Ship of Theseus

Posted on July 15, 2025 by James McCrone

“When is ‘am’?” The persistence of identity and Witness Tree

The Ship of Theseus looms large as a metaphor for ideas about identity and change in my novel-in-progress, Witness Tree, a suspense-thriller about a leadership battle for (white) supremacy in a rural Oregon county that erupts into the open when newly sober, ex-con David Paterson is the sole witness to a brutal execution meant to tie off the last loose thread.

David is trying to make a fresh start in sobriety, but he carries the weight of the past with him, along with questions about how much he may (or may not) have changed during his eight years in prison. When he reports the murder to the police, as a now-solid citizen should, it’s the deputy who put him away eight years earlier who takes his testimony. The deputy makes it clear that if a body is ever found, David will be the prime suspect. “People don’t just change overnight, Paterson,” he says.

[from Wikipedia]: “In its original formulation, the ‘Ship of Theseus’ paradox concerns a debate over whether or not a ship that has had all of its components replaced one by one would remain the same ship.” For David, the notion that you can never step into the same river twice; that “Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow,” looms large.

So, as to identity–which is it? Which you is “who”? The person you are today? Five years ago? Who will you be in fifty years? And when is “am”? This week? Today? And which facet of you is “I”? I’m writing a suspense-thriller, so I don’t belabor the point or get in the way of the story, but David can’t be sure who he is, or what he wants, and he can’t know how others perceive him.

The story becomes David’s race to find out who was killed, why, and by whom, before the police can hang it all on him. As he investigates, with the help of two high school friends who still stand by him, he finds that what the murder was meant to cover up runs deeper and wider than David could have imagined. Worse, the murder and officials’ seeming complicity in it, feels eerily like the murder of his friend in prison, to which he was also a witness. In prison, the Aryan Brotherhood left him alive–and damaged–as a warning to others.

The photo of the pine tree on the hillside that you see is the Witness Tree that inspired the book. It’s near my parents’ farm, a Yamhill County, Oregon, survey marker, delineating plots of land. It’s probably 80 years old. Or more. And it is illegal to cut it down. “Witness to corner,” the badge on the tree reads. My mother, now passed on, had always liked the tree. The term witness tree had been pregnant with meaning for us, and I decided to start a short story that involved it.

I began thinking about a short story titled Witness Tree, with the premise, “someone sees something they shouldn’t.”

I thought, “okay, good.” But then looked at the bare hillside and there seemed no way to see something without also being seen…seeing it. Which kind of threw a wrench in the gears. Until the following day, when I noticed that someone had dropped one of those green porta-potties near it for the grape harvesters to use.

And so the opening scene was born. David shelters from a deluge–common at that time of year–inside a porta-potty near a witness tree late one night. There is (fictionally) a large warehouse-like structure nearby, and the murder takes place in its gravel parking lot. The assassins are backlit by the lights on the building, but David, some forty yards away, is in total darkness. They are shadows in the murky, watery night. They can’t see him, and he can’t identify them. And yet, there’s something familiar about the dead man…

Try as I might, I could not get the story to stay a short story. I wrote the first ten pages or so and thought that it read like like an opening chapter. So I kept going. It’s been an exciting, satisfying and frustrating process. Dealing as it does with addiction, it is my most personal story to date, too.

And I have written it in first-person, which is new for me. Many of the plot points and reveals, however, could not happen as I originally conceived them. I couldn’t shift POV to the bad guys as I would do in the Faithless Elector series books, and I ended up writing (and then deleting) multiple scenes.

So, the notion of whether this is anything like the book I (sort of) conceived of two years ago also embraces Theseus’s ship. What began as a short story called “Witness Tree” became a novel of the same name, in the writing of which, I ran off the rails in a number of key ways, but have worked hard to bring it back into trim focus. Not only is it my most personal work, the number of holes I’ve plugged, scenes I have had to rewrite, is breathtaking.

But it floats, and I’m hopeful it will be seaworthy soon.

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

Without law, there is only power

Posted on July 10, 2025 by James McCrone

“Without law, there is only power,” is the tagline for the second book in the Faithless Elector series, Dark Network.

The books have been prescient about where we find ourselves today, attacks on the Electoral College, attacks on voting; naked power grabs by people from outside the parties who are nevertheless parasitic upon them (and who, like parasites, take over and destroy their hosts). There is a prison murder made to look like suicide, false flag attacks–and all written years before such events took center stage.

But I have to admit to a little naivety.

As the tagline above suggests, I had stupidly believed that the law might be a check on power. I had no inkling that the Dept. of Justice and the courts could be neutered (or weaponized) to the extent that we’re seeing today. The courts may indeed turn out to be a bulwark against the worst excesses of the current Trump administration, but I am not optimistic.

If I were writing Dark Network today I might use the tagline “when power is the law, there is no justice.”

Laws are not self-enforcing. We learned today, that DOJ lawyers are “being forced to choose between the president’s agenda and their ethical obligations as attorneys” (NYT, see link above).

With a supine congress, content to cede power to the presidency, there is little chance the administration will follow rulings that are contrary to its will. When the Supreme Court continues to abdicate its prerogatives, too, it’s unlikely that the administration will be compelled to do anything or uphold anything it doesn’t want to.

Voting is the crux of all three novels in the Faithless Elector series. It’s what the conspirators try to undermine and nullify. So, while I may have missed some of the viciousness and vindictiveness of the current administration in my novel, their real-world undermining of voting rights remains salient.

My alter-ego, and protagonist in all three books, FBI Agent Imogen Trager, is driven by her rage to oppose those who would take away or mitigate the right to vote. To do so, she has to navigate compromised and outright corrupt colleagues, a shadow paramilitary group and more to unmask who is pulling the strings and bring him to justice.

The “law” that Imogen fights desperately to preserve is that of the people to determine their own destiny. And in the real world, it’s also under daily threat.

Democracy Docket is fighting anti-voting legislation across the country, and it will be voting that brings some semblance of order and justice to the nation. “We are not powerless, and we must not act like we are,” writes Marc Elias.

I might add that they wouldn’t fight so hard to take away your vote if it wasn’t so important…and worrisome to them.

The Imogen Trager #FaithlessElector Thrillers at a glance:

Faithless Elector – Everyone thinks the election is over, but six weeks is a long time in politics. An idealistic, young researcher stumbles onto a plot to steal the presidency, with deadly consequences.

Dark Network – Without law, there’s only power. FBI Agent Imogen Trager is alone and in grave danger from a conspiracy she failed to destroy. She’ll have to fight against time, a sinister network, and even her own colleagues to defeat it.

Emergency Powers – No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The investigation that was FBI Agent Imogen Trager’s undoing may be the key to stopping a brutal, false flag terrorist attack meant to tighten a puppet president’s grip on power.

# # #

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!

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”

Questions and guessing, when the political is not political

Posted on June 11, 2024 by James McCrone

Fiction is not a letter to the editor, not an essay or a position paper, nor even a puff piece reifying one view over another. It’s stories–about character(s) in conflict, and a question–what will happen next? will the character succeed, fail, or live to fight another day?

But that isn’t quite all of it. I’m indebted to Maria Popova’s newsletter The Marginalian for helping me articulate something I felt to be true but couldn’t quite make clear.

Popova’s August 2021 newsletter “How (Not) to Be a Writer” quotes Anton Chekhov: “the task of the writer is not to solve the problem, but to state the problem correctly.” James Baldwin said something similar when he noted that the writer’s task is to “drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”

Chekhov goes on to say: “Anyone who says that the artist’s sphere leaves no room for questions, but deals exclusively with answers, has never done any writing or done anything with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses, and arranges; every one of these operations presupposes a question at its outset. If he has not asked himself a question at the start, he has nothing to guess and nothing to select.”

So, is it that “Happy families are all alike; but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” as Tolstoy asserts at the beginning of Anna Karenina? We may decide for ourselves. George Eliot’s preoccupation and recurring question was, “What to do with one’s life, how to use one’s gifts for the benefit of oneself and the world?” Or, as she asks in one of my favorite novels, Middlemarch, is it true “that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been…owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”?

I have said that I write political thrillers that aren’t political. By that, I mean that the work has no axe to grind, no point to prove. Sometimes the label “political” is lobbed around by readers or critics who are uncomfortable with a book’s subject matter, or the characters involved, and those inclusions in the story are what such people label (and dismiss) as “political.” Which is decidedly not what I’m talking about. In my work, I’m drawn to what lies behind the official explanations and stories we’re told. What is the flip side of the answer the powerful would like us to accept? What (if anything) is being concealed?

For example, a switched vote by a “faithless elector” has never altered the supposed result of a presidential election. But what if it did, what would it take? Who might orchestrate such a thing? How would they go about it? Those questions animated my first thriller, Faithless Elector, and new questions arose that drove me through the two following novels in the series, Dark Network and Emergency Powers. Early agent- and editor rejections for Faithless would praise the story, the characters (while nevertheless declining to pursue publication), but in two instances an agent wrote back, saying that “No one knows anything or cares about the Electoral College.”

I think they do now.

This isn’t too much of a spoiler, but readers are often surprised to find that neither of the parties is behind the conspiracy. Did I do it because I wanted not to offend anyone? No, when I asked the question, ‘who would do it?’ the story (and verisimilitude) dictated that it be an outside force, albeit one that is parasitic on a particular party. As a beginning, the novels I have written thus far ask, “What if?” and then go deeper:

In Faithless Elector, it was, What if a group of conspirators tried to steal the presidency by manipulating the Electoral College? In Dark Network, it was, How far might such people really go, and what happens when there is no law, only power? And in Emergency Powers, the questions was, Would Imogen have the stamina to sustain the investigation when everyone else wants to move on? (And why are those others so eager to move on?)

For my latest thriller, Bastard Verdict, I wondered, What if the first Referendum on Scottish Independence had been interfered with? How might it have been achieved? Would the conspirators be anxious to keep the lid on what they had done?

You can also read two of my recent short stories online. In “What’s Hidden,” the question is, “what do we owe to the dying and the dead?” In “Eight O’clock Sharp,” the question is, “is there freedom when the past doesn’t remember you?”

To write about one’s own time is to risk being dismissed as “political,” but to write about the here and now is always political. The beauty and substance comes from the questions we ask.

# # #

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. 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.

His latest book Bastard Verdict (18-May-2023), is a noir political thriller set in Scotland. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

A Seattle native (mostly), James now lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He’s a member of the The Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, Int’l Thriller Writers, Philadelphia Dramatists Center and is the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of the Sisters in Crime network. 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!

Secondary characters

Posted on June 29, 2023 by James McCrone

I used to daydream about writing for Law and Order back when it was still running*, not for its propulsive, plot-driven narratives, and certainly not its copaganda, but for the occasional, random, richly drawn secondary or even tertiary character(s); some random person who helps the plot along, but whom you probably won’t see again. True, there are a lot of stock interactions and tropes in Law and Order, like the one comedian John Mulaney has satirized as “guy who while being questioned by homicide detectives will not stop stocking crates…”, a kind of expository action-within-inaction reminiscent of the Sorkin walk, or any of HBO’s “sexposition” scenes.

But occasionally, and the reason I wanted to write for Dick Wolf, the episodes will also give time to brief encounters with memorable criminals. Yes, I want to know whodunnit, but the cream in my coffee, the a la mode on my pie, are the people, the characters. I’m not talking about dramatic flashbacks, but about artful, iceberg-like, less-is-more character moments. One that sticks with me was a brief interchange between Briscoe and a heroin addict being held for questioning.

The heroin addict has been detained for hours, and he needs his fix—badly—and he’d very much like to leave, now that he’s told the police everything he knows. Briscoe makes some wisecrack about how much money the addict is spending on heroin, and the addict launches into a brief, surprisingly cogent, economic disquisition on how well heroin has held its value in the marketplace. “Pot, cocaine,” he says disdainfully, “the price per gram has doubled over the past few years, but heroin’s still right where it always was. Gram-for-gram, ounce-for-ounce, heroin’s still your best value.” Not even Briscoe had a comeback for this sage advice.

Why do I love those exchanges? Because in a world of formulaic television, strange, vivid, serendipitous encounters are the stuff of life. I’ve written elsewhere about how I try to remain alive to possibilities, and I write down moments and exchanges I’ve been party to or eavesdropped upon. I hold onto them because even though they’re real and therefore could mean anything (or nothing), they feel like more than what they are—and maybe someday I’ll have a place to use them.

I’ve been pleased, in Bastard Verdict, that the character of Alan Wilson, a young, up-and-coming, petty criminal in an organized crime gang, has caught on. I needed someone with underworld ties to make the story work, but I needed him to be more than a conduit for the plot. To put flesh on his bones (so to speak), I created a backstory for him (one I know but don’t go into great detail about), and introducing him, I ripped off an exchange from my long-past drug days, and a deal I made in a pub bathroom.

I’d gone into the bathroom to wait for my dealer. When he came in, he was aghast that I was just standing there. “At least pretend you’re taking a piss,” he said to me all those years ago.

But how and why do some secondary characters strike a chord with readers where others don’t?

I’ve been pleased that some of my secondary characters have resonated with readers. Though I as I noted in the WHAT I LEARNED interview with the Indy Author/Matty Dalrymple, I had hoped the lawyer, Ewan Johnston would have garnered a bit more attention.

I remember an early reading of Faithless Elector in Oxford, where a young woman from the audience that day came up to me afterwards, wondering if I was going to give the cab driver more “stage time” in a future book. “I’m sure he’ll be back!” she said. I was glad the cabby had “landed” but sad that Mr. Fitzwilliam, the super in Professor Calder’s building had not. I wanted Fitzwilliam to resonate as the kind of good, everyday person whom we might all hope would (collectively) be the bulwark against the kind of conspiracy that’s unfolding. I even gave him a kind of heartwarming joke but no one mentioned him in reviews.

Special Agent in Charge Amanda Vega in Dark Network gets good reviews, but I’d also hoped that the courier, Jimmy May, would have engendered similar affection. While no one disparaged him, no one said, “will he be back?” He was, in Emergency Powers, as was Vega. In Emergency Powers, I brought back the cabby, but I had really hoped that Kirsten, the waitress at a tiny, Midwest airport would gain more traction than she did. Again, I wanted to juxtapose her ordinary, everyday-ness with the dire things going on in the conspiracy. Strangely, the bad guy, Frank Reed, even received some plaudits. I had one reader write to me to say how odd it was to be rooting for him.

I’m not sure why some secondary characters break through and others remain in the background, I’m pleased that the young criminal Alan Wilson, who becomes a kind of moral center in Bastard Verdict, seems to have become a favorite, with two reviewers expressing the hope that he’ll be back in a further installment.

I’ll see what I can do! 🙂

*Wait, L&O is back on the air?

# # #

His current book, Bastard Verdict, debuted on May 18th. A noir political thriller set in Scotland, it’s available through the link above, or wherever you buy your books. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

A Seattle native (mostly), James now lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He’s a member of the The Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, Int’l Thriller Writers, Philadelphia Dramatists Center and is the vice-president of the Delaware Valley chapter of the Sisters in Crime network. 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!

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.