“Murder is the worst kind of pornography”

“Murder is the worst kind of pornography” is Michael Noonan’s judgment on violence as the ultimate exercise of the will to take what one wants. In the closing reflection, the phrase becomes both a moral principle and a reckoning with how fiction can turn a person’s death into a convenient plot device.

Meaning and Context

Michael connects murder to the idea of doing whatever one wants, carried to its most extreme conclusion. His formulation treats violence not as a neutral mechanism for resolving a story’s difficulties, but as a choice with moral weight. The expression’s force lies in that escalation: an entitlement to act without restraint ends in the destruction of another person.

He sets this conviction against a familiar convention of popular fiction: when a plot reaches a dilemma that seems difficult to resolve, a sudden murder can provide an easy way out. Recalling that device, he rejects its apparent convenience. Even imaginary murders, he argues, should be taken seriously, rather than used as disposable solutions to narrative problems.

Mattie’s Death and the Narrator’s Reckoning

The principle is sharpened by Michael’s memory of Mattie’s death. He recalls holding her as she died, still calling for her daughter. The memory makes the abstract claim personal: the death that fiction might treat as an expedient turn in the plot was, in his experience, an irreversible loss with a human relationship at its center.

Michael admits that he had written similar deaths in at least two earlier books and recognizes that popular fiction is full of comparable examples. That recognition sickens him. His condemnation therefore reaches back to his own work as well as outward to a broader storytelling convention; he can no longer regard a conveniently arranged death as merely an effective device.

Significance in the Closing Reflection

The expression appears as part of Michael’s account of why he has stopped writing after completing his memoir. He describes his creative faculty as a machine that is not broken but has gone quiet, and identifies Mattie’s death as one reason for that silence. The distinction matters: the instrument of writing remains intact, but his willingness to use it as before has changed.

The phrase does not offer a solution to grief or restore Michael’s ability to write. Instead, it marks a limit he chooses to observe: fiction may depict murder, but he believes it must not make the act morally weightless. His final reflections place that conviction beside his decision not to destroy the dreams associated with his past, leaving the work of remembering—and the responsibility of telling—unresolved but deliberate.