Some five years ago, when he started what would become his current novel, Marlon James was writing a set of novellas that featured lone protagonists. The first work tracked “a hitman from Chicago who’s hired to kill a Jamaican” and served as the Minneapolis-based author’s effort at penning American crime fiction.

“Even back then I knew the Jamaican he tried to kill was involved in an assassination plot,” James says now. “I just didn’t think it was a big deal.”

After generating a good 300 pages, he sought the advice of a friend who informed him that, rather than a series, he was actually writing a novel. Opening in 1976, A Brief History of Seven Killings broaches “everything from the growth and explosion of reggae music to the Bob Marley assassination attempt, to the Cold War, to Henry Kissinger, to Mick Jagger, to Carlos the Jackal”.

A chorus of voices, James notes, “ended up being just the only way I could talk about that year”, and the resulting book presents a polyphonic narrative that addresses Jamaica’s sociopolitical landscape during the late 20th century. Since its release in 2014, the novel, a bustling mix of violence and humour, stream of consciousness and patois, has drawn wide praise, and last week it won the 2015 Booker Prize.

“I’m very grateful for it [the reception],” James says to the Straight, on a stopover in New York days before the announcement. “I know it’s not the easiest book to like. It’s not one of those novels that goes down like a sugar pill.”

Using the December 3, 1976, assassination attempt on Marley, referred to here as “the Singer”, as a springboard, the plot line reveals the minds and motivations of the gunmen, and the gangsters, politicians, CIA operatives, journalists, and other individuals “who one way or another found themselves caught in the middle of it,” James says. “And the ways they dealt with the events and the consequences, which spiralled over the course of nearly 20 years, from 1976 to 1991.”

Marley had been the common thread in the earlier novellas that sparked the project, though James “didn’t really even notice it” as he wrote them. (James, who is 44, grew up in Jamaica, where airwaves “up to the mid ’70s were playing mostly foreign music”, and came to appreciate the reggae icon as an adult. “Sometimes, people abroad have this idea that reggae’s only Bob Marley, so Jamaicans must have been listening to Bob Marley all day, every day. Well, he wasn’t playing on the radio.”)

Of Brief History’s diverse cast, he especially enjoyed writing the tenacious Nina Burgess, who witnesses the shooters fleeing the Singer’s residence, and Josey Wales, a gangster with far-reaching influence who participates in the hit. “In the ghetto there is no such thing as peace,” Josey observes in patois. “There is only this fact. Your power to kill me can only be stop by my power to kill you.”

“Josey is in a lot of ways the centre of the novel,” James says. “To write a character that is responsible for so much bloodshed—he’s basically the villain of the story, in those really superficial terms—but to still give him humanity, I think people, in a weird way, as much as they don’t want to, end up liking him.”

To convey the era’s hope and furor, James called on his own memories, as well as music, academic studies, and “people who know people who told me a story”. Poring over period journalism, he was struck by “how biased and warped, and sometimes corrupt, the reporting was. And that was really interesting in context, because I’m trying to write a story where I’m tying everything together,” he says. “The original source material was really good for giving perspective. It was thoroughly unreliable in terms of giving me an accurate portrait of the time.”

While brutality and history also shaped John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women, his 2005 and 2009 novels, his intentions and processes with all three are dissimilar. “I’m not interested in a sustained message throughout,” he says, “because I get bored.”

At nearly 700 pages, Brief History is a showcase of James’s stylistic dynamite and never suffers from its scope or ambition. Relating the characters’ pursuit of power and autonomy, amid civil unrest and drug trafficking, gave James the chance to further explore his fascination with unanswered questions.

“That’s one of the reasons why this story appealed to me,” he says, “because so many of the main characters don’t exist. They could’ve existed, and they probably did, but we don’t know anything about them. There’s no history of the boys who tried to kill Marley. There’s none. There’s rumour, there’s conjecture, there’s gossip, and we know about the ones who survived, but the other guys we don’t really know anything about.

“I like to go into stories that history can’t cover or history isn’t interested in covering,” he continues. “And I think that’s one of the things that the novelist can do that the biographer cannot.…The novelist can illuminate the life and show the dimensions and the contradictions and the growth and the tragedies and the pains of the people who had to endure history—who helped cause it, who may even help change it—that we don’t know about.”

Marlon James will be a guest at two Vancouver Writers Fest events, both of them on Friday (October 23). You can also meet James at a free public book-signing on Thursday (October 22). See the festival's website for details.