Fluidity of Memory and Guilt by Association

Posted on May 27, 2025 by James McCrone

We are the sum total of the memories and experiences we have forgotten. Or, as William Faulkner put it, in Light in August, “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders…” Memory is also associative, grouped with other memories, sometimes seemingly at random.

Memory and story-telling are a bit like Rob’s “autobiographical” filing method for his record collection in High Fidelity: “If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don’t really want to go into…”

As I whittle away and reorganize the undying manuscript called Witness Tree (hope to have a final-final draft by the end of this week!), I’ve also begun working on my sixth novel, tentatively called Hours, about a pilot flying South American routes in the late 1940’s. And I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about memory.

Hours is loosely based on my grandfather’s experiences as an airline pilot based in Lima, Peru. I say loosely, because though it draws on his experiences and impressions, it is not his story. Though I hope I’m able to preserve some of the essence of him. He was a fantastic storyteller, and I’m equally hopeful that his spirit of fun, adventure and not letting facts get in the way of a good story will continue to guide and inspire me.

The opening of Hours, begins with the observation that “Memory is fluid, roiled by currents that carve deep paths, much as flowing water forges a riverbed but is thereafter constrained by it.”

The narrator, a pilot flying South American routes in the late 1940’s, is thinking back to the pinnacle moment of his career. He sees himself as though standing outside himself, a young captain, on the tarmac in Santiago, Chile, peering toward Los Andes, waiting for some sign that the “Paso de la Cumbre,” 65 miles away and still obscured, will clear. And as he conjures that earlier, younger self there on the tarmac, he finds that he’s thinking of his earliest memory of flight, when he was seven years old in West Virginia:

“If I’m to think of the pilot, I must also think of the boy, must follow the course. Because as the pilot peers toward the Andean mists, playing his game of chicken with the weather, he thinks of the boy he was. The boy’s dreams were wild, he remembers. But not this wild.”

Hours is not very far along. But I see it being told in two inter-layered parts, from two perspectives, the protagonist is the pilot in the late 1940’s, and his grandson in the present day–also a pilot–who goes through his grandfather’s log books and notes, after his own Icarus-like fall from grace. And the skies.

It will be about flying, class (rags-to-riches), and the struggle between outward success and inward peace. Like the spotty, primitive radio signals they are meant to use for navigation, the novel asks, what are you to do when the thing that’s meant to guide you may be deadly wrong? It will be through memory, and its associations, that at least one of them will find a kind of redemption.

# # #

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.

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:

Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

The Vaudeville Hook

Posted on June 20, 2024 by James McCrone

Proust has his madeleines and tea, a moment that unlocked and threw open a door of “involuntary memory.” Proletarian that I am, I have a cane. Or rather, my wife has her grandfather’s cane.

This morning in the living room, as my wife finished her morning stretch routine, she stood up and reached for her grandfather’s cane to initiate and facilitate a new stretch.

As she turned the cane sideways and gently hooked her own neck I found myself transported to Alderson, West Virginia, to my grandparents’ house in the early 1970’s.

There was a good-sized gathering of family and friends in the kitchen and in the hallway running past it. Somehow, I’d been able to stay up late to watch The Tonight Show the previous night, and I wanted to share some of Johnny Carson’s opening monologue with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles. (At about eight years old I was the youngest person in that kitchen by a good four or five decades.)

I have a phonographic memory (if that’s really a thing); that is, I remember best what I hear. In the center of the kitchen I had everyone’s attention, as I recreated Johnny’s monologue, word-for-word from the previous night. I had his timing, his pauses, his cadence–and I was killing! It was a heady feeling for a child. But after four or five minutes, I realized I was about to run out of material, and I was desperate to keep it all going. So, I inserted my own material, which was an ill-advised mix of the arcane, the illogical, and scatological. The laughter faded, but I soldiered on.

Though I sensed that my grandfather was looking uncomfortable, I had no intention of relinquishing the stage when from behind me, a great aunt reached out with her cane and pulled me backward with it, an improvised Vaudeville hook.

She had suffered a stroke some years earlier, and I don’t believe I had ever heard her speak, but she liked to be in among people. She had not laughed during the earlier portion of my performance, but then, I think the stroke rendered her physically incapable of doing so. While everyone howled with laughter at her “joke,” her body shook and tears came to her eyes. My eyes must have registered hurt and confusion. Seeing my face, she dropped the cane and drew me to her in a tight hug. Her body still vibrating.

No one who was there remembers my dazzling rendering of Johnny Carson’s monologue, but everyone remembers “the hook.” And my great aunt, bless her.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the hook lately, and not only when my wife uses it for her stretches. I’m beginning the rewriting/editing of the second full draft of Witness Tree, my “pinot” noir tale set in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Too often, as I wade through my tortured (and tortuous) first-draft prose, I find insupportable diversions, dismaying breaks with diction and tone, convoluted reasoning…and first draft cutesy-ness.

It’s slow-going, and I read each page aloud, cutting this, clarifying that, excising paragraphs wholesale and putting (*)asterisks next to words or passages that I can’t decide about, but that I think I should (re)review.

My great aunt passed away many years ago, but I could really use her right now.

# # #

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. 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.

He’s 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. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

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:
Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

Lost in Oregon

Posted on June 2, 2024 by James McCrone

MYSTERY WRITERS – Do you need inspiring, dramatic scenery, with no one around and no way to contact anyone? For those crime writers who lament the contemporary ubiquity of plot-destroying cellphones and trackers, who yearn for earlier times when someone could simply disappear, or be out of touch, I give you the forests of Western Oregon! There is spotty (at best) cell reception and absolutely no one around. I loved it! (Mostly)

I was in Western Oregon last month spending time with my father and brother in Yamhill. I had a day to myself, and I took a neighbor’s advice and traveled the “scenic” route to the Oregon coast, a winding road leading out of the nearby town of Carlton, OR, called Meadow Lake Road, which would take me to Beaver, OR, and thence to Highway 101, which would get me to the coast. Oh! that it were so simple.

What few knew was that a landslide had covered the road near the town of…well, there isn’t a town anywhere near there about 18 miles along from where I started. In fact, I was enjoying the natural beauty and the fact that I had the road to myself when I came upon a very serious “Road Closed” sign across my route. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just double back and take a different road.” I’d get to relive looking at and communing with gorgeous, soaring forest and dramatic streams, as the car ran in and out of dappled light. I had already noticed that my phone had no signal, but somehow, what with the abundance of nature, that seemed like a very good thing.

But as the miles (re)flitted slowly by it dawned on me that I didn’t remember seeing another road leading off from this one. And I do mean slowly: these are country roads, with severe turns and steep climbs; some of the turns have signs saying 15 mph, and for once I took the DOT at its word.

Would I have to drive all the way back to Carlton? It was at about this time that I began to regret the lack of a phone signal. I pulled over to test it, feeling that maybe it just wasn’t trying hard enough. But nothing. I looked in the glove compartment for an Oregon map. Again, nothing.

Finally, there was a turning to the right, which seemed like it would be the correct way to go, towards Wilamina, whoever or whatever that was.

In the picture above, you’ll see that the route leading around the red “wrong way” symbol seems straightforward enough. (I must stress that no such wrong way symbol existed when I started out.) But the route around the landslide is a BML (Bureau of Land Management) road, barely one-and-a-half lanes wide. If there had been a car traveling in the opposite direction, in order to pass one another we would both have had to dip our passenger-side wheels on the shoulder. The shoulder of the road (where there was one) could be frightening–either it led directly to a precipitous 80-100 foot drop, or into a ditch. By the time I started up the hill, I hadn’t seen another car or person for at least 45 minutes.

As the BLM road led its winding way upward, I wondered where I was going, and as I glanced down at some of the ravines I was skirting, I realized that if I tumbled down into one and died, it might be years before someone found the car and my body. Worse, no one knew I had taken this route, so they might not think to check along it–and where would they check? What if they looked for me along the logical route I would have taken…and it was entirely possible that this was not the most logical route. So finding my body was going to be left up to chance.

In the end, I made it back to the main road. But I had taken a ten-mile (40 minute) detour around a stretch of road that was probably less than two miles. When I finally had a cellphone connection, I found out that the place on the coast I was going had closed. So I turned back home…via main state highways.

The scenery was lovely when I finally felt that I (somewhat) knew where I was.

I’m going to put a good state map in every car I travel in from now on. I also stumbled across some serendipitous moments, scenes and places that will figure in my forthcoming novel, Witness Tree.

# # #

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. 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 follow this blog!

Scenes from #BastardVerdict – Glasgow, Spare ground and murder, Pt. 3

Posted on October 4, 2023 by James McCrone

When people asked me what I was going to do in Scotland when I visited in 2019, I said I was going to attend the Bloody Scotland crime writers festival in Stirling, and I was going to Dundee and Glasgow to find “good places for murders.” I neglected to include this final bit when speaking to customs officials at border control.

As I’ve noted in earlier posts about getting the settings right, if you want a creepy, out-of-the-way place for a murder, or to have a body discovered, it’s crucial to see it for yourself.

One afternoon in Glasgow, I walked down along the Clyde, taking touristy photies of the Finnieston Crane. And then I wandered along the northside of the river, westward under the Anderston Quay and the Kingston Bridge.

I needed a place for someone to be killed. It was a difficult journey, not least because I liked the character very much. Nevertheless, I reluctantly followed the dictates of the plot, and my feet along the river toward the Anderston Quay area, which from a distance had looked a likely spot.

Redevelopment is coming to the the Anderston Quay–a couple of new buildings, a car park under the Kingston Bridge. But the rehabilitation (if it can be called that) hasn’t quite arrived at the loop road made by of Cheapside Street and Warroch St. Indeed, there is spare ground and tree cover to…spare.

I was excited looking over the area, but I worried there would be CCTV cameras about. There were not!

In September of 2019, I had barely made a start on the book. I knew the character needed to die, but I hadn’t decided how or where I wanted him to die.

As I walked around the area, an idea came to me. I would have the character be attacked and killed as he went to his car, which he parked there more-or-less for free. Looking around, this seemed plausible, as there were a good number of cars parked along Cheapside–some of them for quite some time.

It was a desolate place. I saw no other person, and I walked around for more than an hour. So, for the story, I knew that there would be no one about; and, crucially, it would take time to discover the body, particularly if they shoved it in amongst the trees and brush. I decided that the assassins would steal the car into the bargain, to make it look like a car-jacking gone wrong.

So, I wrote:

<<Imogen found a televised news report about [spoiler-name removed]’s death on her computer.
“The body,” the reporter began, “was found this morning along Cheapside Street by Anderston Quay. Mr. James McManus, a resident of the Glasgow Central Skyline apartments, who was walking his dog, telephoned police.”

The news report cut to McManus:

“It’s an open area, and I sometimes let the dog off the leash,” he began. McManus’s eyes shifted as a flicker of doubt ran across his face over whether he should be admitting that. “He found something by the fence on the other side of the street from the parking lot. He was quite excited by it. I couldn’t make out what it was because it—the man’s body—was on the other side of the fence. That’s when I went over and had a look myself.”

Imogen and Ross looked at one another with bleak disgust. His body, it seemed, had been tossed over the high fence like abandoned rubbish. The camera roved over the site, tucked under the Kingston Bridge. It was a weedy, desolate place, surrounded by grim, spare ground.

“The car has been stolen, too,” said the reporter. “We’re told that it’s been recovered where it was abandoned sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, behind the Possilpark Library.”>>

Later, Imogen tries to pump the brakes on whether this was a calculated murder, or just some senseless, random killing:

<<“Let’s take a moment and examine the facts,” she said to Ian. “And whether this isn’t just some horrible coincidence. I mean, things like this do happen.”

“In America, maybe!” said Ian “But this is Scotland. There’s homicidal violence, sure: a bar fight? Practically any night of the week. A bit of aggro outside the chip shop? Some thieving or drug dealing? Again, sure. But murder? Robbing someone and murdering him? You’re not on.”

“You’re positive?”

“No,” he admitted. “No a hundred percent.”

“Can you get the police report?” she asked.

“No, I…” He thought for a moment. “I could, yeah. I’d have to be careful how I phrased my interest.”

“Let’s start there,” she said. “And, yes, we need to be careful. Because if [he] has been killed to keep him quiet, it might draw attention to us.”>>

Next up, Dundee Law

# # #

Bastard Verdict is available now in paperback, and eReader!

YOU DON’T NEED TO WIN, JUST DON’T LOSE
In politics, people cheat to win, or because they’re afraid to lose. The difference can be deadly.

Imogen will risk what’s left of her standing, her career–and maybe her life–to get at the truth.

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. To get the details right for the new thriller, he drew on his boyhood in Scotland and scouted locations for scenes in the book while attending Bloody Scotland.

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.

He’s a member of MWA, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the new president of the Delaware Valley Sisters in Crime chapter. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

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

His most recent short fiction is below. The first is available for online reading.

“Eight O’Clock Sharp” in Retreats from Oblivion: the Journal of NoirCon. (free online)
Set in Philadelphia’s 9th Street Market, Thomas is a man outside of time, forgotten, but trying to do the right thing while contending with avaricious forces.

“Ultimatum Games” in Rock and Hard Place magazine issue #7
A rare book heist, bad decisions. The narrator and his partner-in-crime clash over evolving bourgeois norms.