Screenwriters secretly envy book authors for their intellectual prestige and creative control, and authors secretly dream of working in Hollywood. Few writers straddle both worlds with the aplomb of Patrick Radden Keefe. To give you a sense: He found the idea for his new book, London Falling, while on the set for the FX adaptation of his 2018 breakout best-seller, Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Or rather, the idea found him. Keefe, an executive producer on the series, was in London, sitting in a director’s chair between setups in a mockup of Scotland Yard, when a guest of the episode’s director started chatting with him. The man told Keefe about a family he knew whose 19-year-old son had leaped to his death into the Thames under mysterious circumstances, and that after he died, they found out he’d pretended to be the son of a Russian oligarch and had been consorting with notorious members of London’s underworld.
Keefe was hooked. The tragedy, he believed, could be a lens through which to tell the story of how dramatically London, a city he has loved and lived in, had changed in recent years, becoming a magnet for dirty money and a stage for reinvention.
When he got home that night, Keefe googled the incident. There wasn’t a trace of it on the internet — just how he likes it. “I knew that if the family were up for it, this would be my next thing,” he says. “I’m going to clear the decks.”
Rachelle and Matthew Brettler, the parents of Zach Brettler, the boy who jumped, were hesitant at first. But the investigation by London’s Metropolitan Police had led nowhere. They decided Keefe had the required sensitivity to tell the story and the acumen to uncover details lesser sleuths had missed. His track record spoke for itself.
As an author, Keefe has specialized in untangling shadowy networks, whether that’s the Provisional IRA or the Sackler family, whose role in the opioid crisis via their ownership of Purdue Pharma was the subject of his book Empire of Pain. The 2021 best-seller led to his serving as an executive producer on the Netflix miniseries Painkiller, and, more significantly, contributed to the Sacklers having to pay a $7.4 billion settlement to victims. The subtitle of Keefe’s 2022 collection of journalism, Rogues, might as well be printed on his business card: “True stories of grifters, killers, rebels, and crooks.”
London Falling began like most of his six books: as an article for The New Yorker, where Keefe has worked as a staff writer since 2012. And it is ending the way his last two books have — as a TV series. In March, ahead of the book’s April 7 publication, A24 emerged victorious after heated competition for the adaptation rights. At Keefe’s insistence, all serious suitors Zoomed with the Brettlers. “The plan is to proceed not just with the family’s blessing but with their active consultation,” Keefe says.
At 49, the Dorchester, Massachusetts, native has joined the pantheon of celebrity investigative journalists, a sadly dwindling group. His name recognition is such that he was cast as himself in the final scene of HBO’s Industry. “I had way too much fun” acting, he says. “I’ve been joking with a friend of mine at FX who did Say Nothing that I’m going to slip him a headshot.” He could simply hand his friend an outtake from his 2025 campaign for J.Crew, depicting him in a trench coat and suit, coffee cup in hand.
When the music drops out at the coffee shop in the suburbs of New York where we meet, Keefe’s voice lowers to a whisper. It’s unclear whether this is out of consideration for our fellow patrons or out of concern for who might be listening. Given his line of work, and the unsavory people he writes about, it pays to be cautious. It’s for this reason he doesn’t want to reveal which New York suburb his family calls home.
“When I was doing the Sackler book,” he says, “we had a private investigator who was parked in front of our house.” Keefe also has received his share of legal threats and has learned to brush them off. “At a certain point, you get enough of them that you start to be a little less easily intimidated by them. In fact, sometimes you feel like if you’re not getting the legal threats, you’re not doing your job.”
Keefe’s New Yorker colleague David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon, says, “He’s just one hell of a reporter, and that is why he is able to get the granular detail about the people he’s writing about and the events he is writing about, to bring them to life, to make them feel real.”
Keefe wears all that research lightly, careful not let it weigh down a good story. “His books are incredibly cinematic,” says Eric Newman, the showrunner of Narcos who collaborated with Keefe years ago on a project, since aborted, about organized crime in Asia’s Golden Triangle. “I remember reading the opening to Say Nothing, when these men come to this house and drag this woman out in front of her children, and he just has that flair that really grabs the viewer.” (The scene is re-created pretty much beat for beat in the FX adaptation.) London Falling kicks off just as dramatically. But Keefe says he never thinks ahead to potential screen adaptation when writing journalism. If anything, the influence goes the other way. His occasional work as a screenwriter over the years — all on unproduced projects, including a Jo Nesbo adaptation for Channing Tatum — has taught him the value of narrative economy.
Empire of Pain became a Netflix miniseries with Matthew Broderick.
Courtesy of Netflix; Courtesy of Penguin Random House
“Part of what I learned from screenwriting,” he says, “was how to take, say, a 300-page court transcript and turn it into two great paragraphs. I have to pick the very best stuff and boil it down to a page.” Having grown up in the 1990s, which he calls “a golden age of movies,” he’s just as likely to turn to films for inspiration as to his nonfiction forebears. Take the opening pages of Empire of Pain, about the deposition of one of the Sacklers: “What could be more boring than a bunch of lawyers sitting at a table?” Keefe recalls thinking. “How do you infuse this with a real sense of drama? And I found the answer in the opening scene of Michael Clayton,” in which a lawyer suffers a mental breakdown.
For all his devotion to facticity in nonfiction, Keefe has proved more flexible when it comes to scripted screen adaptations of his work. “He’s also an incredible screenwriter,” says Nina Jacobson, who along with Brad Simpson produced Say Nothing, “so he could readily have said, ‘I want to adapt it myself.’ But it actually gave me even more respect for Patrick as a producer to see how nimbly he could step back and encourage somebody else’s authorship.”
Say Nothing, about an IRA murder, was adapted for a hit FX series.
Rob Youngson/FX; Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Even as he continues to write New Yorker dispatches — I caught him between trips to New Orleans, the setting of his latest investigation — Keefe is burrowing deeper into Hollywood. Jacobson and Simpson, hot off their success with Love Story, are reteaming with Keefe for a series inspired by his work. And with Bad Wolf, the English production company behind Industry, Keefe is adapting All That Glitters, a nonfiction book about an art world fraudster, for HBO.
He’s still getting used to his dual identity. “I find screenwriting quite painful compared to nonfiction writing,” he says. “Even when you’re adapting something, you’re kind of inventing out of whole cloth. When I sit down, it’s just like anything can happen, like, ‘I am a god.’ I find that quite difficult.”
This story appeared in the April 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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