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”

Strategic Mischief in the Electoral College

Posted on October 29, 2024 by James McCrone

Despite our familiarity with the Electoral College, it bears repeating that the citizens of the United States do not vote for the president but rather for Electors, chosen by the various political parties state-by-state, who promise, that is “pledge,” to vote for their candidate. “There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted in a 2022 interview.

If you follow this blog, you know that my first novel was a thriller called Faithless Elector, in which a shadowy group seeks to steal the presidency by manipulating the Electoral College. My novel is a work a fiction, and I didn’t get everything right. But it’s dismaying to watch so much of its plot play out in the real world.

Faithless Elector debuted in March of 2016, well before the party conventions had selected their respective candidates, so it’s not about Clinton and Trump, but is animated by the question, “What if?” What if a shadow group wanted to steal the presidency by manipulating the Electoral College? The book’s staying power lies in the fact that it’s about a real, latent weakness in the process, prone, as Rep. Raskin points out, to “a lot of strategic mischief.”

And it’s about writers’ questions: Who are the bad guys? What do they want? What are the stakes? How would they go about it? Because first and foremost, for a good story, the protagonist(s) need a strong antagonist. If your “bad guys” are dummies, or the stakes don’t seem compelling, it doesn’t make for much of a story. As a reader, you want to feel the importance of the stakes and the very real possibility that the protagonist might not succeed.

The story is driven by move and counter-move. Verisimilitude (“like truth”) has been my guide, and I had to construct a plausible, mischievous threat. So, to begin with, I looked at the story not as the hero’s journey, but as the conspirators’ plot. I looked at how they might plausibly pervert rules and institutions, what groundwork they would have to create. I zeroed in on the weakest link, the actual Electors, and I made the conspirators resilient, having built into their model an ability to take advantage of serendipitous (for them) unforeseen events.

In the novel, the assumed EC vote tally is separated by only four votes. If three Electors could be persuaded to switch their votes, then the presumed loser would win. When I wrote the book, only a few states had anti-Faithless Elector laws on the books, and no one knew whether those statutes would stand if brought before the Supreme Court (there is much scholarship suggesting that Electors were intended to be decision makers, and despite their pledge were free to vote as they saw fit; but of course, no switched vote had ever changed the assumed outcome). Since the ’16 election a number of states and the District of Columbia (38 in total now) have instituted some sort of anti-Faithless Elector law, leaving twelve states without any such laws, and of the 38, fully half have no enforcement mechanism for their laws.

In the novel, an idealistic young graduate student, Matthew Yamashita, happens to be polling Electors for his dissertation research when he finds a suspicious number of deaths among them–all of them occurring between the general election and the real presidential election, when the Electors meet in their respective state capitols. This year it will be December 17, 2024. Matthew must get the information out to someone who will believe him–and who can do something to stop it. Later, Matthew and his allies realize that though they’ve got most of the facts right, they’ve missed a key point, which has cost them time.

In the novel, the conspirators need to give the Faithless Electors cover for switching their pledged vote, so they set about creating what looks like voter fraud in Illinois. It is the key to their strategy because it sows doubt and causes confusion. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Trump campaign covers all bets–it sows doubt about the validity of voting, and their operatives work to disenfranchise as many voters as possible. We have even seen ballot collection boxes set on fire in and around the Portland, OR, area, putting hundreds of ballots in jeopardy.

Not only is the Electoral College an archaic remnant that has never operated as designed, but since the first fully contested election (after Washington declined to run a third term), the rise of political parties has caused it to grow worse and more convoluted. Worst, far from giving a voice to small state voters, it disenfranchises rural and city dwellers alike. Adding the malapportioned Senate numbers (two per state regardless of population), further distorts the will of the people. The candidates, as has been true for some time now, focus on “swing states,” like my home state of Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, there have now been five (5) presidential elections where the loser of the popular vote nevertheless became president – 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. Will it happen again in ’24? Will it be worse?

# # #

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!

Democracy on Trial – 2024 Election edition

Posted on August 12, 2024 by James McCrone

Making sure–NOW–that you’re registered to vote, and voting in November has never been more crucial. Donald Trump has even gone so far as to claim that we “won’t have to vote anymore…” if he’s put into power.

So, it’s not hyperbole to say that democracy is under threat. There are 84 days left until November 5th, 2024.

It’s important to remember that if voting didn’t matter, Trump’s party wouldn’t be working so hard to make sure you can’t. The litigious radical right means to gerrymander, purge/disenfranchise and litigate itself into power. They have been at it for years.

The Shelby County v. Holder decision saw the Supreme Court erode years of settled Voting Rights Act’s settled law. The overturning of key Voting Rights Act areas like Section 5 resulted in quick, anti-democratic laws. Within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced that it would implement a strict voter-ID law. Georgia and other states began closing polling places, resulting in . The list goes on. And on.

Democracy Docket does a nice job of keeping track of this misfeasance. The foes of democracy have deep pockets, (some) pliant judges, and a blistering sense of grievance and entitlement. They are laying the foundation–now–to overturn the upcoming election if it doesn’t go their way. Democracy Docket keeps a running scorecard of the lawsuits, judgements and official actions related to voting across the U.S.:

The “scorecard” from the most recent newsletter

Below, is a sample. The states of Georgia and Mississippi remain embattled, but the forces of disenfranchisement are at work in every state. The bullet point topics listed below, copied from the DemDocket newsletter, are the most recent developments.

Deep dive into threats to democracy in Georgia

Since 2020, we’ve seen an uptick in election denialism. And at a Georgia rally last Saturday, Trump and his allies started their plan to subvert the 2024 election by targeting the people responsible for overseeing election rules, Marc wrote in a new piece.
The state of Georgia has created a new online portal that makes it easier to cancel people’s voter registrations. In a new YouTube video, Marc shares his concerns about how the website will likely fuel election vigilantism in the state.
Struggles for voting rights continue in Mississippi
The RNC appealed the dismissal of its lawsuit seeking to reject mail-in ballots in Mississippi that are cast by Election Day and received shortly after. The case is now before the 5th Circuit — the most conservative federal appeals court.
Recently, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Mississippi Constitution’s felony disenfranchisement provision will remain in effect, reversing its previous opinion from August 2023. Democracy Docket talked to individuals working to get their voting rights restored about this ruling’s impact.

Ohio removes hundreds of alleged noncitizens from voter rolls

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) announced that the state’s county boards of election are removing 499 alleged noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls after purging nearly 155,000 inactive voters last week.

I do not work for Democracy Docket, nor do I have any financial interest in it, but they do important work that shines light on the kinds of things the Party of Trump does in the dark and away from the headlines.

I would urge anyone who wants to keep abreast of what anti-democracy forces are doing across the nation to read and subscribe to Democracy Docket. For those living in Pennsylvania/Philadelphia, The Committee of Seventy is also a wonderful source. While I’m at it, Brookings has its “Issues at Stake 2024” newsletter

But above all, make sure your voter registration is current and active. And make a plan to vote on November 5th!

Anyone who reads this blog must know where my sympathies lie. But first and foremost I care about our democracy. Yes, I’m a life-long Democrat, but I welcome the national argument that is voting–the chance for a free people to decide for itself as an electorate what they want their future to look like. I deplore and will resist any action to rig the game. By any side. And right now, it’s happening all on one side.

# # #

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, about a conspiracy set in Oregon’s wine coutry, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption.

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.

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