When interviewing an exceedingly dangerous criminal, it’s best to alert loved ones to your whereabouts. Journalist and “Say Nothing” author Patrick Radden Keefe thought that would be prudent as he planned to meet one of the sources for his new book. He warned a director with the International Crisis Group and an expert in private intelligence — two of his best friends — as well as a former U.S. attorney, who put a pin on Keefe’s phone.
But all went well, and Keefe kept speaking with the man, Andy Baker, keeping in mind that he had been convicted of blackmail and credibly accused of far worse.
On one occasion near Bristol, England, Baker presented Keefe with a mysterious wrapped parcel, rectangular and light. Keefe tore open the paper. It was an oil painting in the style of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” but instead of two anonymous figures at the bar, it showed Baker tucked under Keefe’s outstretched arm, both men grinning widely.
Keefe, embarrassed, said it would be difficult to transport to the United States. But it wasn’t a gift. Baker asked Keefe to sign it. He wanted it for himself.
Keefe told me this story. It is the kind he loves because, as he put it, it shifts the ground under your feet; you end up somewhere different than you started. I like it because it conveys a simple truth. With a new book, “London Falling,” out next week, Keefe is as famous and admired on both sides of the law as is possible for a magazine writer in 2026.
He has modeled for J. Crew, appeared as himself in HBO’s “Industry,” and is, according to David Remnick, his boss for well over a decade at The New Yorker, a “relentless, relentless reporter and a storyteller of the highest order.” He is one of the last household names in nonfiction at a time when the entire future of the enterprise — writing — is up in the air.
Keefe, who turns 50 in May, has written hit after hit, pursuing the themes that fascinate him most. In the preface to “Rogues,” an anthologized collection of his magazine stories, Keefe provided a list of those abiding preoccupations. Crime and corruption are on there, as are secrets and lies, and the bonds of family.
Conspicuously absent from Keefe’s list is ambition. Yet his work often focuses on driven people who in some way fail spectacularly; whole books, including “Empire of Pain,” his exegesis of the family behind OxyContin, and now “London Falling,” are animated by this pattern. He specializes in Icarus stories, moral tragedies that hinge on hubris. Read enough of them and it can start to feel as if Keefe is writing warnings to himself about the danger of success.
In February, he and I had lunch. I was asking him about “London Falling,” what in his own makeup had drawn him to the story.
Like many good reporters, Keefe is adept at deflecting attention, pushing it back toward his interlocutor or onto some subject of mutual interest. He resists psychological probing. “I’m like a computer that reboots every morning,” he said on another occasion. “No matter how bad a day has been, I wake up in the morning full of optimism.”
Patrick Keefe — he fastened Radden to his byline later — began traversing worlds at an early age.
He grew up in the Ashmont section of Dorchester, a diverse, working-class Boston neighborhood. His father, Frank Keefe, was one of Gov. Michael Dukakis’ top Cabinet officials. His mother, Jennifer Radden, is a philosopher of psychiatry who focuses on individual agency in the context of mental disorder.
After graduation, Keefe left his hometown for Columbia University and fell in with a group of culturally omnivorous humanities majors who knew by their junior year that their tall, talkative friend wanted to write for The New Yorker.
One was Martin Eisner, who remembers Keefe telling the same stories again and again to different groups of people, “trying out new angles on things.” A choirboy in his youth, Keefe is comfortable with his voice. He would read aloud long passages to his friends, a habit he continues to this day. He still reads a rough draft of each article on speakerphone to his mother and father.
For a long time, those drafts were not fated to be New Yorker stories. He wrote essays for the now defunct Legal Affairs and later “Mad Men” recaps for Slate. He met Justyna Gudzowska, formerly a top-ranked Texan tennis prospect, when both were Marshall scholars and followed her to Yale Law School. While there, he began writing his first book, “Chatter,” an attempt to map a globe-spanning signals intelligence network. It published in 2005; the next year, he and Gudzowska married.
The book made a splash. Keefe felt ambivalent.
But it may have shown him how far his tenacity could go. Combining his innate drive with his Yale Law bona fides, he found a niche. He successfully pitched The New Yorker the magazine story that would become his second book, “The Snakehead,” about human smuggling into Chinatown in the 1990s.
“Patrick understands criminal cases oftentimes better than the people who led the criminal case,” said Chauncey Parker, a former top official with the New York Police Department whose investigation into Chinatown gangs was a part of the book. “At least, that happened in my case. He looked at it from so many different perspectives that he found pieces of the puzzle that I didn’t know existed.”
Keefe’s work has brought him into the exact type of elite circles of which he has long been wary. Many of those with whom he’s come into contact are similarly high-achieving, whether it be Nic Pizzolatto, the creator of “True Detective” (he called Keefe “a superlative writer”), or Cody Keenan, President Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter (who said Keefe was “the coolest guy ever.”)
He almost gave up on books. “The Snakehead” received numerous accolades and awards, but was panned in a pontifical New York Times review describing Keefe as a “hostage of his own ambitions.” “Say Nothing,” his true-crime history of the Troubles, seemed doomed to an even worse fate. When it was published in Britain and Ireland in 2018, it was met with shrugs.
Then, early the next year, the Penguin Random House imprint Doubleday published it in the United States. “It blew up in a very big way, and everything’s changed since then,” said Michael Hanna, one of Keefe’s best friends. Keefe himself has not changed. But “he’s no longer anonymous.”
That book’s success led him, indirectly, to “London Falling.” It’s the story of a 19-year-old who fell from a high-rise into the Thames under mysterious circumstances. After his death, it emerged that the teenager, Zac Brettler, had been passing himself off as an oligarch’s son and become enmeshed in an increasingly corrupt London underworld his parents barely knew existed.
Keefe’s willingness in recent years to indulge the possibilities that come with fame — the modeling, the cameos, the invitations to movie and television premieres — has made media colleagues who do not know him well wonder what comes next. Will he be lost to the celebrity ecosystem, another former writer performing being a writer?
The question is heightened by the expectation of more exposure to come. Keefe made a cameo in the recent season finale of “Industry,” and one of its creators, Konrad Kay, was already dreaming of adapting “London Falling” when we talked in January.
Kay may get a chance. A24 has officially optioned the rights and is developing a limited series. No showrunner is yet attached; Keefe will executive produce.
We started having a conversation that journalists have all the time, in these days of artificial intelligence and political turbulence and nonstop distraction: Does what we do matter? I said something self-deprecating. But then Keefe surprised me. He said something positive.
“I don’t want to sound self-righteous at all,” he said. “But I feel like I’m living a righteous life.” He said that everywhere he looked, there were people, including a number of other Yale Law graduates, who were doing morally grotesque things. “Listen, I may not be part of the solution here in any fundamental way,” he said. “But I’m not part of the problem. And that’s something.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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