The reader is first invited to witness the seemingly routine arrival of a passenger at Amsterdam airport but soon thereafter the man is identified as a drugs cartel assassin. The opening paragraphs of one of the best essays in the collection, The Hunt for El Chapo: Inside the Capture of the World’s Most Notorious Drug Lord, illustrate this well. He invariably employs anecdotes to build interest, structure and tension. Keefe is not only a coolly conscientious investigative journalist but a real literary craftsman. That’s where he made his first pitch for publication and where he has remained a staff writer to this day. The nursery of Keefe’s talent – and the source for all the essays in Rogues – was the liberal magazine The New Yorker. Thereafter via Chinese immigrant history ( Snakehead), Keefe branched out into a world increasingly peopled by secretive bad guys involved in murder in Northern Ireland ( Say Nothing) or who knowingly induced drug addiction in the US. Indeed his interest in the electronic eavesdropping covered later in his first book, Chatter, was sparked during his time in Britain when he caught sight of the listening station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. Born into a third-generation Irish immigrant family in Boston, he was schooled at the prestigious Milton Academy in Massachusetts – attended earlier by T S Eliot and Robert and Teddy Kennedy – before studying at Columbia University in New York followed by postgraduate studies at Cambridge and the LSE.
But that would be to carp at what in the round is a scintillating set of exposures of the nasty and of the tragic. If there is a criticism to be made of the essays in Rogues it is that some have been overtaken by events and would have benefitted from more substantial updating than is provided in a few italicised sentences at the end of each chapter. The essays in Rogues – originally published between 20 – are par for the course. Many have the appearance of being precis for the kind of longer studies which have made Keefe’s name, most recently the highly acclaimed Empire of Pain, an investigation of the opioid crisis in the US. “… if there’s one connective thread that runs through a lot of my stories it’s Secrets, secret worlds, uncovering things I’m not supposed to know.” In his award-winning podcast series built around the Scorpions’ song “Wind of Change”, Keefe reflects on the character of his writing:
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