our brave narrative podcasters is that they have to straddle the two worlds: their material must be interesting and unusual, but their final story should have the poetic coherence of good old unreality. They have to turn ‘some things that happened’ into ‘a kind of thing that happens’. Otherwise it’s all evidence and no charge, each event indistinguishable in its randomness from a bolt of lightning.

Obscene:The Dublin Scandal has classy production values, a great, likeable narrator in Adrian Dunbar, high-profile talking heads such as Colm Toibin and Fintan O’Toole and a post-Succession theme tune of cellos weeping over a loose, reverbed drumkit that promises clever twists and high-concept suspense. It tells a story so brightly freaked with improbability that it inspired a new acronym in Irish politics: Gubu. Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented. Yet after its seven grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented episodes were through, I found myself wondering if the writers themselves could explain to me what the story really meant, let alone why it all happened.

The story in a nutshell: one glorious summer day a young nurse was brutally murdered in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Shortly afterwards a farmer was shot in the face with his own gun. Eyewitness reports confirmed that both killings were the work of one man: a plummy Anglo-Irish sort in a beige V-neck and bow tie. Not bad looking either, with his cresting sweep of tight black curls, if you could overlook the bloodstains on his shirt. His name was Malcolm MacArthur, and he soon became the subject of the largest manhunt in Irish history.