Temperance's Temporal Detective Agency

More Tales from the Black Hart

By: Professor Stanwell P. Briar

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

What is an imaginative and worldly young woman with a well-established and completely boring career in accounting to do once she has tasted the exotic delights and adventure traveling through time as an associate of Professor Bajusz? Yes, that Bajusz, the one who has often been characterized publicly and in print as a “mad Hungarian scientist”, “Hungarian mad scientist” or often enough as, “quite simply mad and probably Hungarian”. Why, she evolves her tax avoidance accounting business into a detective agency, of course! She already has a Peterson System pipe, several kilograms of TK-6 pipe tobacco blend, one or more guns and several lovers. What more might one need to establish a successful detective business?

It's no mystery, to even the casual observer, that time is all in a jumble, what with disappearing socks, avaricious corporate entities, the toxic dumping somewhere in time of biological and genetic engineering experiments gone wrong, temporal tourists (more than hotel towels stolen) and temporal refugees fleeing from various disasters, all churning any sense of linearity. Did someone mention the evil duo, Doctor Minneapolis St. Paul and her “husband” Doctor Zetaprst who have some inclination to rule the universe through the perversion of science?

This is the fifth or maybe sixth novel in the Mid-Century Modern Novel quagmire, which naively enough aspires to be a series. There is some possibility that this story follows closely on the heels of Galvanic Æther of the Martian Moons since several, perhaps many, of the characters appear in both stories.