Of Questions, not Answers…and Furry Hats

Posted on October 19, 2026 by James McCrone

Yes, I’m still on that kick.

The print version of Stephen Marche’s New York Times essay from earlier this month is titled “Tony Sorprano Tried to Warn Us,” (the online title is “The Four Shows that Heralded America’s Fall”).

IS that what they did?

The subheading within the text is “The golden era of prestige television was surprisingly prescient.”

People can certainly see it that way…now. But were those dramas conceived as a warning? I’m doubtful that the writers of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire or Mad Men intended to write a warning about mid-2020s America. That’s not how fiction works. They are great dramas because they offer so many facets.

And I would argue that fiction, by its nature, gets at deeper truths through the questions it asks—questions that may, in retrospect, seem prescient.

My wife (and my indefatigable publicist!) was at a Political Science conference recently, and a fellow panelist, speaking of her own work, mentioned that she studies the current intersection between economics and politics, which she terms “Neo-royalism.”

That is, in place of laissez-faire capitalism contesting for advantage in a clamorous marketplace, economic transactionalism now trades favor among flattering admirers, like a royal court.

My publicist, er, wife, mentioned my Faithless Elector trilogy to the fellow panelist. Published more than 10 years ago (and conceived years before), it centers on an oligarch who is intent on stealing the presidency; who wants to seize power and run things for his own benefit. To run the government and the economy like a medieval monarch, or like an organized crime “family.” Like a court. The co-panelist said she thought I sounded like a lovely man, but that maybe I should be locked up (!)

Was I prescient? Somewhat. The Electoral College became a battle ground later in the same year that the first book debuted (2016), and the craven men and women who circled the drain in that first administration knew little and cared less about norms and the rule of law.

Did I anticipate Trump? No. He wasn’t even his party’s candidate in March of 2016, when the book debuted.

Did I intend the book as a warning? No. I wanted to write a thriller.

But fiction can get at truths or scenarios that transcend reporting, or opinion pieces. I wanted to tell a story, and I wanted that story to have bite, but more than anything else, I wanted it to have verisimilitude. I worried that the bleak premise of the book was too harsh, the bad guys too over-the-top.

The election of George W. Bush in 2000 changed that.

First, after his narrow, disputed victory in the Electoral College, I assumed W would steer a cautious, middle course. Which he did not. The image that crystallized who the bad guys were was a photograph of W. Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld standing together.

I felt I could be looking at members of the Politburo reviewing the troops. The only thing missing were ushankas, those furry, Russian winter hats. The photo seared itself into my mind.

Naked power animated them.

That idea of power that was an end in itself raised the stakes for my protagonists Imogen Trager and Duncan Calder, who must figure out what’s going on and how to stop it. Before the “real” election, when Electors meet in their respective state capitals to cast their vote for president.

The story became more than just “What-if” and became, How do you stop people whose only goal is power? In the later books, it became how do you fight against something like that without becoming the thing you hate?

Later, the question was a version of Who polices the police? with the twist being, how can you trust people to follow your new rules when they have demonstrated a clear disregard for rule of law?

As I’ve argued elsewhere, and here good literature (and I include TV/film and stage under that heading) is about questions, not answers. And good literature is deep enough that it can contain multitudes, and multiple readings.

If you doubt that idea, think back to stories you’ve read in the past, and in which you found different things on subsequent readings. You “get” things you didn’t see before, or moments land differently. Because you’re different, or the world has changed in some meaningful way. And your answers to the questions the story poses may change, too.

Maybe the author saw it all coming, but maybe you’re reading into it. Which is not a bad thing.

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. And follow him on here, or on Substack!

Editing anxiety

Posted on April 27, 2026 by James McCrone

Editing is fraught with dangerous snares. Multiple “passes” focus individually on drama, or character, or plot, or diction. I suffer through all of those because I want the work to sing for the reader.

But the part over which I bleed is spelling. I confess, I am a terrible speller.

My inability to properly represent words stems not from laziness or any diagnosed affliction, but rather from two sources: Britain in the late 1960’s and mid-70’s, and junior year at university.

I spent two formative years (five years apart) in Scotland and England, first when I was 5, turning 6; and again five years later when I was 10, turning 11. British English spells things like “theatre” and “litre” or “kilometre” more like the French; they favor (or, rather favour) the “o-u-r” endings for words like labor and color. They use ‘s’ in words like analyze or synthesize, where American’s use a ‘z’ (though Americans don’t call it a ‘zed’).”Kerb” is their spelling of the American “curb.”

The list of differences is long, and that long list, first imprinted on a five year old was reversed and reprogrammed by formidable Midwestern American (Wisconsin and Iowa) grammarians, only to be re-undermined in Britain five years later. I struggled mightily with spelling.

But I had gained the upper hand in that struggle by the time I was a teenager. That is, until my junior year at university. I was an English major, and as part of my studies, I read uncorrected texts, of Shakespeare, Milton, Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, John Donne, Andrew Marvel, and others.

Spelling standardization didn’t really take hold until the latter part of the 17th century. There are documents in which, Shakespeare signs and spells his own name a couple different ways. Up to my junior year, my spelling, while sound, was tenuous. And then it became unmoored.

Words like “dramatick” came to seem correct. And usages like “dramatickal” seemed legitimate and sensible.

In Paradise Lost (1667), Milton often spells ‘me,’ ‘he’ or ‘she’ with with a double-‘e’. Most often (if I remember correctly), Milton used the double-e construction to denote an inversion of
the iambic pentameter rhythm, or to doubly reinforce the stress, as in:

“Hee for God only, and shee for God in him,”
x / x / x, / x / x / x

where the spelling of ‘hee’ is meant to suggest stressing the first (usually unstressed) syllable, and in the example given, deliberately slowing the rhythm by having 11 beats rather than ten. Meanwhile, I must remember, that in American usage, punctuation goes inside the quotation marks.

I have made my peace with my limitations, and I have found workarounds and aide de memoires. And proofreaders.

But today, in the New York Times, John McWhorter’s “What’s Better Left Unsaid,” shakes my already tottering confidence by throwing not only spelling but pronunciation into doubt. Should we pronounce the ‘t’ in ‘often? he asks. Or the ‘th’ in ‘clothes?’

Wait. I do pronounce them, though I don’t say “lis-ten,” which leaves me wondering what other (supposedly) superfluous letters I’m pronouncing or what dubious, inconsistent choices I’m making regarding my dialogue and prose.

While I adhere to the standards–or at least the ones I know of–I still find myself squinting at ‘roofs,’ which feels like it ought to be ‘rooves.’ As in hoof:hooves, or wolf:wolves. (The dictionary regards the spelling and pronunciation rooves as “archaic.”)

Editing at the sentence level is meant to create vivid, confident prose, but the process of getting there is full of pitfalls and wrong turnings (or is it “wrong turns?”).

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

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

The Empty Nest Revisited

Posted on April 13, 2026 by James McCrone

Maybe it’s more like being a parent than I had previously thought when I wrote about having placed Witness Tree with a publisher. Things seemed to be going well. Until they weren’t.

So Witness Tree is back home, unemployed, chastened but going out on lots of “interviews.” And like a great many interviews, the standard refusal is no response.

Foggy morning at the vineyard; witness tree obscured by the rising sun #Yamhill

At least it’s not wasting its time watching reality television and only dressing in sweats. But it is here, and I feel its weight.

During Covid, like many families, two of our grown children came home. One, from university, the other to work remotely. I can say unequivocally that I prefer having the kids in the house to (re)hosting my manuscript.

I second-guess myself—is the pitch any good, have I truly resolved the threads? Time, of which there seems to be both too much and too little, will tell.

One of the best parts of publishing something is that it’s done. You could always do something different with the manuscript or fix a typo. But you can move on from a published manuscript, and you can leave it alone. It is what it is and will stand on its own.

In contrast, one that isn’t “out there” tugs at your sleeve, craves attention.

Maybe my endless tinkering will make the book better. Maybe I’m just polishing a turd.

Obviously, if I believed it was a turd, I wouldn’t spend the time polishing it. But the next book (Hours) and some half-finished short stories grow impatient for me to move on.

I tell myself each morning that I chose this life.

Some days, that’s helpful. Some days, not.

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

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

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

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