In journalism argot, a “writearound” is a profile written without access to its subject — because that person is dead or can’t talk or, more likely, doesn’t want to. Reporting a writearound can be a vexing, monthslong marathon, requiring you to read everything that has ever been written by or about your subject, scour archives for old footage or audio, and track down and try to interview as many of the subject’s acquaintances as possible. The process can feel like a parody of a law enforcement sting, with low-level sources “flipped” to gain access to more important ones and the writer inching through concentric circles of proximity to encircle his target slowly.
“Some journalists hate writearounds, but I’ve always enjoyed the challenge they pose,” Patrick Radden Keefe writes in the preface to his new nonfiction collection, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks. “It takes a lot of creative reporting to produce a vivid portrait of someone without ever getting to speak to them, but these pieces are often more revealing than the scripted encounters you end up with when the politician or the CEO actually cooperates. When I wrote about the reality TV producer Mark Burnett, he wouldn’t talk to me — but he had two ex-wives who did, and in the end, I think I learned more about Burnett from speaking to them than I would have from Burnett himself.”
A staff writer at the New Yorker, Keefe tends to write about shadowy figures and worlds — espionage, drug cartels, and the murkier corners of finance and industry. His previous books have explored electronic wiretapping, human smuggling, and the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis. Perhaps his best-known is 2018’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, an investigation of one of the most notorious crimes of the Troubles that became a surprising smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic. They don’t have quite the same historical sweep, but the 12 magazine articles collected in Rogues explore classic Keefe-ian subjects such as fraud in the vintage wine world, Swiss banking, and the Lockerbie bombing, all with admirable authority and grace.
One of the standout pieces of the collection, “A Loaded Gun,” concerns Amy Bishop, a professor of biology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who shot and killed three colleagues at a faculty meeting in 2010. Keefe is less interested in the college shooting itself than in a startling fact that emerged in its aftermath. Years earlier, when Bishop was 21, she shot and killed her brother in an incident that was treated as an accident. Keefe makes a compelling case that this earlier killing was not an accident but instead one of a series of unheeded red flags.
In tackling the often dark topics that he tends to write about, Keefe is both skeptical and empathetic, an approach that can lead him to more interesting places than would simple indictment. He suggests that Mathew Martoma, a financial trader convicted of insider trading, refused to take the easy route and flip on his boss because to do so would be to admit guilt, and Martoma’s insistence on his own innocence was the only thing holding him and his family together.
Similarly, Keefe argues that Bishop’s family and community convinced themselves that her shooting of her brother had been a tragic mistake. “I came to believe that there had indeed been a cover-up,” Keefe writes, “but that it had been an act not of conspiracy but of compassion. In small towns, in particular, some degree of denial about what happens behind the closed doors of one’s neighbors can come to seem not merely exigent but humane.” To the community, “it might have seemed that the most charitable way to address the confounding tragedy at Hollis Avenue was simply to move on — a parochial gesture of mercy and denial that had an incalculable cost, decades later, in Alabama.”
Keefe has said in interviews that he used to do screenwriting work and that the storytelling he learned from scripts has served him in writing magazine pieces. “Nonfiction writers can learn a lot from good screenwriting about structure, pacing, transitions, dialogue,” he recently told the New York Times. “It’s a ruthlessly economical format. You can learn more from studying one good Tony Gilroy script than from a dozen screenwriting books with the word ‘craft’ in the title.” His writing has a deft sense of structure and scene, even if the length and detail of the pieces can sometimes strain reader attention.
All the articles collected in Rogues were first published in the New Yorker, and they are characteristic of the magazine’s house style for reported features: comprehensive, never breathless, and conveyed in a forensic narration that minimizes the writer and rejects the gonzo flourishes associated with magazine journalism in the Rolling Stone and Esquire tradition. There are strong arguments for this kind of self-effacing style, though I occasionally wondered what it might be like to read a more liberated Keefe. His former New Yorker colleague George Packer moved in 2018 to the Atlantic, and it has been interesting to see Packer experiment with style and voice at a publication where first-person perspective is slightly more welcome.
Rather than a painstaking investigation of murder or malfeasance, Rogues’s closing entry is a more conventional, though also deeply reported, celebrity profile. Published not long before Anthony Bourdain’s suicide, “Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast” is an elegant and perceptive portrait of a hard-living bon vivant who is somewhat ill at ease with his own success. Here, Keefe has access to a candid and very quotable subject, and the result feels colorful and sumptuous after so many pieces filled with dense technical exposition and careful legalese. He hops on the back of Bourdain’s Vespa, and they cruise through Hanoi, “swept up in a surging river of vehicles,” shooting “through a perfumed cloud of smoke from a cook fire.” This feels like a glimpse of Keefe with his hair down. Perhaps we’ll see more at some point.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
