For Sackler exposé writer Patrick Radden Keefe, truth is always stranger than fiction

Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of “Say Nothing,” “Empire of Pain” and the new collection “Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks.” On the Shelf Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks By Patrick Radden Keefe Doubleday: 368 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. These three are brought vividly to life in “Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks,” a collection of Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker articles. The emphasis in “Rogues,” out this week, is on criminals, but the stories cover a wide range of people, including celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain; a computer technician who revealed the secrets of the Swiss banking industry; the death penalty lawyer who defended the Boston Marathon bomber; and producer Mark Burnett, who resurrected Donald Trump with “The Apprentice.” Speaking to The Times via videoconference, Keefe outlined the thematic links among his stories, as well as the art of making people care about random topics and the limits of what journalists can accomplish, in an interview that has been edited for length and clarity. You’ll never read a piece by me where you get a first section that’s colorful and engaging and then you get a paragraph break and then it says, “And now, a thousand words on the history of corn.” The thing I always remind myself is that I’m interviewing people who are specialists or immersed in the details of the story, but the reader may know nothing about the topic.