Latest / The Book Brief Project / London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe | The Boy, the Lie, and the City

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London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe | The Boy, the Lie, and the City · The Book Brief Project

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Speaker 1: All through the spring and summer of 2026, a city
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Speaker 1: read a book about itself and argued over what it
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Speaker 1: found there. London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe went straight
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Speaker 1: to number one in Britain. The argument it started was
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Speaker 1: about money. It was about the dark mansions and the
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Speaker 1: foreign fortunes parked in property like cash and a safe,
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Speaker 1: and about a police force that seemed too tired or
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Speaker 1: too careful to open the safe. And near the back
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Speaker 1: of the book, Past the gangsters and the detectives, there
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Speaker 1: is a rabbi, dead since 1996, whom almost nobody in
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Speaker 1: that argument mentioned, and who may be the figure the
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Speaker 1: whole story was quietly circling. That rabbi had a grandson,
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Speaker 1: and the book opens with the grandson on a balcony.
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Speaker 1: Keefe built a book in which nearly everyone is pretending
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Speaker 1: to be someone else, and that leaves a question worth
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Speaker 1: holding on to the whole way through. If everybody here
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Speaker 1: was an imposter, why does only one of them, the city,
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Speaker 1: end up carrying the boy's death? Keefe has worked the
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Speaker 1: same way for most of two decades. He finds a
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Speaker 1: narrow case and uses it as a key to a
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Speaker 1: much larger room. In The Snakehead, a grandmother running a
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Speaker 1: smuggling operation out of New York's Chinatown opened up the
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Speaker 1: traffic in human beings from southern China. In Say Nothing,
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Speaker 1: The disappearance of a widowed mother of 10 in Belfast
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Speaker 1: opened up the whole moral wreckage of the troubles. The
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Speaker 1: case is always small. The room is always enormous. This time,
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Speaker 1: something was different because the room did not wait for
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Speaker 1: him to find it. By the time Keefe heard the story,
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Speaker 1: in 2023, the boy's parents had been investigating their son's
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Speaker 1: death on their own for more than three years. They
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Speaker 1: had pushed against a stalled police inquiry and an inquest
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Speaker 1: that refused to reach a conclusion in the middle of
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Speaker 1: a pandemic. Keefe offered to help, and he became, in effect,
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Speaker 1: the family's detective. That decision gave him access no reporter
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Speaker 1: could buy. It also gave the book a loyalty, and
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Speaker 1: that loyalty is worth keeping in mind as the story unfolds.
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Speaker 1: Here is what the investigation could establish. At 2.24 in
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Speaker 1: the morning on the 29th of November, 2019, A security
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Speaker 1: camera on the headquarters of MI6 across the Thames recorded
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Speaker 1: a figure on a brightly lit fifth-floor balcony of a
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Speaker 1: luxury building called Riverwalk. The figure paced for a while,
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Speaker 1: then jumped, apparently aiming for the dark water. He didn't
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Speaker 1: reach it. His hip struck the embankment wall, and he
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Speaker 1: went into the river, most likely unconscious. At dawn, the
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Speaker 1: tide left him on the shore. He was Zach Brettler,
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Speaker 1: 19 years old. a recent graduate of an expensive private school,
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Speaker 1: raised by comfortable parents in Maida Vale. The flat he
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Speaker 1: jumped from was owned by a Saudi princess and occupied
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Speaker 1: by a career gangster known around London as Indian Dave.
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Speaker 1: His real name was Verinder Sharma, and he had spent
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Speaker 1: decades collecting debts for people who preferred not to collect
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Speaker 1: them personally. One of his methods, in Keefe's reporting, was
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Speaker 1: heating knives on a stove in front of the person
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Speaker 1: who owed, The scene should have told the police a
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Speaker 1: great deal. Zach's jaw was broken, and the pathologist could
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Speaker 1: not explain the break by the fall. A bankrupt businessman,
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Speaker 1: the third man in the flat earlier that night, had
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Speaker 1: once messaged a friend from that apartment about heating knives
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Speaker 1: and cleaning up blood. Sharma answered nearly every police question
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Speaker 1: with no comment. The businessman gave two interviews full of contradictions,
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Speaker 1: and the navigation data from his car did not match
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Speaker 1: his account. The detectives never swabbed the apartment for blood.
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Speaker 1: In the weeks after the death, both men offered the
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Speaker 1: family their help, warmly, right up until the questions started
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Speaker 1: pointing at them. Sharma died of an overdose in that
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Speaker 1: same apartment in December 2020. Two years later, the coroner
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Speaker 1: returned an open verdict, which is the legal way of
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Speaker 1: saying nobody can say. His parents learned the rest only
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Speaker 1: after he died. To Sharma, and to a whole world
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Speaker 1: of private members' clubs, and borrowed glamour, their son was
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Speaker 1: not Zach Bredler at all. He was Zach Ismailoff, son
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Speaker 1: of a Russian oligarch who did not exist, about to
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Speaker 1: inherit something like $ 270 million. He took conspicuous rides around
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Speaker 1: Mayfair and told people he lived at One Hyde Park,
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Speaker 1: the most expensive address in the city. The family car,
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Speaker 1: Keefe notes, was a Mazda. Zach daydreamed about a Bugatti.
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Speaker 1: The lie had a long prehistory. At school, he told
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Speaker 1: classmates that his mother was dead and his father dealt arms,
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Speaker 1: and the classmates saw through him and said so. He
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Speaker 1: told one friend, talking about his own father's money, It's
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Speaker 1: not enough. I want to be bigger. That line is
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Speaker 1: the closest the book comes to letting us hear Zach think.
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Speaker 1: Keefe weighs the obvious literary comparison, Tom Ripley, and sets
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Speaker 1: it aside. because Ripley's con had an economic logic. Zach's
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Speaker 1: had none. There was no moment when the fictional inheritance
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Speaker 1: could turn into real money. The only possible ending was exposure,
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Speaker 1: in front of men who had already started counting their share.
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Speaker 1: The puzzle Keefe solves best is how a teenager whose
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Speaker 1: lies were transparent to schoolboys managed to fool a seasoned criminal.
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Speaker 1: The criminal was a fake, too. By the time Sharma
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Speaker 1: took the boy under his wing, he was an aging,
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Speaker 1: drug-worn gangster living on a reputation he could no longer
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Speaker 1: back up, and Zach's fortune looked like one last score.
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Speaker 1: The businessman beside them was the son of a man
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Speaker 1: who had fled the expulsions in Uganda, made a fortune
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Speaker 1: in the boom of the 80s, bought into Wembley Stadium,
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Speaker 1: and gone to prison for lying about his assets. The
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Speaker 1: son had inherited the taste for money without the money.
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Speaker 1: Zach walked the man's Weimaraner and rode around London in
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Speaker 1: the passenger seat of his Mercedes, apprenticed to someone who
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Speaker 1: was already broke. So Keefe gives you three imposters in
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Speaker 1: one room. A boy playing an heir, a gangster playing
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Speaker 1: a mentor, a bankrupt playing a rich man. In his words,
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Speaker 1: all of them were caught up in the glitzy, mercenary,
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Speaker 1: aspirational culture of modern London. That sentence is the spine
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Speaker 1: of the book. And the case Keefe builds around it
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Speaker 1: is formidable. Over 30 years, London turned itself into a
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Speaker 1: safe deposit box for the world's unexplained wealth, with mansions
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Speaker 1: bought through anonymous companies and left dark most of the year.
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Speaker 1: The money did not arrive alone. It brought the people
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Speaker 1: paid to protect it and the people paid to collect
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Speaker 1: for it. And in this case, at least, it met
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Speaker 1: a police force that seemed remarkably incurious. Zach's mother tells
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Speaker 1: Keefe she had no idea this underworld existed on her
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Speaker 1: own doorstep. By the end of the book, you believe her,
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Speaker 1: and you wonder how anyone managed to miss it. So
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Speaker 1: the book has given you the night and the men
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Speaker 1: in the flat, and the city that made room for both.
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Speaker 1: What it has not yet explained is the boy himself.
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Speaker 1: Why a 19-year-old with a loving family would lie his
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Speaker 1: way into a room he could not leave. Keefe's answer, mostly,
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Speaker 1: is the city. Zach grew up watching wealth from very close,
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Speaker 1: at a school topped up with Russian pupils, in a
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Speaker 1: feed full of yachts and watches. At one point, Keefe
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Speaker 1: even gestures towards social media algorithms. The boy in this
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Speaker 1: telling was a bright, restless kid who absorbed what London
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Speaker 1: was selling and believed it. It is a coherent answer.
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Speaker 1: It is also a convenient one, and the book seems
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Speaker 1: to know it. because near the end, Keefe opens a
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Speaker 1: door that the rest of his story has been leaning against.
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Speaker 1: Zach's grandfather was Hugo Gren. He survived Auschwitz and arrived
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Speaker 1: in Britain speaking no English. He became one of the
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Speaker 1: most loved religious voices in the country, a regular on
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Speaker 1: a moral debate program on BBC Radio. He also invented
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Speaker 1: parts of himself. He told people he had studied at Cambridge,
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Speaker 1: which he had not, and for years he kept a
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Speaker 1: second family, secret he publicly denied when the tabloids came close.
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Speaker 1: A man the country trusted to argue about right and
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Speaker 1: wrong on the radio was maintaining a private fiction the
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Speaker 1: whole time, and his own children learned the full truth
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Speaker 1: only later. Keefe tells this almost as an aside. It
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Speaker 1: is the most important aside in the book. What it
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Speaker 1: shows is that the impulse came first. A man from
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Speaker 1: a respectable family reinventing himself in front of strangers is
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Speaker 1: older than oligarch London. It was there in post-war England,
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Speaker 1: in a refugee who rebuilt his life and then decorated it,
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Speaker 1: decades before the shell companies and the Russian money arrived.
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Speaker 1: London didn't teach Zach to lie. It gave the lie
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Speaker 1: a market. Keefe sees the parallel, and he has said
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Speaker 1: in interviews that it struck him. But on the page,
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Speaker 1: the door opens and closes quickly, and the argument goes
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Speaker 1: back outside to the mansions and the money. The family
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Speaker 1: history becomes texture. The city stays the culprit. That choice
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Speaker 1: decides what the title means. If London is the culprit,
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Speaker 1: then the falling in London falling belongs to the city,
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Speaker 1: and Zack becomes the most vivid exhibit of its decline.
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Speaker 1: If the impulse came first, the fall belongs to a person,
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Speaker 1: and the city becomes what it actually was in this story,
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Speaker 1: an audience that paid far too well. The book prefers
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Speaker 1: the first reading, and its subtitle hints at why. It
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Speaker 1: calls itself a family's search for truth. and a search
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Speaker 1: conducted alongside a family has a direction before it starts.
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Speaker 1: I think I understand why, and there is nothing scandalous
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Speaker 1: in the reason. In 1990, in The Journalist and the Murderer,
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Speaker 1: Janet Malcolm described the reporter as a kind of confidence man,
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Speaker 1: someone who wins a subject's trust and then betrays it
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Speaker 1: in print. Keefe faces the opposite risk. He did not
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Speaker 1: betray the Bredelers. He became their ally and wrote a
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Speaker 1: book that is faithful to them, and that fidelity is
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Speaker 1: exactly what makes it so moving. It is also what
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Speaker 1: keeps one question politely closed. Looking hard at Zach's inner life,
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Speaker 1: at whatever made a clever boy build a fiction with
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Speaker 1: no exit, would have meant asking whether something in him
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Speaker 1: was never London's doing at all. There is no gentle
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Speaker 1: way to ask that in front of parents who have
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Speaker 1: spent years trying to prove their son was a victim.
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Speaker 1: There is an opposite mistake. In one of the books,
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Speaker 1: American reviewers came close to making it. He wanted Keefe
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Speaker 1: to probe the boy's sociopathic tendencies, as if a diagnosis
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Speaker 1: would settle the matter. It would not. Calling Zach a
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Speaker 1: sociopath is as tidy as calling him a casualty of
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Speaker 1: the city, and it is crueler. Both answers end the conversation.
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Speaker 1: What the evidence supports is less comfortable. A solitary, clever
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Speaker 1: teenager whose habit of invention was visible at school long
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Speaker 1: before any gangster heard his name, and who walked into
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Speaker 1: a city that rewarded the habit instead of noticing it.
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Speaker 1: That is a story about a boy and a place.
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Speaker 1: Keefe tells the place superbly. The boy he leaves half
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Speaker 1: in shadow. And he was a victim. in every sense
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Speaker 1: the evidence allows. The broken jaw alone rules out the
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Speaker 1: simplest version of the story. Something happened in that flat
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Speaker 1: that frightened him enough to jump toward a river in November.
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Speaker 1: Keefe's reconstruction, a boy cornered by men who had just
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Speaker 1: discovered the money was imaginary, is persuasive. One of Sharma's
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Speaker 1: old associates told him flatly that once the gangster knew
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Speaker 1: he had been fooled, Zach was never leaving that apartment alive.
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Speaker 1: I accept that reading. What I can't accept is the
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Speaker 1: idea that the city explains the boy, it explains the men,
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Speaker 1: and why nobody official looked very hard. It does not
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Speaker 1: explain why a 19-year-old needed to be bigger, and the
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Speaker 1: book's own best chapter suggests that need was older than
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Speaker 1: any of it. None of this lessens what Keefe achieved.
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Speaker 1: The death never made the London papers when it happened.
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Speaker 1: and more than four years passed before his reporting put
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Speaker 1: it in front of the world. He traced the men
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Speaker 1: and their money with a patience the official investigation never managed.
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Speaker 1: He found what the police did not, and he wrote
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Speaker 1: it with a calm that never cheapens the death at
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Speaker 1: the center of it. The disagreement is with the shape
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Speaker 1: of the blame, and the evidence for that disagreement is
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Speaker 1: sitting inside his own book. If this kind of reading
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Speaker 1: suits you, one book at a time, taken slowly and
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Speaker 1: argued with, follow the book brief project. Another one is
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Speaker 1: already open on the desk. Near the end, Zach's mother
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Speaker 1: takes Keefe to the cemetery. Zach is buried next to
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Speaker 1: his grandfather. The rabbi died four years before the boy
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Speaker 1: was born, so they never met. Yet there they lie,
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Speaker 1: side by side, two people who decided the life they
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Speaker 1: were handed was not quite the life they wanted to
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Speaker 1: be seen living. A whole city spent a summer reading
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Speaker 1: London falling as a story about itself. From that grave,
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Speaker 1: it reads like a story about a family and about
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Speaker 1: how far back a lie can travel. In the cemetery,
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Speaker 1: at least, everyone has their real name.