Plain tales of crookedness and corruption: Rogues reviewed

Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel, a ‘best of’ articles by Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for the New Yorker. The magazine has always had its stars, among them James Thurber, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm, Anthony Lane and Malcolm Gladwell. Let’s be honest, Patrick Radden Keefe is not one of them – or wasn’t, until the publication last year of Empire of Pain, his book about the Sackler family and America’s opioid epidemic, based on an old New Yorker article. An overnight sensation, it was years in the making.

In fact if you’ve read the New Yorker over the past decade or so – if you’re a rootless cosmopolitan, say, or a non-Manhattan-dweller of vaguely liberal inclinations who can nonetheless afford both private medical insurance and Condé Nast’s subscription rates – you’ll have come across Keefe’s features. That one about the fine wine fraud? Or about the Dutch gangster and his sister who turned against him? The El Chapo one? The one about the mass shooter who also happened to be a neurobiologist? Deeply disturbing, plainly told tales of everyday and extraordinary wickedness, crookedness and corruption – they’re all Keefe’s.

Rogues is a compilation of these half-remembered pieces – a quick Empire of Pain follow-up – and as entertaining and perplexing a publishing project as any other volume of collected journalism. As Keefe admits in the preface: ‘The paradox of magazines is that they’re both perishable and permanent’ – and more so now than ever. ‘A big magazine feature used to be as evanescent as cherry blossom: here today, gone next week. Now it’s just a click away, forever.’ Here’s a strapline for any truly honest 21st-century publishing house: ‘Books: Why Not Save Yourself the Bother of Clicking?’

Keefe claims that as a journalist he has no ‘particular beat’, but nonetheless lists his preoccupations as ‘crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial’.