“A Brief History

of Seven Killings,” by Marlon James (Riverhead Books, 688 pages)

DAYTON, Ohio — Decades after Bob Marley’s death, the music of the Jamaican reggae star retains its potency. Struck down by cancer at the age of 36, his legend keeps growing.

Marlon James has written a novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” that was inspired by a dramatic episode in Marley’s life.

In a recent interview, the author told of the incident that became his lodestone for this ambitious, sprawling work of fiction.

James was a young boy in Jamaica when a startling event occurred. He explained that “the novel begins in 1976. It’s two days before Bob Marley was about to do a peace concert in Kingston. 1976 in Jamaica was particularly violent. It was an election year, the different sides; left wing, right wing, were against each other in tensions that just got more and more violent.”

He continued: “In the Kingston ghetto where Bob Marley came from, Trenchtown, there was almost total upheaval. There’s drugs, gang violence, there’s war over territory … in response to all that Bob Marley had this idea of a peace concert in Kingston; free, open to the public. Hopefully it would ease tensions.

“But two days before the concert a bunch of men, some of them actually just boys, burst into his home, jumped through the gates, blocked the entrance and just started shooting. They broke into the house and shot Bob Marley in the chest, they shot his wife …his manager … some members of his band got shot. But miraculously nobody died.

“The men disappeared …and it became this sort of dramatic blip in the story of Bob Marley and the story of Jamaica. Nobody really talks about it. We know a little bit about what happened to the men and boys who tried to kill him …the boys kind of disappeared from history. One reason I call it ‘a Brief History’ is that their histories are pretty brief. The novel isn’t brief but their appearances in it are.”

He concluded: “The novel follows not just what happened to the killers but how the afterlife of these killers stretched all the way from Kingston in 1976 to the Bronx in 1991 and the people who got caught up in the legacy of this event. The event itself took merely 10 minutes yet the consequences went on for nearly 20 years.”

In the author’s acknowledgments at the end of the book he describes an issue he had to resolve: “I had a narrative, even a few pages, but still not quite a novel. The problem was that I couldn’t tell whose story it was. Draft after draft, page after page, character after character, and still no through line, no narrative spine, nothing.”

Eventually he made a realization. “I had a novel, and it was right in front of me all that time”; it “is a novel that will be driven only by voice.”