Secret story of an unsolved crime

A man walks past a burning building during Troubles (National Library of Ireland) .C. Doyle (National Library of Ireland)

The 1972 abduction in Belfast of Jean McConville, a widow and mother of 10 children, was always surrounded by a thick and ominous silence.

Her body was finally found in 2003, more than three decades later.

But no one knew for sure why they took her out of the house that night in front of her children, saying she would be back in a couple of hours, what happened, why she did not return and who killed her.

In 2010, Dolours Price, a prominent member of the IRA who participated in that crime, decided to look back in an interview in which she spoke of that fateful night, and pointed to the widow as a confidant of the British army - an extreme that

His body was finally found in 2003, more than three decades later.

But no one knew for sure why they took her out of the house that night in 1972.

Perhaps it is not entirely strange that the title of the last and definitive contribution to the history of this crime resonates that fatal silence that accompanied the

, as the conflict in Northern Ireland is called.

is the journalistic investigation in which the American Patrick Radden Keefe addresses those

that turned Northern Ireland into a war zone and left some 3,500 dead.

The book won the Orwell Prize, that of the Critics Circle of the United States and was a finalist in the National Book Award, and, two years after its success in the Anglo-Saxon world, where it was hailed as one of the books of the year by the criticism, its version in Spanish arrives from the hand of Reservoir Books (in Catalan, Periscopi).

An obituary for Dolours Price that spoke of interviews she gave and an oral history file at Boston University with members of the IRA was what put Radden Keefe on the trail of this unsolved crime.

“The first thing that surprised me, as someone who came to this topic again, is how alive the story is.

Things that happened before I was born still feel electric and dangerous in Northern Ireland today, ”explains this 44-year-old reporter from

magazine by videoconference

His work ranges from reporting on El Chapo Guzmán to a memorable profile of the chef Anthony Bourdain with whom he spent almost a year traveling.

Now, he has just launched the

on the role that the CIA played in the gestation and dissemination of that song by the German

Scorpions, and he is also preparing a book about the Sackler family, philanthropists and owners of the pharmaceutical company that sells oxycontin, the substance behind the brutal opioid crisis in the United States.

But the story of the kidnapping of the widow Jean McConville caught him, he confesses, not only because of "the inherently very dramatic material with lies and secrets, spies and counter-spies, prison escapes ...", but also because of the expressive capacity, the way that they characters — none of whom he has met — had to tell the story.

Radden Keefe is a master at recounting events in depth from people who are reluctant to talk to him.

He says the key is to find all the records that allow you to recreate the details and get as close to the characters as possible.

Although he managed to solve McConville's crime (it happens in the last chapter, when reviewing some recordings, although it would be better not to reveal the enigma), the author says that he did not want to make a mystery novel.

Radden Keefe still makes use of the tools of the novel and this accelerates and sets the tone for

I've always thought that there are things about them that are very useful to the non-fiction writer.

I'm not sorry, part of the challenge is thinking about how you take a topic that seems remote and may even be intimidatingly complex and get the reader inside.

The answer for me is in the characters ”.

Are you heir to the New Journalism?

“I don't feel that my source of inspiration is there, there was something garish in that movement, something with which I do not identify.

I have been most influenced by Robert Caro [renowned American biographer who has spent several decades focused on the history of Lyndon Johnson], who is a rigorous reporter, and also knows how to write a scene and get inside and make you feel that you hear the voice and know the person;

that you are seeing it ”.

He claims to have had mixed feelings about everyone he writes about in the book.

His ideas about what happened were changing.

“People are complicated and history is complicated and

is often written

in a way that tends to simplify.

Gerry Adams is either a total hero or a horrible villain.

It always ends in the cartoon.

But the truth is that he is an incredibly complicated person and if you think you can simplify it, you are not thinking enough.

The same can be said of Dolours Price, someone capable of touching greatness and also doing terrible things ”, he reflects.

"As with a friend or a member of your family, knowing someone well, and thinking about them in an honest way, is having mixed feelings and changing your mind because we are all complex."

When he started reading about the

was shocked by the many versions of what happened and also how partisan they were.

"You can read two books about the same period and think that they are telling totally different stories," he says.

His purpose was to construct a story that would allow the reader to feel up close to the characters of Dolours Price, Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes, another prominent member of the IRA, and that was "dispassionate, so that no one would think that he was defending one of the both parts".

Do you mean that you were looking for objectivity, that which is being questioned today by the US media, which are trying to determine whether it is a legitimate or even useful aspiration?

“I don't think there is only one truth and I don't think there should be.

The myth that maintains the contrary is dangerous.

But I am a journalist and my way of working is to go out and talk to as many people as I can, "he replies.

In

includes almost 100 pages of notes: "I explain where each statement I make comes from, I show everything and I think this is important because I am not the voice of God."