That New Yorker profile developed into Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, one of the best books written about Northern Ireland and the history of the Troubles. At the time, he was digging with his pen into a profile of Gerry Adams, the party’s then president, and the notorious 1972 IRA killing of Jean McConville, the widowed Belfast mother of 10. In the interests of full disclosure: I have been a long-time fan of Radden Keefe’s journalism and have got to know him as a friend since I first bumped into him at a 2014 Friends of Sinn Féin fundraising gala dinner in Manhattan.

The most poignant chapter is the last on the restless chef turned travel show host Anthony Bourdain and his worldwide search for culinary Xanadu While there feels at times a thin thread drawing together these “true stories of grifters, killers, rebels and crooks” in this book of Radden Keefe’s published journalism from The New Yorker, it is the journalist’s interrogative style, laced with razor-sharp turns of phrase and his rich descriptive powers as a writer, that draws all these studies together into an intriguing rogues gallery.

Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord and serial escapee better known as El Chapo, was hardly going to speak openly about the thousands - possibly tens of thousands - of murders committed by his cartel or even confirm his prodigious consumption of Viagra - a typical example of a fascinating factoid, unearthed from some of his many sources, that Radden Keefe sprinkles through his stories that add bright textures of colour and give such life to his portraits. In Irish journalism circles, it is known as the profile: a study of an individual who declines to be interviewed built with information gleaned from people who know the person best. In the United States, editors call the form of journalism that Radden Keefe specialises in “the write-around”. This collection of tales in his latest book, Rogues, are so expertly told because he has clearly spent an obsessive amount of time running down leads, sweating spurious angles and returning to the protagonists, or those closest to them, in the end with the toughest questions as he attempts to pull all the strings together. Put simply Radden Keefe is a brilliant storyteller.

Thankfully, the world of long-form journalism is far better off this American writer found a home at The New Yorker magazine where his writing and investigative talents shine brightly. Had life taken a different course, journalist Patrick Radden Keefe might have ended up as a murder-squad detective, a code-breaking spy or a cross-examining pit bull lawyer given the evident skills he has.

Rogues true stories of grifters