Had life taken a different course, journalist Patrick Radden Keefe might have ended up as a murder-squad detective, a code-breaking spy or a cross-examining pit bull lawyer given the evident skills he has.
Thankfully, the world of long-form journalism is far better off this American writer found a home at The New Yorker magazine where his writing and investigative talents shine brightly.
Put simply Radden Keefe is a brilliant storyteller. This collection of tales in his latest book, Rogues, are so expertly told because he has clearly spent an obsessive amount of time running down leads, sweating spurious angles and returning to the protagonists, or those closest to them, in the end with the toughest questions as he attempts to pull all the strings together.
In the United States, editors call the form of journalism that Radden Keefe specialises in “the write-around”. In Irish journalism circles, it is known as the profile: a study of an individual who declines to be interviewed built with information gleaned from people who know the person best.
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It is the journalist’s interrogative style, laced with razor-sharp turns of phrase and his rich descriptive powers as a writer, that draws all these studies together into an intriguing rogues gallery.
Radden Keefe’s skill as a writer and an investigator is in his ability to paint a vivid portrait of his subject, whether or not the individual chooses to speak with him. In some respects, the study becomes a more honest appraisal of the individual when they decide not to co-operate.
This is particularly true in his essay on Mark Burnett, the reality TV tycoon whose showcasing of Donald Trump on The Apprentice helped propel the New York real estate mogul to the White House in 2016. Radden Keefe says himself in the preface to this book that he believed he learned more about Burnett from his two ex-wives than he could have from the man himself. The former wives certainly help burst some of the myths presented previously by the man.
Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord and serial escapee better known as El Chapo, was hardly going to speak openly about the thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of murders committed by his cartel or even confirm his prodigious consumption of Viagra — a typical example of a fascinating factoid, unearthed from some of his many sources, that Radden Keefe sprinkles through his stories that add bright textures of colour and give such life to his portraits.
While there feels at times a thin thread drawing together these “true stories of grifters, killers, rebels and crooks” in this book of Radden Keefe’s published journalism from The New Yorker, it is the journalist’s interrogative style, laced with razor-sharp turns of phrase and his rich descriptive powers as a writer, that draws all these studies together into an intriguing rogues gallery.
The most poignant chapter is the last on the restless chef turned travel show host Anthony Bourdain and his worldwide search for culinary Xanadu
In the interests of full disclosure: I have been a long-time fan of Radden Keefe’s journalism and have got to know him as a friend since I first bumped into him at a 2014 Friends of Sinn Féin fundraising gala dinner in Manhattan. At the time, he was digging with his pen into a profile of Gerry Adams, the party’s then president, and the notorious 1972 IRA killing of Jean McConville, the widowed Belfast mother of 10. That New Yorker profile developed into Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, one of the best books written about Northern Ireland and the history of the Troubles.
The forensic skills on display in that book and in his follow-up, Empire of Pain, the essential examination of the Sackler family’s reckless pushing of the painkiller OxyContin on the American public and the US opioid crisis, were well honed in Radden Keefe’s reporting for the stories in this book.
The Burnett profile on how a TV executive and reality show essentially helped create a political monster in Trump is a standout chapter. The profile contains light bulb moments that explain how some of the same choreography that made The Apprentice a success followed Trump into his presidency. For example, editors on The Apprentice had to “reverse engineer” episodes searching hours of footage showing moments when some of the better performing candidates slipped up just because Trump decided to fire them on a whim. Life mimicked art in the Trump White House, but then it was obvious Trump ran his presidency like a ratings-hungry reality TV show.
The most poignant chapter is the last on the restless chef turned travel show host Anthony Bourdain and his worldwide search for culinary Xanadu. Radden Keefe shadows Bourdain on his travels and watches the former addict struggle with a frenetic work ethic, fatherhood and potentially ruining the best-kept-secret restaurants he exposes to a global TV audience.
“It’s a gloriously doomed enterprise,” Bourdain confesses. “I’m in the business of finding great places, and then we f**k them up.”
You read this deep study of the man knowing that he took his life just over a year after Radden Keefe’s profile was published, and you are thankful not just that the writer spent time trying to figure this guy out but that long-form journalism still occupies such an important place in the age of the tweet.
