A book a day: Patrick Radden Keefe: Criminals

Original language: English
Original title: Rogues: True Stories od Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
Translation: Pablo Hermida Lazcano
Year of publication: 2023.
Valuation: quite recommended

To say that Radden Keefe is creating his own genre would be absolutely exaggerated, but we must recognize his merits in a kind of segregation of a hybrid that is halfway between biographical sketch, reportage, investigative journalism and, of course, if not We would not pay attention to it, a certain intention of literary creation more based on the ways of presenting his writings (which seem to obey a certain plot progression) than on an intention (I have not detected it in any of his works) of taking creative licenses.

Criminals collects a dozen articles that Radden Keefe dedicates to personalities from the criminal world. It is varied in both its geographical and professional range. We have Mexican traffickers, Dutch common criminals, American speculators, Israeli merchants. Perhaps Keefe should be reproached for feeling more comfortable when, as in The empire of paintakes a topic and squeezes it to the point of satiation, which in these shorter articles – the longest ones barely exceed 40 pages – although I sense that many of them were commissioned by the publications for which he writes. Don’t get me wrong, any of these texts have their own value and the writer’s style is extremely entertaining and stimulating. But the extension limitation works something against it. The moment Radden Keefe limits the scope of his analysis, something, literary, is lost, or at least blurred. The psychological profile is not so deep, the information that is accumulated for the sake of the overall view, of putting it in context, is necessarily inferior and the whole suffers. It is not that the “characters” who parade here are less memorable, or that the events in which they are involved are less memorable. How to forget Chapo Guzmán or Monzer Al-Kassar. Simply that the format is a little short for its deserves.

Radden Keefe remains rigorous, determined, effective at all times, there should be no doubt. Criminals left behind simply if we compare it with his most extensive and ambitious works with respect to which, if I may use the simile, this collection of articles seems a promising collection of demos.

Other works by Raddn Keefe reviewed in ULAD: here