Verisimilitude – Getting ahead of behind-the-headlines

Posted on April 3, 2026 by James McCrone

Was I a little ahead of the curve again, but this time with my short stories? Guns, cocaine, fentanyl—but no coffee—in Cumberland Coffee & Snacks in North Philadelphia…The police arrested a drug ring fronted by a coffee shop.

My short stories have focused on Philadelphia and crime—on desperate people making bad choices. In “Nostalgia,” a young man does stress tests on the facades of businesses used as fronts for illegal activities to make sure they seem legitimate. He knows he’s working for bad people, but he didn’t realize just how bad, until…. (collected in Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 3).

The folks at Cumberland Coffee could have used my unnamed, nostalgic narrator as a “consultant.”

And in “Raccoon Summer,” (still, alas, homeless) a delivery driver and a corner store owner who has been strong-armed into being a front see a way out. But they’ll have to hold their nerve.

For stories to ring true, to have verisimilitude, the writer has to work out just how something might work in the real world if s/he has any hope of it working on the page. My first reader, and harshest critic (my wife), is excellent at poking holes in scenarios that I think are bullet proof, often sending me back to the drawing board.

This attention to detail extends to the “bad guys” themselves. The characters may know that what they do is wrong, but they feel justified in doing what they do. Only Iago and Richard III know that they’re evil, and they revel in it.

But to have verisimilitude—and tension—they both protagonist and antagonist must believe they’re in the right. And for a story to maintain tension, the reader has to believe that what’s happening on the page could happen in real life.

And sometimes, it sort of does.

The two short stories I mention above are not available online, but the list below gives links to titles you can find online, and buy links to those in anthologies or physical books.

FREE ONLINE
“Coffin Corner,” in Tough/Redneck Press July, 2025
In a small corner of Philadelphia, a funeral director steals a man’s car as payment on a debt…

“What’s Hidden,” in Killer Nashville Literary Magazine, Feb. 2024 issue
An old map reveals a crime and offers some redemption

“Eight O’clock Sharp,” in Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon Jan./2022
There’s freedom when the past forgets you. Set in Philadelphia’s 9th Street Market

ANTHOLOGIES (available for purchase):

“Ultimatum Games,” in Rock and a Hard Place magazine – Winter/Issue #7 – Jan./2022.
“Nostalgia,” in in Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 3, May 15, 2022.
“Numbers Don’t Lie,” a short story LOW DOWN DIRTY VOTE, Vol. 2 – July, 2020

James McCrone’s stories raise questions about the nature of power, the choices we make and the lessons we don’t learn.

He’s the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His current novel, Witness Tree, is out on submission.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and he now lives and writes in Philadelphia, PA.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. Follow this blog, or follow him on Substack!

Some of his short stories are available FREE online. Links are HERE toward the bottom of the page.

From the Dust is a compelling, insightful whodunnit

Posted on April 1, 2026 by James McCrone

I was fortunate enough to read an early copy of David Swinson’s From the Dust on NetGalley. Here’s my review.

Retired DC homicide detective, Graham Sanderson has returned to his father’s home in Upstate New York. “It was my father’s death that brought me here, but my brother’s condition and need for company that made me stay,” he says. Death used to be Graham’s business, but he’s happy to be retired. Or so he says.

But something isn’t right. The small, rural town where he finds himself had only two murders in the past three years, and they were crimes of passion easily solved. Now, a body is found near the canal, probably killed elsewhere and brought to the site so that it would be found.

The local sheriff, himself a retired big city detective, worries that his new detective may not be up to the challenge. When a second murder occurs, with all the hallmarks of the first, he enlists Sanderson to help the rookie.

Swinson has crafted an intriguing and compelling whodunnit that is insightful and poignant. The weight of the past drags at Sanderson, and indeed on many of the characters here. Sanderson’s investigation will take him into places, and pit him against forces he never dealt with in DC.

And it will force him to confront not only his preconceptions about the investigation, but what lies behind them. The story moves along well. The pacing is good as suspects are introduced and the motive behind the crime comes into focus.

There is a noble doggedness about Sanderson’s approach, exhausting the leads, that reminded me of Georges Simenon’s Maigret.

I enjoyed this story, and I particularly liked that it didn’t fall into the trap of portraying rural citizens as quaint or cute, but as fully realized characters, each contributing something to the story.

Highly recommended.

From the Dust, by David Swinson ISBN: 978-0-316-52865-8

James McCrone’s stories raise questions about the nature of power, the choices we make and the lessons we don’t learn.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon.

eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And you can also follow him onSubstack!

Some of his short stories are available FREE online. Links are HEREtoward the bottom of the page.

We’ve been here before

Posted on March 19, 2026 by James McCrone

For a while in the early part of this century, the hype was everywhere. A new world!

The American investor and venture capitalist, John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that it was “as big a deal as the PC.” It would revolutionize the Post Office, law enforcement, urban travel and transportation. In the end, only 140,000 units were sold during the lifetime of the product, 2002 to 2020.

Steve Jobs later said it “sucked,” and South Park devoted an episode to making fun of the hype around the product when it was released. What was it?

The Segway.

I was about to write that we can “only imagine” what the hype would have been like if investors had spent $1.6 trillion dollars (so far) on R & D for the Segway and needed to recoup their losses. But we don’t need to imagine, we know. We’re living through it. Or at least enduring it. For now.

With AI, the venture capital class is so desperate to recoup losses on their $1.6 trillion dollar bad bet, on something that might have a few practical brute force applications, that they’re willing to move fast and break everything, including valuation metrics and gainful employment, while they drown us in AI “slop” that sluices bad faith and misinformation like manure into a hog pen lagoon.

Meanwhile, as they race to make it the next big thing, they foul the air, destroy the landscape and suck up all the water.

The data centers they’re trying to build and the hording of DRAM and NAND memory chips have caused a stratospheric spike in prices.

Spot prices for DRAM chips, according to Bloomberg, have jumped 700% recently. And, speaking of data, the high cost and scarcity of chips is beginning to have an impact on laboratories. All this for something that “hallucinates” and outright lies.

The profligate waste reminds me of Orwell’s “floating fortresses” in 1984, which are scrapped as obsolete even before they become operational, or Milo Mindbinder in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 cornering the market on Egyptian cotton just as the bottom fell out. To recoup his costs, Milo went so far as to serve chocolate covered cotton in the mess halls, and he was insulted that the men wouldn’t eat it.

“They’ve got to eat it!” Milo says.

“It’ll make them sick,” Yossarian replies, “why don’t you eat it?”

“I did,” says Milo, “and it made me sick.”

In both of the above (albeit fictional) cases, to cry foul or point out that the emperor has no clothes (or, say, that cotton is indigestible) would be unpatriotic.

In the early part of his century, Segway Personal Transport only made up 1.5% of total company profit. The Segway’s learning curve and need to balance led to notable accidents involving Usain Bolt, George W. Bush, Ellen DeGeneres, Ian Healy, and Segway Inc. previous owner Jimi Heselden [links from Wikipedia]. While the Segway has remained popular for security and tourism, its electric scooters have been more popular for personal mobility.

Maybe Segway lacked boldness, and they should have skipped the pesky, fickle human user altogether, a lesson that AI investors may have taken too much to heart.

A $1.6 trillion dollar AI bet feels like another memory from earlier in this century: banks and investment firms in 2007 and 08 that were deemed “too big to fail.” Will we spend the remainder of the 2020’s paying off the AI bailout?

Will there be anyone able to do that work?

James McCrone’s stories pose questions about the nature of power, the choices we make and the lessons we don’t learn.

He’s the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His current novel, Witness Tree, is out on submission.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon.

eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And you can also follow me on Substack!

Some of his short stories are available FREE online. Links are HERE toward the bottom of the page.

Faithless Elector is 10 Years Old

Posted on March 16, 2026 by James McCrone

Prescient then, dismayingly relevant now…and hopeful

This week marks the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Faithless Elector, a thriller about stealing the presidency by manipulating the Electoral College. It kick-started the (fictional) career of Imogen Trager, a Justice Department agent in the FBI’s Voting Integrity.

The novel debuted in March of 2016, and its plot presaged many of the alarming things we contend with today—a shadowy, mendacious elite interested only in naked power, compromised officials, questions about voting integrity and much more.

This reminder cropped up this morning.

In Faithless Elector, an idealistic, young graduate student working on his dissertation stumbles across a deeply suspicious number of deaths among Electors that no one else seems to have noticed.

He needs to get the information to someone who will believe him (he’s had conspiracy theories before), and who can do something to stop the plot before it’s too late. Which is where my recurring heroine and alter ego, Imogen Trager, a Justice Department agent in the FBI’s Voter Integrity makes her entrance.

The action covers just six weeks—a lifetime in politics…or the end of one—beginning in November, on the night of the 2016 general election and culminating on the day of the real presidential election, December 16, when Electors meet in their respective state capitols to cast their votes for president and vice-president.

As Imogen digs deeper into the case, she begins to suspect that some of her own colleagues might be working against her.

The novel sold well, and though I’ve since published three more (with another on the way!), it remains my best seller. The book was many years in the making, and as a result, it’s not about the current administration (Trump was not even the GOP’s candidate for president when the book came out) but about well-heeled forces undermining democracy, so intent on control that they’re willing to “shoot the hostage.”

What surprised many readers was that the conspiracy wasn’t tied to either of the main political parties, though it was parasitic on one of them. The most personally disturbing part of the book’s journey has been the continued sclerotic polarization of politics.

Imogen was (and is!) a heroine for our times not because she had an axe to grind but because she believed in justice, fairness and the sanctity of the vote. At the time, her stance was the least controversial or partisan part of the story.