When interviewing an exceedingly dangerous criminal, it’s best to alert loved ones to your whereabouts. The 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. Keefe folded his lanky frame into the passenger seat of my tiny blue car and gave me directions to one of his favorite Chinese restaurants in Westchester, N.Y. He seemed a bit nervous with someone else behind the wheel. 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’s top cabinet officials. His mother, Jennifer Radden, is a philosopher of psychiatry who focuses on individual agency in the context of mental disorder. A certain kind of person will have heard of her before Patrick. “That was always a thread in our friendship, that I really admired his mother,” his New Yorker colleague Rachel Aviv said.
Starting in second grade, Keefe attended Milton Academy, a liberal Massachusetts prep school where the kids wore plaid flannels and khakis. The school’s relationship with nearby Dorchester was complicated. Tristram Keefe, Patrick’s younger brother, remembers schoolmates mocking his neighborhood by making machine gun sounds at him with their mouths.
“It was intimated but not said that Milton was on the right side of the tracks but Dorchester wasn’t,” said Galt Niederhoffer, a novelist and film producer who attended Milton in the 1990s.
The incongruity bothered Keefe. At 16, he wrote a scathing, self-implicating piece in one of his high school’s papers about a school groundskeeper whose murder he felt had gone under-acknowledged. The day of the crime, Keefe wrote, “we worried about tests later in the day, plans for vacation, getting into a good college. Cebien Odney opened the front door of his Dorchester apartment to someone who shot and killed him.”
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.”
He was evolving into his current form, which comes with a mythology. Even people who know Keefe well sometimes idealize him as a swashbuckling detective, solving crimes on a grand scale. For years, he’s been fighting the F.B.I. for information related to a book about whether two former C.I.A. agents went rogue in the 1970s. He’s bested Syrian arms dealers, persuaded Fujianese fixers to let him into their secret worlds.
“I feel like he’s solved multiple murders,” his New Yorker colleague Jia Tolentino said.
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.”)
Keefe’s stature makes others dwell on their own. Many of the people I spoke to warned me that they didn’t want to overstate their closeness to him. Some of his New Yorker colleagues told me that they were incapable of executing a story at the level he does.
“It’s a hard bar to clear,” said Joshua Yaffa, a contributing writer for the magazine who is based in Berlin. Keefe, he said, “sets the kind of standard that’s energizing and invigorating to try and reach. I’m not sure I ever have fully.”
Keefe himself feels uncomfortable talking about his status. He is not modest, exactly; he has a healthy sense of his own capabilities. But he is congenitally self-deprecating, and humble. When an octogenarian book club in Santa Fe, N.M., read “Say Nothing,” Keefe planned to make a surprise appearance via Zoom. He has written so many glowing notes for other authors’ books that his colleagues took to joking he would blurb a bodega.
I brought up his colleagues’ affection for him on our drive. The other writers’ admiration, I said, had led many of them to speculate about whether Keefe would succeed Remnick as editor in chief.
It was not something he was pursuing, he said.
“That’s a politician’s answer, though,” I said.
“There’s only politician answers for me, with this,” he said.
It will be some time before the question is really at issue. Last year, Remnick signed a new contract, allowing Keefe to continue doing all he ever really wanted to do for at least a little while longer.
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.
Here is how Keefe found the story: A few summers ago, on the set of the Hulu adaptation of “Say Nothing,” he started talking to a Londoner named Andrew Fingret. (Fingret, when we spoke, read me a prepared set of remarks in which he compared Keefe to a combination of Philip Marlowe and Clark Kent.)
Fingret was a dear friend of Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, who were struggling to make sense of their son’s death. They were aware that their obsession with the mystery — and what they saw as the injustice of the police’s slipshod investigation — could make people uneasy in conversation. Some days later, the journalist was sitting across from the couple at a cafe a stone’s throw from the British Museum. “I come along and I say, ‘I’m here for it, whatever you got. You want to talk for four hours about it? Let’s do it,’” Keefe said.
They were never quite sure what about their story had drawn Keefe in. “There was something about, maybe, us,” Matthew said. “There was something about the fact that Patrick has two sons. We had two sons.”
Keefe told them at the outset he could not promise answers. And he reminded them, gently but firmly, that he was not a therapist. But, inevitably, he became a vessel for the grieving parents. And, also inevitably, it messed him up.
This past summer, he was close to wrapping up the book. He was reading apocalyptic news headlines and fretting about what he called “normal adolescence stuff” with his teenage sons. And then suddenly, one day, he woke up and the internal computer — the thing that he relied on to do his job every day — had not rebooted. He still felt bad.
“I had spent two years talking constantly with these parents who, their son broke bad in adolescence and is dead,” he said.
For the first time, he went to therapy, maybe five or six sessions. “And I felt a lot better,” Keefe said. He asked the therapist what the value would be of continuing. And the therapist explained “a scenario in which, together, over huge amounts of talking, we would excavate things that I couldn’t see.”
He did not think that was for him. “I fully believe that that’s enormously useful and valuable for lots and lots of people,” he said. “I just don’t think that I contain inner recesses.”
This was during a conversation at his Westchester house in mid-February. Gudzowska, now the executive director of The Sentry, an investigative nonprofit that scrutinizes war profiteering, was working quietly in the room next door. Their sons were at school.
About an hour later, we were about to leave when Keefe stopped at a striking framed picture by the photographer Philip Montgomery that hangs at the base of his stairs. It shows antlered heads on the wall of an opulent Houston home, the floor drowning in water swept in by Hurricane Harvey. Keefe contemplated it.
“It’s a good reminder that you’re in the nice house today,” he said. “And then, tomorrow, the flood comes.”
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. “You would need an enormous budget to make it work, but you could do a sort of kaleidoscope of London from the ’50s until now,” Kay mused. He began to elaborate, describing individual episodes and scenes, and then apologized. “I’ve thought about this, obviously,” he said.
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.
But those who know the writer best are not worried he will disappear into the glare of fame. Keefe is partly kept in check by his parents, who were horrified by the J. Crew spots; he was also mocked mercilessly for them by many of his close friends. He makes a habit of keeping people around him who tease him, a longstanding feature of the Radden-Keefe household. “In this family, you don’t sell yourself short,” Frank Keefe said, laughing, “because everybody else is doing that for you.”
His editor, Daniel Zalewski, will rib Keefe, too, but it is clear that he admires his writer. It was he who best helped me understand the Icarus story I saw repeating itself in Keefe’s work. Zalewski pointed out that Keefe could have become a rapacious corporate lawyer, a white-shoe law firm guy who then parlayed his expertise into bigger money at a hedge fund.
He didn’t, he said, “because he didn’t think of that as a morally useful form of ambition.”
Maybe Keefe’s subjects, he continued, represented counter-lives he had never led, that he was all too capable of leading. The Icarus story was not wholly about the writer. It was also about his peers, and the misapplication of their ability. “America actually asks for that, when you look at what the culture directs the brightest people to do,” Zalewski said.
After our lunch, Keefe and I were driving back to his house. We had just finished a fairly heavy meal. He had given up trying to steer. “We’re taking a route I’m not accustomed to, but I think it should be fine,” he said.
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.”
He had given me his entire morning and several hours of the afternoon, most of which he had spent answering fairly intense questions about his family, his profession, the meaning of his life. He walked into his house, wrote for another five hours straight and, the next morning, filed his latest New Yorker story.
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
The post Can a Journalist Be a Celebrity Anymore? appeared first on New York Times.
