Readers will sooner believe the fantastic than the implausible.
People who have read Faithless Elector are amazed that it came out well before the 
2016 election (March, to be precise), long before either of the parties had chosen their candidates. At the heart of the stories is FBI Analyst-turned-Agent, Imogen Trager, whose patient, analytical approach is regarded as alien and “soft” by many of her colleagues—even while it is precisely her methods that are getting results.
Initially, she learns of the plot through her former academic advisor Duncan Calder and his current star graduate student, Matthew Yamashita. They have information no one else is looking at,and they’re in way over their heads; and they have less than a month to stop the plot before it’s too late. Later, pushed to the edges of the investigation, she picks the lock on the back door no one thought to look for, plunging her again deeper into danger.
The backdrop for the thrillers is a contested presidential election. The situations looming over the action ring true to our shared experience—a dangerously divisive campaign, accusations of voter fraud and dirty tricks…and then (in my story) the murders begin. The second thriller, Dark Network, has as its backdrop a fractured Justice Department. The FBI is leaking, the Attorney General is being undermined, politicians are spinning, social media is in an uproar…and a murderous dark network is gunning for anyone standing in its way.
In the third book Who Governs, begun in late ’17 and now with my editor, a beleaguered Attorney General is barely holding onto her job, and a president is busily staffing his sub rosa “kitchen cabinet” with loyalists. To be fair, I haven’t seen everything in advance: there are no Russians in my books, and “bot” is a word I have only recently learned. I definitely missed that part.
So, did I just get lucky that many aspects of the novels jibe with our collective sense of democracy off the rails? Do I have a crystal ball?
This journey really began with the 2000 election. I had a rough draft of Faithless by then. I had the principal characters in place, but the setting and background came into sharp focus during the run-up to and fallout from the Bush-Gore election: a very close race, backroom dealing, voter fraud. It became clear to me that we were entering a new era, and that realization animated the story.
Initially, I harbored a naïve hope that Bush’s narrow, disputed win would produce a humble bipartisan administration, eager to reach across the aisle and govern with broad consensus. (I know.) What we got instead was a tight group who sought to fortify their hold on power through administrative, extra-democratic, and mendacious means—“yellow cake,” anyone?
So, no, I don’t have a crystal ball. I have the newspaper. Eighteen years ago, I gleaned what it might take to steal the presidency, and the more I read and paid attention, the more clearly I saw what a group who seized power would need to do to cement their status. And I wrote it, because it’s a good story. Moreover, it is in fact plausible.
Obviously, the stories are fiction. They aren’t about one administration/party or another, but rather the latent weaknesses in our laws and processes, and the theme is (certainly, it should be) worrying to liberals and conservatives alike.
James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thriller series Faithless Elector and Dark Network. The third and final book in the series, working title Who Governs, is coming soon.
Find them through Indybound.org. They are also available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s Books.
Link to REVIEWS
was originally construed in the Constitution) that the candidate with the majority of Electoral College votes should be president and the candidate with the second best showing be vice-president. But, as the nation realized in the 1800 election, that meant that president and vice-president were from different parties.
On his blog, 
Campbell goes on to note in detail that Scottish Conservative party and anti-Scottish Independence news organizations seem not to have run afoul of the BBC’s gatekeepers.
While this is particularly disturbing for pro-Independence voices, it also points up a larger contemporary epistemological problem: how do we know what we know, if the evidence and facts that underpin our opinions and action are so easily disappeared? How do we hold officials and others accountable when the record of their very words is so slippery?
Manchette cites many of my favorites, like John Le Carre and Ross Thomas as having been very influential in his embrace of a new aesthetic. As Ethan Anderson put it in his ‘
To Manchette’s list of influential writers in this hybrid genre, I would add Graham Greene. His “entertainments,” like The Quiet American, The Third Man, Our Man in Havana and The Honorary Consul are extraordinary. Political events are not just backdrops for Greene’s and the others’ stories, they are integral, giving deeper meaning to the characters’ struggles and to the stakes if they fail. They inform the stories and give them an edge, whether it be Viet Nam as the Americans replace the French (Quiet American), or the gullible Agency in Our Man in Havana. As I struggle to write engaging thrillers, I keep these and other works in my mind, not to copy, but as strong examples of all that’s possible.
