Authors Like Jeff Maysh

David Grann

American · The Lost City of Z (2009), Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), The Wager (2023)

Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose books usually begin as magazine pieces. The Lost City of Z follows the explorer Percy Fawcett into the Amazon and Grann after him; Killers of the Flower Moon reconstructs the murders of Osage people for their oil headrights in 1920s Oklahoma and the young Bureau of Investigation case that followed, and Martin Scorsese filmed it in 2023; The Wager is a shipwreck, a mutiny and two competing accounts delivered to the Admiralty.

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Patrick Radden Keefe

American · Say Nothing (2018), Empire of Pain (2021), Rogues (2022)

Say Nothing uses the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville in Belfast to tell the Troubles through the people who carried it out, and became an FX series in 2024. Empire of Pain is three generations of the Sackler family and the marketing of OxyContin, and won the Baillie Gifford Prize. Rogues collects twelve of his magazine pieces, which is the closest thing on this list to a Maysh anthology: an arms dealer, a wine forger, a chef, a bank robber.

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Susan Orlean

American · The Orchid Thief (1998), The Library Book (2018)

The Orchid Thief began as a New Yorker piece about a Florida plant dealer arrested for stealing rare orchids from a state preserve, and became a book and then Adaptation (2002), a film about the impossibility of adapting it. The Library Book is built around the 1986 fire that destroyed much of the Los Angeles Central Library and the man accused of setting it, and turns into a history of libraries themselves. She has been at The New Yorker since 1992.

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Michael Finkel

American · True Story (2005), The Stranger in the Woods (2017), The Art Thief (2023)

Finkel writes short books about single strange lives: a man who lived alone in the Maine woods for twenty-seven years and stole what he needed from holiday cabins; a Frenchman who took more than two hundred artworks from European museums, largely because he wanted them. True Story is about a murderer who used Finkel's name while on the run, which Finkel learned about days after The New York Times Magazine dismissed him in 2002 for building a composite character in a story about West African cocoa labour.

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Ben Macintyre

British · Agent Zigzag (2007), Operation Mincemeat (2010), The Spy and the Traitor (2018)

Macintyre works from declassified British and Soviet files and writes espionage as character comedy with lethal stakes: a safecracker turned double agent, a corpse dressed as a Royal Marine officer to deceive the Germans about Sicily, Kim Philby's friendship with the man who did not see it, and Oleg Gordievsky's exfiltration from Moscow in a car boot. He is a columnist at The Times, and several of the books have been filmed, including Operation Mincemeat in 2021.

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Skip Hollandsworth

American · The Midnight Assassin (2016)

Hollandsworth has spent decades at Texas Monthly writing long true crime pieces about small Texan places, and his article about Bernie Tiede, an East Texas funeral director convicted of killing the wealthy widow he had befriended, became Richard Linklater's Bernie (2011), which he co-wrote. The Midnight Assassin is about a series of murders in Austin in the 1880s, years before the Whitechapel killings in London, and the city that could not catch the killer.

Mark Bowden

American · Black Hawk Down (1999), Killing Pablo (2001), Hue 1968 (2017)

Black Hawk Down began as a twenty-nine-part series in The Philadelphia Inquirer reconstructing the 1993 raid in Mogadishu almost minute by minute from hundreds of interviews and radio transcripts, and became a book and then Ridley Scott's 2001 film. Killing Pablo follows the hunt for Pablo Escobar. He spent twenty years as a newspaper reporter before the books, and has written for The Atlantic and Vanity Fair since.

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Joseph Mitchell

American · McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (1943), Joe Gould's Secret (1965)

Mitchell wrote for The New Yorker about the fringes of the city: fish market workers, a bearded lady, the tenants of a Bowery hotel, and above all Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant who claimed to be writing the longest book in existence, an oral history of the world. Mitchell wrote about him twice, decades apart, and the second piece reveals what he had learned. He also acknowledged that some of his figures were composites drawn from several people, which changed how the profiles are read.

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Ben Mezrich

American · Bringing Down the House (2002), The Accidental Billionaires (2009)

Mezrich writes true stories built for the screen, and they get there: Bringing Down the House, about MIT students counting cards in Las Vegas, became 21, and The Accidental Billionaires, about the founding of Facebook, became The Social Network. He has published more than twenty books. His method includes reconstructed scenes and dialogue and composite figures, which he acknowledges in author's notes and which reviewers and some subjects have disputed at length.

Janet Malcolm

American · The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), The Silent Woman (1994)

The Journalist and the Murderer opens by declaring that every journalist knows what they do is morally indefensible, and then examines the lawsuit a convicted murderer brought against the writer who had befriended him while reporting his book. Malcolm was herself sued for libel by the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson over her book In the Freud Archives, in litigation that ran for a decade before a jury found in her favour. She wrote for The New Yorker for more than forty years and died in 2021.

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