Et In Arcadia Ego

Posted on June 17, 2025 by James McCrone

(“Even in Arcadia, there am I”)

There was a place, at NE 40th Street and University Way in Seattle’s University District, where even recently, some 40 years on, I could locate and remember a former, younger self, one now slowly fading. That intersection was quite literally a crossroad for me–between the Last Exit on Brooklyn, the College Inn Pub and Arnold’s. And the University of Washington.

The news that The College Inn Pub will close after 50 years has hit me hard. I have read that you die by degrees; that is, you’re not really gone until the last person who remembers your face dies. But I think parts of us disappear even while we’re living.

The “I” in the translation above is meant to be death itself, present everywhere, even in the happiest places. Which that corner certainly was. It also leapt out at me because Arnold’s Video Arcade, scene and locus of much misspent youth, was diagonally across the street.

This post isn’t meant to be a cranky whinge about how great things used to be and how soulless and rotten they are now. Change is a constant, you can’t put lightning in a bottle, and lots of other cliches that for all their threadbare, hackneyed-ness nevertheless articulate a truth. It’s that when things that are (or were) a part of you disappear, it feels like losing yourself, or like reaching out in the dark to touch a wall you know should be there. But it’s not. People, places and things locate you, give you context, guidance, maybe even comfort.

The Pub anchored the northeast corner of NE 40th Street and University Way in Seattle’s University District, an area just west of the University of Washington campus that was a focal point for the lives of me and my friends from 1979 until about 1994, by which time I had moved to another part of the city, first Belltown, then Beacon Hill and then the Rainier Valley.

Diagonally across the intersection from the Pub stood Arnold’s, a video arcade. Just around the corner, on Brooklyn Ave., was The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s second oldest coffee house, and one of the oldest in the country. It stood right next door to the Ethnic Cultural Theatre. Arnold’s is long gone, The Exit moved to a new a location and then closed 20+ years ago, and now the College Inn Pub is up for sale and will probably be closed.

I started working at The Exit as a dishwasher when I was 15 years old in 1979. Later, when my high-school friends and I would stop in at Arnold’s to play Asteroids, or Defender or Ms. Pac-Man, we’d often steal through the alley into the back of The Exit, where we would hang out. And if it was a weekend night, we’d look for someone to buy us beer. I would also take dates there. Not only was it an interesting, funky place, but it was cheap, and I was known.

I think I was the youngest employee Irv Ciskey, the owner, had ever hired. I had gone to his other restaurant, Lake Union Pizza, to apply for a job when we moved to Seattle, and he had sent me to The Exit. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Irv had called the manager there and told him to hire me. It did seem like an easy interview even at the time.

Even before I was old enough to go inside, the College Inn Pub loomed large in my thoughts. My freshman year at the University, I was in the Terry-Lander dormitory, and even though it was generally simpler to take the Campus Parkway exit from the building to get to my classes, I would often leave via the back exit, and NE 40th–terra firma. I’d head to The Exit for a quick espresso, then mount the stairs to leave via the back way out, into the alley that also ran behind Arnold’s and onto the street.

Later, I would work at the Pub as a “beertender”–my work life as a grad student split between it and the University Bar & Grill about six blocks up the street.

Even after we had moved east, returning on visits to that corner, I could see myself there. It was unique in that it represented not just a snapshot of my life, but a series of lives–adolescence, undergraduate, graduate, young father–were enacted there. Not like flipping through an album of static pictures or one brief moment, but like viewing a film covering the ages of 15 to 36, how I changed (if, indeed, I’ve every really grown up!), how my friends grew, how the city changed, even as the corner remained largely unchanged whenever I returned. Fortunately, I’m still close with those friends, even if we don’t see one another regularly.

I lived in the midwest (Wisconsin and Iowa) for about 12 years, in Seattle for 21; and I have now lived away from Seattle for longer than I was there (25 years). My wife says I’m a midwesterner at heart, but a good deal of my life and heart is at 40th and University.

I’m not sure when I’ll be back in Seattle next, though I hope it will be soon. If you see some sad and bitter old man standing in the intersection staring disconsolately, or pointing out what used to be, he’s not lamenting a Seattle that is no more, but mourning the loss of a bit of the sense of himself.

Maybe I should be grateful that I have such a place–a “better to have loved and lost…” kind of thing. Maybe I will be grateful one day.

# # #

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”

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.

# # #

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”

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.