‘London Falling’ by Patrick Radden Keefe

This book has been one of the top sellers of the summer, and the reasons for that soon become clear once you pick it up and start reading. It is a fascinating story, compellingly told by a highly accomplished investigative reporter who knows exactly how to pace his narrative and to write about some difficult subjects in a balanced and accessible manner.

This is ostensibly a book that might be categorised as belonging to ‘the true crime genre’, but it is also a thoughtful exploration of some of the social change we have seen in London over recent decades, for good and ill. It is furthermore, in my view, a superb example of outstanding, contemporary literary non-fiction.

On 29th November 2019, a 19-year-old Londoner called Zac Brettler jumped from a balcony at Riverwalk, a luxury apartment building that stands across the Thames from the headquarters of MI6. As he fell, his body hit the embankment and was subsequently recovered from the river.

Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, were naturally devastated and bewildered. Their son had been intelligent, imaginative and ambitious. The suggestion that he had taken his own life made no sense to them and they suspected that there was much more to his death. The coroner ultimately recorded an open verdict. This book tries to establish what exactly happened to him and why, in the process uncovering a fascinating and extraordinary series of stories.

The first part concerns the way that Zac – a boy from a fairly standard, comfortable, professional middle-class home – had, while at school, mixed with the children of some seriously wealthy people who had settled in London from all over the world. He had apparently determined that he wanted that kind of lifestyle too, and in order to start achieving this ‘dream’, had developed for himself a double life, reinventing himself for public consumption as one Zac Ismailov, supposedly the son of a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch. He let it be thought that he had access to an enormous family fortune, and this unsurprisingly brought him into contact with some decidedly dangerous individuals from London's underworld. These included a criminal gangland enforcer known as ‘Indian Dave’, who was living in the apartment at Riverwalk from which Zac supposedly jumped to his death, and a businessman called Akbar Shamji, who Patrick Radden Keefe strongly suspects knows more about what really happened than he is prepared to say.

The book appears to have been written primarily for an American audience, and this means that the author is obliged to explain a lot of things about London and our recent national history that most British readers will find a touch basic at times. But this does not in any way make the book any less compelling, as chapter by chapter we find out more about Zac’s deceptions and the variety of people he came into contact with in the year or so before he died.

And, as in the best novels, there are plenty of equally interesting sub-plots too. Some concern Zac’s maternal grandfather, whom many older British readers will remember well. His name was Hugo Gryn, and he was a leading rabbi in the 1980s and 1990s, who famously appeared every Monday morning in the ‘Thought for the Day’ slot on the BBC Radio 4 early morning Today Programme when it was rather more widely listened to than it is nowadays. I will refrain here from including spoilers, but one of the pleasures of reading this book was the discovery that Rabbi Gryn was, somewhat contrary to his public image, all too human a personality.

The second half of the book is concerned, in the main, with the police investigation which followed Zac’s death and which ultimately failed to lead to any criminal charges being brought. Patrick Radden Keefe describes how he interviewed all the witnesses himself, before concluding that the Metropolitan Police could have done a lot more. There are suggestions of the need to protect informers and some of the evidence in favour of foul play is persuasive, but ultimately it is impossible to prove for certain whether this was a suicide, a murder, a stunt that misfired or something in between, such as a suicide precipitated by threats etc. We do thus get a somewhat inconclusive ending.

That might be problematic if the book did not have another additional purpose beyond telling the immediate story of the circumstances surrounding one young man’s tragic death, namely a more general exploration of modern London’s recent capacity to attract people from all over the world who bring with them unimaginable sums of personal wealth, some of which has questionable origins. The way that money now tends to drive conceptions of social status in place of the established British class system is a particularly interesting feature of this book. It can therefore also be read as a thoughtful and very accomplished work of contemporary history.

Most of all, though, it is no more or less than a damn good, highly compelling read.