Category Archives: Crank Philosophy

Of Questions, not Answers…and Furry Hats

Posted on by

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 by

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.

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!

We’ve been here before

Posted on by

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.

Photo: Carrie Carlson, FEECO Int’l

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.

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 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.

Coffin Corner and Taking Inspiration

Posted on by

In a small corner of Philadelphia, a funeral director steals a man’s car as payment on a debt.

My latest short story, “Coffin Corner” [story link] came out on Tough/Redneck Press last week. I’ve already had some feedback from readers–for which I am grateful, and even an exchange regarding where the story had come from. Check out the story (link above), and make sure to look at the other great things Redneck Press is putting out.

One reader wrote to me:

“Very enjoyable & a nice twist at the end. They say you should write what you know. Which makes me wonder what kind of world you live in – wise guys, seedy funeral homes etc.”

My “world” probably isn’t so different from anyone else’s. Imagination, openness and curiosity are the main ingredients to my writer’s life. I write stories about dirty politics, and desperate people making bad decisions; and I’m fascinated by the pettiness of the petty crime that results.

Years ago, I worked for a guy who had been a mortician. We were walking past a house, and he pointed it out, saying that the person who lived there was someone who had once “stiffed” him on funeral arrangements .

He said, “I thought about taking his car as collateral until he paid up, but what’re ya gonna do?” (He really did use the term stiffed)

A story was born in my mind.

Later, I thought to myself, “what if he’d been really hard up, and what if desperation had made him take the man’s car? And, what if seizing the car opened up a whole new can of worms?” When I finally sat down to work on it, the story came quickly. Obviously, the story has nothing to do with real people, the situation is what lodged in my mind and finally came out as “Coffin Corner.”

I made the main character old enough to remember the precarity of the mob days here in Philadelphia, and how difficult they were. I’m fascinated by the difference of opinion about what the old, mob days were like, and what they meant. Some seem willing to remember those past days as good somehow, ordered and orderly, whereas others remember only violence and the way honest people were preyed upon.

I’ve written about it before, as in my story contribution to Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 3, “Nostalgia,” in which a young, career criminal finds himself–dismayingly–in amongst a gang playing at being mobsters. As the narrator notes: “People in the neighborhood treated Mr. Johnny like a big shot—but only because it flattered their vanity, like they were all living together in some movie where the world still made sense.”

And working in the 9th Street Market helped too. My story “Eight O’Clock Sharp,” also available for free online, is published by Retreats from Oblivion (the journal of NoirCon), and it is about a new/old predator. As I wrote about the villain that story, I found myself singing lines from “Teenage Wildlife,” by David Bowie: “Same old thing, in brand new drag, comes sweeping into view…”

I don’t consciously use short stories as a means of working out ideas or themes I explore in my longer work, but it does seem to happen. “Nostalgia” put together drug-running and corrupt politics, allowing me to examine it and return to it in my novel-in-progress, Witness Tree, about a secret power play for a white supremacist organization that erupts into the open. “Coffin Corner” allowed me to think about what the mob meant, and what it might have been like to live with the threat of Wise Guys everywhere.

A similar corrupt, thuggish coercion seems to have taken hold of the country, too. Maybe that’s my world. The source is different, but the stinking fear it creates is the same. And it’s worth exploring and writing about.

# # #

James McCrone is 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 novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country. Coming soon!

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 lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

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

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”