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.
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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. 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!
Chosen Words - James McCrone 