Patrick Radden Keefe on the Mystery at the Center of ‘London Falling’

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When you first heard about this story, was there a moment that you found yourself sort of

“leading in a little bit like a detail or is that a moment that came later?”

It came right away. I actually knew, I mean, it was interesting. The pitch was as simple as I know this family, they lost a child, mysterious certain senses. After you died, they found out he was posing as the son of a Russian oligarch and he had said

that much and I knew if the family will agree to talk to me, this is the next year of my life. I'm Gilbert Cruz, this is the book review for the New York Times, and today we've got Patrick Radnkeef on the show. Patrick is a writer for the New Yorker. He is also the author of several best-selling non-fiction books, including Say Nothing.

That book was numbered 19 on the times as 100 best books at the 21st century and it was also adapted into a limited TV series. His new book, London Following, is Out Now. It's about a young man named Zack Brettler, just 19 years old, who died after falling from a luxury apartment building into the River Thames in London.

The book is an investigation into Zack's death, as well as the shady criminal underworld that he found himself dragged into, but it's also much more complicated than that.

When I talked to Patrick, he said he had first heard about the story back when he was working

on the TV version of his book Say Nothing. It was a pitch from someone who was very close friends with Zack's parents, Matthew and Michelle Brettler, and he said that they had made a startling discovery about their son.

“They learned that he had been unbeknownst to them, leading this secret double life in which”

he had an alter ego, which they had been totally unaware of, and he had been moving around London, pretending at 18, 19 years old that he was the son of a Russian all-gark that his father was a Russian billionaire. They made this discovery, and they learned about all of this actually from these two guys who had been friends of Zack's, and who were with him on the night that he died, and

one of them was a businessman named Akbar Shamji, who was kind of a very handsome, glamorous guy who lived on a really posh street in Mayfare, which was a really posh part of London. He'd gone to Cambridge University, he came from a very wealthy family, and he was in his 40s, but he had been kind of a mentor and friend to Zack, and then there was another guy who was a friend of his who he had introduced as well to Zack named Verinder Sharma, who

is a little unclear what he did, he's a little older, he was in his early 50s, he lived in this luxury apartment, it was his apartment from which Zack had fallen, and as the parents learned more about this Verinder Sharma guy, they learned that in fact he seemed to have a past in London's underworld as a gangster, and that he was better known on the streets of London by a nickname, which is Indian Dave, and so that was kind of the beginning of this whole thing,

for me was the idea of this kid dying mysteriously, he'd had this alter ego, and he fallen in with these two older men. You are maybe approached by people, you know frequently or not, who say, "Oh, there's a story here, I heard this thing, you might be interested in this."

“What was it about this one, and how do you know when something is right for you?”

It's weird, I still don't have a real system for these things, and I'll tell you anytime I go out

and look for a story, I almost never find them when I sort of decide today I'll find a new idea,

usually they find me, in this case I can sort of give you the intellectual answer, which is that I was really interested in the role of the oligarchs in kind of coming into London and changing the face of that city in recent decades, and then I hear this story about a family, and I do tend to gravitate to stories about families. I think I've gotten better about learning to sort of listen to my own impulses where that goes, and if I'm really intrigued by this,

I'll be able to kind of master a level of excitement, which hopefully I can transmit to the reader on the reader will share. Sticking with the early days of the story, you did have to eventually reach out to these parents who were grieving, and they were still early in their grief because they

What was your first outreach to them, and how did that go, and how did your relationship with them

developed? So this guy Andrew, who the friend of theirs, who I met on the set, he had told me the story, and I said, let's not love to talk to them. I think there might be a story in this, I would love to be the person to tell it, but I understand that they might have reservations, and so why don't we just agree to have a coffee, and we'll get together and we'll talk purely off the record. So I didn't even have a notebook out in that first conversation we sat down,

had a cafe in Bloomsbury on a warm summer afternoon, and they just talked for two hours. We're very little prodding from me, and it was fascinating because I think I've seen this happen in other cases, you know, when people are experiencing a loss, or, you know, sometimes I'm

“asking people about the worst thing that's ever happened to them, and that can be very isolating,”

I think, naturally, and then on top of that, the brothers are quite, you know, they're, I think they're quite socially sophisticated people. They have a kind of a high degree of EQ, if you like, and they, and so they both, I think, had reached a point, necessarily years after Zack's death, where they felt like, you know, we don't want to subject the people in our life to look, we could just talk about this endlessly, but we, we realize that

that might be awkward for the people in our lives, and I come along and I just say, I'll take everything you got, you know, you want to talk about it for five hours, I'm here, and so it all just

kind of came tumbling out, not even in any particular order, after you admit that first conversation

was very confusing for me, just because there was sort of so much to wrap my mind around, it was complicated story, and then we met again, maybe a week later, and there were a couple

“things that it felt important for me to say to them, at that point, because I think they had”

done some diligence on me, they'd looked me up, and, you know, I book say nothing is about this murder in 1972, and at the end of the book, I say, I figured out who did it, and as a book, it has a kind of unusually satisfying narrative because, I think that's kind of a who done it, and the end I say, I'm going to tell you who done it, but that was a really unusual situation of a sort that I think is unlikely to repeat in my career, and so one thing I wanted to tell them was

don't get into this with me, because you think in some unspoken way that this is like a quidbro quo, and I'm going to solve the mystery, because that feels like it would be unfair to you, and in that there's kind of a false promise, and unfair to me, and that it just puts way too much pressure on me to deliver something I might not be able to, and then the other thing I said to them was, I don't want to pressure you, I don't want to twist your arm, this is totally up to you,

“I don't need to write this story, but if you're going to get into it, if you want to do this,”

if we're all going to hold hands and jump, the one thing I need to insist on is that there's no takebacks that you can't say yesterday, and then two months from now, and I've been working, get cold feet. Can you talk a little bit more about the sort of rare access you had to them, you know, hundreds of hours of talking with them texting with them on a very regular basis, in a way, maybe that

you have never had access to primary sources before, what was that like, and as importantly,

how did that result in the type of book that you were able to write? It was really something, I mean, I'm often writing about people who are dead or don't want to talk to me, or in some cases we're threatening to sue me, even though I'm writing about them, and in situations where I've had access to people, I haven't had quite the same degree of access as I did here, just in terms of the, you know, the number of hours logged, and there was another kind of extraordinary

thing, which is that the settlers as soon as Zach went missing, so actually before they knew he was dead when he was just missing, they were having conversations trying to figure out where he was and what was going on, and they were talking to a private investigator and talking to the police and talking to Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma, and Matthew Brettler, because he's a particular kind of person, I think because he knew that it was a high pressure moment, and he was going to

want to be, he's very analytical, he was going to want to be all this sort of study, all this stuff afterwards. He started recording everything on his iPhone, so they had this archive of all these conversations they had in the days and weeks after Zach went missing and was ultimately declared dead, and that was extraordinary because I initially had had conversations with them in which they told me their memories of these encounters, but then subsequently they gave me the iPhone recordings,

because their memory was kind of 2020 hindsight, and that allowed me to write the book in this

very, very intimate kind of close third-person fashion where you're really right there with them,

you're kind of in their heads, and so there are things that they kind of in their naivetay in the first third of the book believe that turned out not to be true, and I thought rather than tell you everything at the top, I actually want you to, I want to sort of simulate for you

“the experience of being them, and they meet somebody and I think, oh here's the trustworthy”

person who's here to help me, little knowing that the person is lying to them, and it's going to turn out to be a snake. After the break Patrick talks about the two things that convinced him that this story should be a book. I'm Dame Brugler, I cover the NFL draft for the athletic.

Our draft guide picked up the name "The Beast," because of the crazy amount of information

that's included. I'm looking at thousands of players putting together hundreds of scouting reports. I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft. There is a lot in the beast that you simply can't find anywhere else. This is the kind of in-depth unique journalism you get from the athletic and in New York Times. You can subscribe at nytimes.com/subscribe. And this is the fourth time that I've done this, and there's really only ever been four times

right, because I mean, as people listening will know, you know, famously New Yorker articles are quite long, and there is, you know, the notion that you would get to the end of a New Yorker

“article and say, but there's so much more, you should probably be a rare occurrence. Most of the time”

what I love about it is I get to the end, and I'm done, and I move on, and I feel as though I've

really said everything I have to say about a subject. There's been four times where that was not the case. In this case, part of what was happening was that I, as I got into the story, you know, really the whole narrative turns on this night, in this apartment, in London, where you have these three guys in the apartment, Ak Prashamji and Varinasharma and Zac Brettler and Zac goes off the balcony. And there are all these kind of layers of complication as you

look at that night, so it turns out that, you know, Zac was pretending to be the son of a Russian all-agarch, but actually, Ak bar was kind of pretending to be something he wasn't, and Varinder was sort of pretending to be something he wasn't. So there's all this kind of spiraling intrigue. The two things that inclined me to think it might be a book were the back stories of those three guys in that apartment were all really rich and fascinating. So if you look at their family histories,

so I didn't, I didn't mention this at all in the piece, but Zac Brettler had two grandfathers, actually were shell and Matthew, both of their fathers, who had survived the Holocaust, and they both fled Europe and ended up in England as teenagers, having lost virtually their whole families been murdered in the camps. And so you have this moment with these two young guys in the 1940s when they arrive in London, and they have to reinvent themselves. You know, they've lost everything,

and they have to decide who am I going to be? And I started to think about, you know, Zac's transformation into Zac is my love, billionaire son of a Russian oligarch, and the notion of self-reinvention in general. And then I started to think about how London had reinvented itself in recent decades. And I thought that there might be an opportunity to kind of trace the family's histories back of these three guys in the apartment, noticing some of these weird echoes that happened across

the generations in these three different families. And in the process, tell a story about how London has changed. Hopefully not in a way that we'd feel like a big doorstep, there's a colleague mind at the New Yorker in the truck line who has this beautiful line that he used when I was talking

“about this with him, but I thought about all the way through. He said, "You have to be careful”

that the laundry doesn't break the line." You have this kind of quite slender story about this family losing a son, and then trying to figure out what happened to him, and you can kind of ornament that with all this other stuff. But there's a sort of quite precise amount of stuff you can ornament it with, and too much in it will overwhelm that central threat. So that was the thing

imagine the bigger version, I got really excited. Could you talk about your relationship to London? I know you've spent a lot of time there over the years. I'm not going to say the cliché except I am actually saying the cliché of London made a main character in the book. But your book is called London Falling. The history of London certainly the modern history of it is a major factor in the events that occurred. What's your relationship to it? I should say, I mean it's funny,

the book is probably quite critical of London, but to be clear, I love London. Yeah.

My mother's from Australia, my dad's from Boston. My parents met in England. I went to grad school there right out of college. I lived in London in 2001. Made very dear friends there. And I've gone back virtually every year since. So I've sort of watched this transition happen

“over time. I think there are elements of this story that are very, very distinctive to London.”

Yeah. I don't want to overinscribe this stuff and it's done in the book with a pretty light touch. But if you're reading carefully, there are threads having to do with the British Empire and Britain's role in the world. It's a story very much about social class, which is

kind of a defining element of British life in a way that I don't think it quite is in the U.S.

So there are aspects of the story. They're very, very specific to London. But, you know, having said that, some of what the story is about is the kind of hustle culture or the aspirational culture that we all live in, which is a very American kind of culture as well. I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking this last night, which is that obviously it's a very British story. It's about English people, takes place in London. But the dynamic that you describe

in which a young man is surrounded by wealth, maybe spending a little too much time on social media, is watching too many Hollywood movies and believes that he could enter a world and maybe even

“pass in that world for being someone who is richer and more important than he actually is.”

There have always been strivers in English society, fakes, and whatever. But it does strike

me as very American as well in some way and very capitalist, I guess, as it maybe that's the same thing. Completely. Yeah. And it's funny because I mean part of the story that I tell in the book is that, you know, so the Russians come, right, in the '90s and the '90s. But before the Russians, it was the Americans. Like the first big invasion happened in 1987 when Margaret Thatcher deregulates the banking sector. And there's this flood of American bankers who come in and they're the ones

who, you know, are paying lots of money for apartments. They want to send their kids to good schools. They want to drive BMWs. They're into conspicuous consumption in a way that even wealth the people in the UK up to that point really weren't in quite the same fashion. And, you know, Zach Brettler grows up obsessed with American movies. American movies about hustlers. This is a story in which almost everyone is in a kind of fake it till you make it mode.

And it's funny, you know, one of Zach's favorite movies was the Wolf of Wall Street. And I guess there's a way in which we could think of that movie as a cautionary tale.

“He did not see it as a cautionary tale. I think for him it was a sort of aspirational thing.”

When Zach turns 18, he incorporates his own business and he names it after the crooked brokerage firm in the Wolf of Wall Street. So the line between fantasy and reality was a little little fuzzy for him. And I think he got to kind of drunk on that aspirational culture. I really would love to talk about parenthood a little bit. You're a parent. I'm a parent. One of the threads I was not expecting in this book was the way in which the story made me think

about just the very idea of parenthood. What's our responsibility as parents? How much rope should you give your kids in order to chart their own life and make their own mistakes? There's a lot of people like to say they need to make their own mistakes. How much can you even know your kid in the end? You know, I really was just struck by the journey that Rochelle and Matthew had to take, learning not just about the death of their child, but that's so much about what they believe they knew

about Zach was just completely false and maybe they did not know their child at all. It really hit me at the end of the whole story. Yeah, it's so hard. I mean, I don't, you know, I have two adolescent sons who are, it's a similar age gap to Zach and his brother Joe and they're very competitive with each other. I mean, there are all kinds of ways in which I could relate to some of the dilemmas that the brothers were dealing with. I also find that, I mean, setting aside for a moment,

though weirdness of this kind of period in history that we're living through where, you know,

then kind of 10, a lot of 12 years old and which is a pretty time where young kids have pretty unfettered access to phones. I mean, they still do, but it's just the the phone and it's role in sort of shaping the psyche of a young person is its own issue. But leaving that aside for a moment, I think even when you were I were growing up at the nature of adolescence, right, is that you need to kind of break away from your parents to some degree. There's some moment as the parent of a

child where you see some strange thing that didn't come from you and it didn't come from the other parent and it's manifesting in the child. And it's unclear. Is this some weird external stimulus that's coming from somewhere else? Is it some sort of throwback recessive gene that's manifesting? They suddenly become someone you don't necessarily recognize. And I think the thing that's so hard

“is that's I think you could argue essential in in a person's transition into adulthood that they”

break away in that manner. The challenge for the brothers was, what do you do? You know, do you when Zach starts to change and become something that worries them? Do you lock him up? Do you try to sort of smother him with control and protect him from all the stuff that's out there? Or do you, you know, is there a danger if you do that that he'll you'll drop him away? Yeah. I think part of what has fueled their relentless investigation in the years since Zach died is a feeling of

God, you know, what could we have done? They're sort of playing back the tape and trying to find

exit ramps that they missed. I was incredibly struck. I've never read Andrew Salomon's

far from the tree. It's quite a tone. It's a incredible look. It's supposed to be a great book, classic piece of nonfiction. But the quote that you take away from that or that you put in here the truth about parenthood is that it abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, really struck me like a lightning bolt. So I was listening to the audiobook of this on a

“plane last week. I was like, oh my God, is this what is going to happen to me and my 11 year old?”

Yeah, and it's and it's sort of figuring out what that should mean, you know, what does that mean day to day, right? And it's also fascinating because the brothers both grew up in a different era, they grew up in a time of like pretty less a fair parenting. And they turned out all right. And then by the time they were parents, I have a little riff in the book about all the things that parents are expected to do now, but it's the opposite of less a fair. Parents are unbelievably

involved in the lives of their children as compared to, you know, practically any earlier generation. And yet there's that idea that you use, it's a kind of fantasy to think that you actually have real, that you can exert, exert real control in terms of how your kid is going to turn out. Yeah, I don't like it. It scares me too. We are going to take a break. And when we come back, Patrick answers some very specific questions about

books. And he's also going to talk about the classic novel that he is only just reading

for the first time. So the New York Times book review for more than a decade has asked authors

new and old a recurring set of questions about their reading as part of a series that we call by the book. This is something we've run in print for a very long time. We are now doing it as part of this fantastic show. I have several extremely specific questions for you about your reading

“life books that you're reading in the like. And I would like it answer them. Can you do that?”

I can't. I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to give you different answers than I give what I did this in print. But this is a good challenge. Unfortunately, I read a lot. I'm looking at the shelves behind you. I believe it. Okay. Patrick ran and keep. What books are currently on your nightstand? So I have a huge stack of books on my nightstand in part

because I confess to you that I do not always finish all the books on my nightstand. I start more

than I finish. I have a book called Season of Fury, but it's not yet out. It's by Rosina Ali, a former colleague of mine and a friend of mine about Islamophobia in America, which I'm about to start and I think should be amazing. It actually grows out of work that she's done some of it in the New York Times. Rosina is incredible. And I have a novel that I reread periodically just as kind of comfort food. It makes me feel not even comfort food is probably the wrong way to

a novel I read when it came out and I revisit every few years. Wonderful. That's sort of a 9/11

of Jason book, right? It came around. It's actually about, it came out afterwards, but 9/11,

“I'm ways that I won't divulge 9/11 comes up in it and extraordinary book. Why do you reread it?”

What does it make you feel? I think it's beautifully written. The characters are wonderful. It has a kind of dramatic inevitability. The gears all sort of, they sort of kick in in a way that you don't see coming. But also it's sad in a world, you know, I graduated from college in 1999 in New York and was back in New York again not long after 9/11. It's just sad in a world I recognize. I will say there's a kind of strange thing that started to happen to me as I near 50, which is that when I

revisit certain works of culture, I find that I relate to different characters than I did before. It's really unsettling. What else has happened with? It happened in a big, this is going to sound darker than it is, so bear with me. But I think probably the greatest podcast ever made was S-Town, at least today. And that's another one that I revisit every few years. And it's hosted by, you know, like a young public radio guy who was probably in as, you know, 30s when he made it. And when it

came out, how many years ago, he was sort of my proxy. He was my virtual. I related to him. And it's about this guy who's this kind of very depressed 49-year-old guy in Alabama who keeps reading newspaper and despairing about what's happening in the world. And when I relish into it about six months ago, it was really kind of unsettling. But I found my whole, my point of view character had

“changed. That's fantastic. I mean, I think it myself is essentially still in my 30s. What's going on?”

But it was also just the idea that this guy is kind of constantly going on about environmental devastation. And it's this idea of kind of, you know, frankly, how do you wake up in the morning? And read the first 10 stories in the New York Times and then proceed into your day with any spirit of optimism. That's the thing he's wrestling with. And I related to that in a scarily profound way. No, that's not, I agree. That's not dark at all. Okay. Patrick, what is your favorite book

that you think no one else is heard of? Okay, so this is not necessarily a book that anyone, well, it's an out-of-print book, but it's one that I really love. I've always been very into them and love the work of Steven Sodaberg. He's somebody I've tried to profile for years

for the New Yorker, but he never wants to never want to play ball. And his first movie was sex

lies in video tape and favor in the UK published not long after that came out. So we're in the 90s now. Published the screenplay for sex lies in video tape, but also included a diary that Sodaberg

“kept from the moment he started writing the script until the moment that the movie was. I think”

it goes either to Sundance or it may go all the way that can. Where he wins the big prize and famously his speech, he was all of 24 years old or something and this, he gets up to the podium and says, "Well, it's all downhill from here." But it's his diary and it's an incredible record of just a really, really brilliant creative mind. In the matter of about a week over the winter holidays staying with his parents in Louisiana, cranking out the script and then setting up

the financing of the cast and all the rest of it and then making the movie and describing directing his first feature. It's wonderful. I have a feeling it's actually so personal that that may be part of the reason that it went out of print and he, I don't know whether he was involved in the kind of

discontinuing, but it's, you know, I never have to do. I have to do some insider trading here and

go on a eBay right after this conversation. Yeah, exactly. Before we exactly before we publish it, I'll show you the copy. You know he's like a crazy reader, right? He just, I do. He reads so many novels and watches. You've seen the list that he puts out over here. I wait for it every day. He's insane. Yeah. Yeah. And he's got this book. You know what this book. He's writing a book right now. I cannot wait to get my hands on this. He's writing a book which is all about directing, but it's about

the movie Jaws. He's obsessed with Jaws. Yes. What? Yes. Yes. I'm so excited for this book.

the Oscars Museum. Did you? How was it? It's awesome. Oh, man. Cool. Okay. We have a couple more

“questions here. What is the best book you have ever received as a gift? My first book was a book called”

Chatter that I wrote when I was in my 20s. I was really young. I don't think it's a very good book, but I was, you know, kind of figuring out I was still sort of learning what I was doing. And it's about the National Security Agency, the NSA. It's kind of a very post-9/11 book. And it turns out the NSA is a really difficult subject to write about. Especially if you don't really know what you're doing as an investigative journalist, which was me. And my wonderful editor for that book is a woman named Eileen Smith.

And when I was halfway through, Eileen gave me out of sheer rage by Jeff Dyer, which is a great book that I'd recommend to anybody, but it's very, very, very funny book. But it's a... Do you hate Florence about? Yeah. It's about Dyer Florence, but really what it's about is how how impossible it is for Jeff Dyer to write a book about Dyer's Lawrence. And it was just the most inspired, you know, it's just like what a moment of inspiration on Eileen's part to, who's this guy

writing a book about a spy agency. And she gives me this book by Jeff Dyer. And it was, it was probably

“the most thoughtful gift to a book I can remember. That's a great gift. Patrick, are there any”

classic novels that you've only recently read for the first time? Oh yes, so I'm embarrassed to say,

and I'm still, this is still in progress. I... There's this thing that they do, listeners may not know this, but there's this thing they do now where when you get a signed copy of a book that's, you know, you buy to the book's orbit, it's already, it's got the stick around, it says it's signed. Sometimes it's because the author has gone and signed the books. But what they do now in advance of publication is they will before they bind the book, send what they call "tippants," which are just

these pages, these blank pages that are going to be bound into the book. And on this new book, I was sent thousands and thousands of, I don't know how many, I mean, a whole dining room table was covered in these tippants. And I had spent months just signing my name on all of these thousands of pages that would eventually get bound into these book. This is both in the U.S. and also for the UK edition. And I decided, all right, I'm going to listen to an audio book while I do this,

and I need to get something really substantial. And I actually thought that I would, it was kind of an interesting question when I finished the book first or the signing first. And I ended up signing,

did finishing the signing first, the middle March, which I'd never read. Wow, the version

hall on a wrote down her name because she's so good. There are different versions. The version I got is Juliette Stevenson is the woman reading. She's phenomenal. It is such a funny book in a way that I don't think I had fully appreciated. And she has this kind of perfect dry delivery. It's fantastic. But weirdly because I, it was like a thing I did, was I, I signed and I listened and then I finished the signing. So now I need to come up with some excuse to go back to it. Patrick, are there

books that you find yourself returning to time and again? There are a bunch. Yeah, I mean, in cold blood as a book, I go back to quite a bit. I would tell you I'd go back to Robert

“Carrow as if I've read everything covered a cover, but the truth is it's like that's a kind of”

buffet table at which I graze periodically. It's very inspiring. And I did read the power broker, covered a cover when I was young when I actually was in college. And I have more stamina for that kind of thing. But most of that I go back and kind of dip into those. There are novels. I mean, it's, they're very sort of specific novels. I really love presumed innocent Scotteros first novel.

Wow, a readable book. I read it in law school. It's just amazing. I love the secret history

by Donna Tart. And, and finally, my, it's one of the best. So great. And, um, and it holds up again and again and again. And, finally, enough, my, my older boy who has had periods where he's a great reader and periods where he's not as engaged. What's funny is he's read it about three times. And, in his case, I keep saying it's too soon for you to read that, you know, you need to read other books. And he loves that book as well. That's so great. Yeah. I mean, there's any number of them

that I go back to. The last samurai by Helen to it. Really good reader. That could go on. You could, but you shouldn't, because we have to end this conversation. Patrick, thank you so much for joining the book review to talk about your new book, London Falling. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl. It's edited by Larissa Anderson

Adalia Hadad. We want to hear what you think about the show. So send us an email at the book review at nytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.