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. In the United States, editors call the form of journalism that Radden Keefe specialises in “the write-around”. 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. Put simply Radden Keefe is a brilliant storyteller. 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. The appearance of his byline in the New Yorker is always an event collected here for the first time readers can see how his work forms an always enthralling yet also deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up to them.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. Keefe explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black-market arms merchant and profiles a passionate death-penalty attorney who represents the ‘worst of the worst’, among other bravura works of literary journalism. As Keefe observes in his preface: ‘They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.’
Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from the New Yorker. Patrick Radden Keefe’s work has been recognized by prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US to the Orwell Prize and the Baillie Gifford in the UK, for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. 'Eminently bingeable, religiously fact-checked and seductively globetrotting' - The Observer From the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time.
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