Author Patrick Radden Keefe: ‘I don't take lightly the fact that the book will be in their lives for ever'

The award-winning journalist and author Patrick Radden Keefe calls his line of work “the sport of kings” and is one of the most lauded narrative non-fiction writers of our time. He has been a writer at the New Yorker for 20 years and has also written six books, including Say Nothing (2018), a painstaking account of the Troubles constructed around the 1972 abduction of Belfast mother Jean McConville and the IRA members, such as Dolours Price, who took her. Empire of Pain was published in 2021 and tells the story of the Sackler family – the owners of Purdue Pharma, which made and marketed the painkiller OxyContin – and their role in the US opioid crisis. 

The subject for his latest book, London Falling, came to him through a chance meeting while he was working in London during the summer of 2023, as a producer on the TV drama adaptation of Say Nothing. On set one day, the director introduced him to a man called Andrew Fingret. “We fell into talking about the Jewish community in London and New York a bit,” Radden Keefe recalls. “As it happens, there's a rabbi in London, Julia Neuberger, who's an old friend of my parents. I mentioned her name [and] that was the thing that clicked.” Fingret knew of Neuberger too – knew a family whose son’s Bar Mitzvah she had officiated at. “Listen,” he said. “I might have a story for you.”

Fingret's friends Matthew and Rachelle Brettler had lost their son – Zac – a few years ago. He was 19 years old when he went off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames under “quite mysterious circumstances”. When his parents started looking into what had happened to him, how he had come to die, they discovered that he had been leading a double life, pretending he was the son of a Russian oligarch. 

The Brettlers would tell Radden Keefe that they suspected the men who were with Zac that night – Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma – knew much more about his death than they were saying. The book suggests they were not who they claimed they were either: Shamji was “a dilettante posing as a successful entrepreneur”, while Sharma, a violent debt collector for drug dealers, was masquerading as a sort of mentor. 

How had a middle-class London teenager ended up in this riverside flat, with these men, before being caught on CCTV stepping off a balcony to his death? In gripping detail, London Falling traces the lives of all involved. Zac’s parents, distraught but determined to find out what had happened to him, a boy who had gone to the same public school as the offspring of Russian oligarchs and who told people he was rich like them. The family histories of Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma, and how London had brought them together. 

It also reflects on the rippling effects of changes to the capital. In the book, we see a city where apparently incurious police officers investigate a death not unconnected to billionaires who have been welcomed to it with “golden visas” by the establishment – the shadow side of a new London, where dirty money and deception make for unlikely connections. 

Radden Keefe spoke to the Nerve from New York, where he lives with his wife – a lawyer – and their teenage sons. 

Well, I have had a kind of minor specialty over my career of writing about people who I don't talk to. In some cases, they're dead. In some cases, they don't want to speak with me. Sometimes, like the Sacklers, they're actively threatening to sue me the whole time. The trick for me when I'm doing that kind of writing is: how can I do this so that on the page these people don't feel remote – that you, the reader, don't feel like I never got to spend time with them? You know, I never met Arthur Sackler or Dolours Price, but I hope that their accounts also feel intimate. 

This [book] was completely different, because here I had effectively unlimited access to the family that I was writing about, and they were incredibly open and honest with me. And they also gave me a lot of materials. They had all these recordings that they'd done of conversations that they were having, in some cases in the hours and days after Zac went missing [with Akbar Shamji and the police] … there's something so sort of deliberative about Matthew, and you could kind of see them thinking: “We're very anxious right now, we may not be thinking clearly. We want to create a record that later we can go back to and study to see if there are things that we missed.” If you're a reporter, it's an incredible gift, because people's memories are faulty, particularly at moments of high anxiety or trauma. 

In some ways Zac's story is incredibly specific: it's a very particular story about a family and London today. In other ways it's quite a universal story, I think, in the sense that it's about the relationship between parent and child, and when the child is an adolescent, and so I did find that I related quite strongly to the Brettlers. And, you know, I felt enormous compassion for them.

Normally I can accept the idea that at a certain point you have to finish the book. You put it out into the world and it takes on a life of its own, and you realise that you can't control the way people read it – they will read things into it, sometimes, that you didn't know were there. Sometimes you think it's a misreading, but you can’t control it. All I can do is write exactly the book that I want to write, and then just kind of set it free. 

In this case, it is slightly different in the sense that there is this family that I've developed an intense relationship with and I think – and this stuff is tricky, I'm picking my words carefully here – it's a somewhat subtle point, but any time I write about people, I think I need to be sort of open and emotionally available to them. And when I sit down and interview them, I want to meet them where they are. I want to hear their story. And that would be true for a mass murderer as well as for the Brettlers. I want to sort of see people in their fullness. But when I sit down to write, I'm not writing for the people that I am writing about. And so with the Brettlers, when I was writing the book, I wasn't thinking: “Oh, what will Matthew and Rachelle think?” 

You have to. You have to see it in a kind of a cold, almost clinical way, I mean, not cold in the sense that you're not sort of capturing the emotions that they're feeling and the emotions that they make you feel. But you can't have the impulse to censor in order to protect their feelings. And I think, to their great credit, they understood that. I think if they had editorial control over the book there's a bunch of stuff that wouldn't be in it, but they are sophisticated enough to understand – in part because we talked about this a lot – that when I go off to write, I need to tell the full version of the story. I can't be whitewashing – leaving bits out that are awkward. I don't think they regret having opened up to me so much. But this is a long way of answering your original question. I do feel an ongoing sense of responsibility to these people, yes. 

They will, and I don't take lightly the fact that the book will be in their lives for ever. 

I think they're sort of bracing themselves. It's been very strange for them as copies of the book started to go out. They will sometimes find themselves in conversation with people who they know nothing about, but [who will] know a huge amount about them and their lives. And that kind of asymmetry, that almost parasocial kind of relationship, is new to them. 

[But] I think they're a remarkable family. I think they're incredibly emotionally robust, in part because it's a family that, if you go back far enough, there are these two Holocaust survivors [both Matthew and Rachelle’s fathers escaped from the Nazis] and so I think there's a sort of strength that's been passed down.

It’s about Zac kind of reinventing himself. But then the interesting thing is, there are three people in that flat that night that he dies, and what I wanted to do is trace back their family histories, and you find that, you know, it's not just that London has reinvented itself in recent decades. That's part of what the book is about: that London is [also] a stage for reinvention in a sort of wonderful way. You have these people who come from other corners of the world, and they arrive in London – in the case of Zac's two grandfathers as teenagers – and they've lost everything and they have to say: “Who am I going to be? Who am I going to be against the backdrop of this great metropolis?” And while that obviously ends up being a dangerous story with Zac, I think it's [also] kind of a thrilling story about the possibilities of a city as well.

I'm a big planner. I plan like crazy. And then at the end I write quite quickly. I feel as though, for me, if it's working, I want the book to come out of me with a kind of velocity. I want to capture that velocity on the page, and I want to actually transmit it. I want the reader to feel that sort of energy.

I've been working with Daniel for 20 years. It's one of the closest relationships in my life. There are lessons he taught me on the first piece I ever wrote for the magazine 20 years ago, things he taught me on my draft for that, that I've just completely absorbed. You know, the wonderful thing about having an editor who you really trust is that you can try things – a joke or a little flourish, a little pirouette that may or may not work out – and you trust that there's somebody there to catch you. And I think if I had an editor who was less interventionist, who was a little bit more laissez-faire, I would be more inhibited as a writer. I wouldn't want to try those things, because I'd be worried I'd fall on my face. 

Listen, I mean, you might hate me for saying so, but I love [writing]. Of course, it's hard. But even the difficulties … I love a challenging structural conundrum. I don't have hobbies, you know: there aren't things that I do to unwind. For me, [this] is just gold. I would do it for free. Don't tell anyone. 

I don’t, because I think people want long investigative narratives. I think there is an audience for that, and, you know, it will come in different forms. In some cases, podcasting is a good thing. 

I am concerned that it's expensive – reporting is expensive. I'm just finishing a story for the New Yorker about a big criminal conspiracy in New Orleans, and I've been nurturing this story along for five years. I went back and forth to New Orleans. The article is 12,000 words. That's an expensive proposition for the New Yorker. That's the aspect I worry about. 

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth is published by Picador (£22)