Patrick Radden Keefe’s books investigate the Snakehead gang in New York City, explore The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and expose the criminal underworld in London. But his own story began right here in Dorchester.
Last Tuesday (April 21), the 49-year-old Keefe returned to an unfamiliar space on familiar Dot Ave. in Fields Corner to sign copies of his recently released book, “London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for the Truth.” Sitting in Just Book-ish with a sharpie in hand and a stack of books to his side, he discussed his upbringing in Ashmont in an interview with The Reporter.
“It was amazing, I loved it,” he said. “We moved there in 1979 to Beaumont Street, and I grew up in a big old, falling-apart Victorian house with my parents, brother, and sister. I had a whole bunch of cousins and family; my father’s brother lived over on Ashmont Hill, and one of his sisters also lived in the neighborhood. There was a lot of family all the time; it was great.”
He added: “I was here from the age of three; it was a great place to grow up. I grew up taking the T, eating Vietnamese food in this neighborhood; it was really a pretty wonderful childhood.”
Living in Dorchester was pretty sweet, and not just because of frequent trips to the Ice Cream Smith.
“I still go back and get it. I take my kids now, it’s great,” said Keefe. “I get a hot fudge sundae with hot marshmallow, which nobody does anymore, sweet cream ice cream with Reese’s cups mixed in.”
When he wasn’t indulging in desserts, he enjoyed singing in the choir at The Parish of All Saints in Ashmont and stopping for meals on Dot Ave. Pho Hoa is a favorite.
But while he called Dorchester home, much of his time early on was spent just south of the city.
“I lived in Dorchester, but I went to Milton Academy, so I went to this fancy private school ten minutes away, but it felt like a world away,” he said between signatures. “The contrast between the world of Milton and the world of Dorchester and the fact that they were so close but so different, I think, informed my approach to my work and the world now.
“I am often noticing those kinds of contrasts, and I’m trying to sort of, when I do a story, plunge into these different places and see them and understand them.”
Keefe’s deep dives into different places began between the shelves of magazines, journals, and newspapers at Cox Library.
“I used to wait for my mother to pick me up from school. There was a periodicals room at Milton, and I would read the New Yorker. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a novelist or a journalist or what have you, but I knew I liked writing, I was good at writing, and it was sort of the only thing I could see myself doing.”
After graduating from Milton, he left Boston for New York, where he studied history at Columbia University. He then spent time in England, where he earned a master of philosophy in international relations degree from Cambridge University and a master of science in new media and economic information systems diploma from the London School of Economics.
“I started pitching stories in college, and I just got all these rejection letters for years,” Keefe said. “It took me eight years of pitching to the New Yorker to have them finally accept a freelance article, and then I freelanced for another six years before they gave me a full-time job.”
While all that was going on, he found the time to earn his Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 2005.
“By the time I got a full-time job at the New Yorker, I had two kids,” he said. “It takes a while, and I think the thing about being a reporter that is great is even now most of my week is calling people who don’t want to talk to me, hang up on me, don’t get back to me. Being a good reporter keeps you humble. The job is rejection, and it’s all about having thick skin.”
Keefe’s identity as a dogged reporter is backed by the fact that while reporting for and writing his best-selling “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” he traveled to Ireland, where he has family ties to Donegal, multiple times to interview more than 100 people.
“It started as a story in the New Yorker,” he said about the book. “I read an obituary in the New York Times of a woman named Dolours Price who was the first woman to join the IRA as a front-line soldier. I read her obituary, and I thought her life sounded fascinating. I always thought of The Troubles as a very male story, so it was interesting learning about this woman out there on the front lines. That was what pulled me into it.”
He noted that the book, which was released in 2018, didn’t take off right away. “It took a while,” he said. “I think that the stories about The Troubles that I grew up with were pretty two dimensional a lot of the time. There wasn’t a lot of nuance; everyone was a hero or a villain. What I learned when I got into it and started to talk to people who took part in The Troubles was that it was a much more complicated story. I honestly didn’t know whether Irish Americans were ready for a more complicated version of the story.”
He added, “At the beginning, they thought, ‘We know this history, why would we need an American to come in and tell us about this?’ It took a while, but I ended up going back and doing the Belfast book festival. The interesting thing was that it was mostly young people in their 20s and 30s who, when they came to get their books signed afterwards, said, ‘My parents lived through this, and they never talked about this.’”
The book’s popularity resulted in an adaptation – a miniseries of the same name on FX on Hulu.
In 2023, while the series was in production in London, Keefe learned about the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who reportedly jumped from the fifth floor of a luxury apartment into the Thames River, where his body was later discovered.
“London Falling” explores what happened before and after the young man’s violent end.
“The book is about these parents kind of becoming detectives after their kid dies, trying to get to the bottom of what happened to him, but also trying to understand their adolescent son in a way that they hadn’t been able to when he was alive,” Keefe said.
“After he died, his parents made this shocking discovery. As a teenager, he had been living a secret double life. He had an alter ego that they didn’t know about, and he had been moving around London pretending he was the son of a Russian oligarch. He got mixed up with some pretty dicey people, and he ended up dead.”
Since its release just a few weeks ago, the book has reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller List and the Sunday Times (London) Best Seller List as well as in Ireland and Canada.
“I don’t really know how to wrap my mind around it,” Keefe said. “That’s more than I could have hoped for, but it’s thrilling. It’s exciting that people are reading the book and responding to it.
“I went out on a tour that was ten cities in ten days. On the third or fourth night, there were all these people who showed up who had already finished reading the book, and it had come out just a few days before. I don’t know that the magic of that is ever going to wear off.”
Between book tour stops in New York and Seattle, Keefe returned to his boyhood stomping grounds. His brother, who still lives in the neighborhood, told him about Just Book-Ish, and Keefe told The Reporter that it was the perfect spot to leave behind some signed copies.
“I love to see a new bookstore open up anywhere, but particularly here in Dorchester,” he said. “There wasn’t a place like this when I was growing up, so it’s great that it’s here. I wanted to just come and check it out and support it anyway I can.”
Next stops on the tour include: Seattle, Portland, Cleveland, then Ireland, England, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.
“It’s a very solitary thing, to write a book,” Keefe said. “Then you … put it out in the world, and to be able to go out on the road and meet people who have read the work and engaged with it, it’s really cool. That never gets old.”
