Patrick Radden Keefe on human stories, tracing Irish family, and Russian espionage

Say Nothing author Patrick Radden Keefe has penned another gripping non-fiction classic. He tells Richard Fitzpatrick what drew him to the story of Zac Brettler

Patrick Radden Keefe's previous books include Empire of Pain about the Sackler dynasty, and Say Nothing, about the Jean McConville murder. Picture: Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images

In the summer of 2023, Patrick Radden Keefe was working on the set of Say Nothing, the TV adaptation of his magisterial saga about the Jean McConville murder. 

He fell into conversation with a friend of the director, a lawyer visiting the set who told him a story about this family he knew. They had a 19-year-old son who had recently died in mysterious circumstances. After his death, his parents found out he'd been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. Radden Keefe was hooked.

Before happening on the story of Zac Brettler, who fell to his death from the fifth floor of a wealthy apartment building by the Thames River in December 2019, Radden Keefe was already intrigued by how London had embraced dirty money from Russian exiles, including a ravenous passports-for-sale programme. 

“Then suddenly the invasion of Ukraine happens, and the British establishment was a bit, ‘I'm shocked there's gambling in this casino’,” says Radden Keefe. The human story of Zac’s demise, which he recounts in London Falling, is fascinating. 

Both his Jewish grandfathers survived the Holocaust. His maternal grandfather, Hugo Gwyn, a rabbi and a well-known BBC broadcaster, led a double life, denying to his family he had a secret love child. Something from his furtive genes passed down through the generations.

Radden Keefe was working on the set of Say Nothing when he first heard the story of Zac Brettler

“I've always liked stories about families,” says Radden Keefe. “I found out in my research that Zac had been telling lies from an early age. They were mostly harmless lies. He shows up at this new school, Mill Hill, at 13, telling people his mother has died and she hadn't.

“As he got older, he was very taken by the money culture of London — that aspirational, glitzy culture you experience when you walk around some parts of London today — and certain Hollywood movies. Some might describe The Wolf of Wall Street as a cautionary tale, but he watched it as an aspirational fantasy.

“He was very active on Instagram. Social media is part of this story. Your kid can be sitting there on the sofa. You think they're in the room with you and you've got your eye on them, but they’re 1000 miles away interacting with people who you don't see, and you don't know. He got sucked into his phone the way a lot of kids do.

“Being surrounded by the children of oligarchs at school was very seductive, especially if you're a teenager who is not quite sure who he's going to be yet, how he's going to fit into the world.” 

Unmoored, he fell into the orbit of two sinister characters — Verinder Sharma, a sadistic London gangster with a murderous past known as 'Indian Dave', likely a police informer; and Akbar Shamji, a charlatan — like his father before him — who is constantly trying to outrun his debts. 

When the two men realise their share of Zac’s imaginary fortune isn’t going to materialise, things go awry.

Radden Keefe writes gripping non-fiction books, including Empire of Pain about the odious Sackler dynasty and America’s opioid crisis. He has penned another classic in London Falling. 

It shines a light on “lacklustre” policing, Russian espionage and its satisfying conclusion brings the truths of a complicated tale into focus. The story is full of bizarre coincidences, which haven’t stopped even though the book is finished.

“The publishers were very controlled about the manuscript,” says Radden Keefe. “They wouldn't show proofs widely. Initially, there were only about eight or nine copies of my book in all of London, sent to certain writers.

“So, Joe Brettler, Zac’s brother, went to get his haircut in Notting Hill. At this point, he knows there's only a handful of copies in the whole city. Joe has very curly hair. Sometimes he'll go to a black hairdresser because they know how to handle his hair. 

"He sits down to this hairdresser he's never been to before. He looks over and there's this very elegant woman sitting waiting. She's reading the book.

Only a handful of proof copies of London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe were printed — but Zac’s brother found him sitting beside an early reader in a hair salon.

“Joe's thinking, how does this woman even have a copy? He knows there's very few copies. He looks more closely. Each page of the book has been watermarked. The watermark says ‘Zadie Smith’. What are the chances? 

"Then Joe says to her, ‘Excuse me, I noticed you're reading that book. It's about my family.’ It's very strange — the bigness of London and the smallness of London all at the same time.” 

Radden Keefe grew up in Dorchester, south of Boston. As a mortified 16-year-old in the early 1990s, he followed his father around Clonmany, Co Donegal, “banging on doors and finding graves, the classic Irish American routine” trying to trace their family’s routes. 

He’s been back to Ireland a lot since, including research trips for Say Nothing. Among a couple of Irish publicity engagements this year, he’s on the bill at his “favourite festival in the world” — Co Carlow’s Borris House: Festival of Writing & Ideas.

“I stayed in a family home in the village,” he says about his last visit. “They didn't have room for me in the Big House, and there's no hotel. A lovely family had me come and stay. 

"There are these remarkable figures, some Irish, some from elsewhere, who you end up chatting with in a very casual way, often in the local pub because there's no real infrastructure there. There's an unpretentiousness about it.

“I remember I was there doing an event — maybe with Fintan O'Toole — under this lovely tent. I was in the middle of talking about the Troubles. I look out in the audience and I'm like, bloody hell, is that Jeremy Irons? Jeremy Irons was sitting there in the audience. I suddenly lost my train of thought.”

•  Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth is published by Picador.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s five favourite books 

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A book I go back to because it's a story about crime. It's also about a community and how they deal with a terrible, violent incident. It's beautifully written. The genre that I work in was born with that book.

Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: A brilliant book about this super-empowered bureaucrat who built New York City as we know it today, named Robert Moses.

Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai: It's about a boy genius. He has this intense relationship with his mother. They live in London. He's searching for his father. He's obsessed with The Seven Samurai, the Kurosawa film. It's about how tragic it can be to be brilliant.

Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent: A book I read when I was in law school. It was made into a film with Harrison Ford, and more recently into a not very good television series with Jake Gyllenhaal. The book is astonishingly good, a hell of a read. It's a legal thriller but written with literary flair.

Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These: Her theme in that book, collective denial, runs through a lot of my work. As somebody speaking to you in Trump's America, what’s required of us as citizens? Everything in your home is fine, but you know around the corner, something terrible is happening to somebody. Do you stay in the comfort of your home, knowing if you keep your head down, you're going to be okay? Or do you do something? That's the dilemma. I think about those issues all the time, which she perfectly distilled into this beautiful book.