"Who Knows but That Some Human Beings, by Virtue of the Divine Spark Within Them, May Occasionally Be Able to Travel Backward Through Time?"

"The Time-Traveler."
By Ralph Milne Farley (Roger Sherman Hoar, 1887-1963).
First appearance: Weird Tales, August 1931.
Reprinted in Omnibus of Time (1950).
Short short short story (4 pages).
Online at SFFAudio (HERE) (PDF).

"What would you do if you were given a chance to influence events so that you could live the past over again?"

The poet tells us that "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" and he "took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

At some point we all come to a fork in the road, take one path, and then years later, if we can find the time for reflection, think about what might have happened if we'd gone the other way, and perhaps feel a pang of regret. Professor John D. Smith comes to one of those forks and has reason to feel regret that he didn't let someone die when he had the chance, and now it's going to cost him his position, his prestige, and even put undue stress on his marriage. But then comes his chance to change things; it'll mean an old rival will die, but Smith's future will be secure.

It isn't long, however, before Professor Smith will come to another fork in the road, one where he must choose between a comfortable contentment and a crippled conscience . . .

Resource:
- Our last meeting with Ralph Milne Farley was in his capacity as a co-author; see (HERE) for more.

- If you're interested in investigating temporal paradoxes, you can either hit yourself in the head with a hammer or you can go to Winchell Chung's page about "Time Travel" (HERE).

The bottom line: "Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories."
— Steven Wright

"A Detective New to Fiction"

Caveat: This post is only for readers who prefer seeing the first appearances of stories they like, especially those with illustrations (illos), including maps and diagrams, that seldom 
get reprinted in book publication.

Detective fiction aficionados (as well as Winnie the Pooh fans) should already be well acquainted with this particular book by its usual title, A. A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922; Wikipedia HERE), but a few might not know it was serialized as The Red House Murder. You can find the complete novel at Project Gutenberg (HERE).

THE RED HOUSE MURDER.
By A. A. Milne (1882-1956).
First appearance: Everybody's Magazine, August-December 1921.
Serial novel (5 installments, 103 pages).
Online at Hathi Trust.
(Note: Some of the text and illos are faded but still legible.)

Part I: 19 pages. Online (HERE). A three dimensional diagram of the Red House is on page 22 (HERE).
   "All of us have the Sleuth-urge, the desire to solve crime mysteries. Mr. Milne confesses to it and that's why we have this novel. He thought, as he says, of a good way to commit a murder and there followed this story of mystery, thrills, humor and a detective new to fiction."

Part II: 21 pages. Online (HERE). A plan of the Red House and grounds is on page 77 (HERE).
   "An Unusual Mystery Novel with a Detective New to Fiction. Was the Killing an Accident and Did Mark Lose His Head and Run Away?"

Part III: 20 pages. Online (HERE). A diagram of the entrance to the secret passage is on page 75 (HERE).
   "While Cayley and the Inspector Drag the Pond, Antony, with Sinister Forebodings, Explores the Secret Passage."

Part IV: 24 pages. Online (HERE). Another plan of the Red House and its surroundings is on page 66 (HERE).
   "Antony and Bill Pursue Their Investigations and Arrive at One Definite Conclusion."

Part V: 19 pages. Online (HERE).
   "Antony Gillingham Does Some Very Shrewd Guessing and Solves the Red House Mystery."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Three Minutes Later, the Laboratory No Longer Existed"

"The Rocket Pistol."
By Robert D. Sampson (1927-92).
First appearance: Science Fiction Adventures, May 1953.
Short story (15 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

"Hawk-Nose gave Bill a bright red Hyper Atomic Rocket Pistol, but warned him that telling where he got it meant death. Bill didn't tell, even when the whole police force wanted to know."

The most efficient and effective weapon is invisible and doesn't make any noise; it bores 
into the mind and paralyzes the will to resist, making conquest much easier and far less destructive. This weapon has a name: fear.

If you're planning an invasion, perhaps the best way in isn't smashing the front door—that always gets noticed—but from a completely unexpected direction, such as through the children . . .

Resource:
- According to the ISFDb (HERE), Robert Sampson produced as much nonfiction as fiction, with seventeen SFF stories to his credit, most of them in the '80s and '90s.

The bottom line: "Guys never really get over their toys."
— Michael Keaton

Who Knew There Could Be So Many MOTIVES FOR MURDER?

MOTIVES FOR MURDER: A Celebration of Peter Lovesey on His 80th Birthday by Members of the Detection Club.
Edited and Introduction by Martin Edwards (born 1955). Foreword by Len Deighton (born 1929). Afterword by Peter Lovesey (born 1936).
CRIPPEN & LANDRU PUBLISHERS, November 2016.
317 pages. Short story anthology (19 stories + 1 poem, all original).
For sale (HERE).

Popular crime fiction writer Peter Lovesey recently turned eighty, a notable achievement in itself, and twenty of his friends at the Detection Club got together to produce this Festschrift in his honor. Editor Martin Edwards's choice of selections is worthy of commendation, while Douglas Greene at Crippen & Landru has done his usual fine job assembling it all into a coherent whole.

Some of the resulting stories knowingly reflect the milieus and characters that Lovesey 
has developed and explored over the years, the town of Bath and his historical mysteries especially so. Other tales by established authors, however, feature their own characters 
and settings, with sub-types running the gamut from domestic suspense to pure detection.

As varied as the stories are, though, there isn't a clunker in the bunch. As instances we 
can point to Catherine Aird's "The Walrus and the Spy," which involves espionage and the solution of a knotty cipher; L. C. Tyler's "The Trials of Margaret" is a black comedy pure and simple; Martin Edwards's "Murder and Its Motives" centers on bibliographical criminality; Michael Jecks's "Alive or Dead" plays with narrative time; John Malcolm's "The Marquis Wellington Jug" explores Lovejoy territory while Michael Ridpath's "The Super Recogniser 
of Vik" wanders poleward into Nordic Noir; Susan Moody's "A Village Affair" echoes Miss Marple, just as Kate Charles's "A Question of Identity" reflects Hitchcock.

For devotees of the Sage of Baker Street there's David Stuart Davies's featherweight "The Adventure of the Marie Antoinette Necklace: A Case for Sherlock Holmes"; while for fans 
of Peter Lovesey's Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray there are David Roberts's inconclusive "Unfinished Business" and, better still, Kate Ellis's "The Mole Catcher's Daughter," with Thackeray's nephew performing some simple but effective sleuthing; and finally our favorite, Andrew Taylor's unpredictable "The False Inspector Lovesey," with its delightfully spunky narrator leading us down the garden path.

CONTENTS:
   "Introduction" by Martin Edwards
   "Foreword" by Len Deighton

THE STORIES:
   (1) "The Reckoning of Sins" by Alison Joseph:
       "It must have taken a minute, to grab her wrists, a struggle, a push. And she was gone."

   (2) "The False Inspector Lovesey" by Andrew Taylor:
       "I didn't bother to count the money. I just sat there, looking at the banknotes, enjoying them, and feeling the happiness rise up inside me like a warm, pink cloud."

   (3) "Dreaming of Rain and Peter Lovesey" by Ann Cleeves:
       "All this bloody fuss about a bit of rain."

   (4) "The Walrus and the Spy" by Catherine Aird:
       "What's the walrus got to do with it?"

   (5) "Unfinished Business" by David Roberts:
       "Blade on the feather, shade off the trees. Swing, swing together, with your bodies between your knees."

   (6) "The Adventure of the Marie Antoinette Necklace: A Case for Sherlock Holmes" by David Stuart Davies:
       "It seems I have been outwitted by the old fox."

   (7) "An End in Bath" by Janet Laurence:
       "I'm sure Rod wouldn't have harmed him. It was probably a fox."

   (8) "The Marquis Wellington Jug" by John Malcolm:
       "There'll be a dented car with forensics locked away somewhere."

   (9) "A Question of Identity" by Kate Charles:
       "But I would be . . . free. Free as a bird."

   (10) "The Mole Catcher's Daughter" by Kate Ellis:
        "Something strange is going on."

   (11) "The Trials of Margaret" by L. C. Tyler:
        "There were clearly things that she hadn't thought through as well as she might, including what to do with the body."

   (12) "Ghost Station" by Liza Cody:
        "The scarlet essence of a victim had slid, unresisting, into a gutter outside a bookshop in a tourist town where nothing happened."

   (13) "The Suffragette's Tale" by Marjorie Eccles:
        "You have a good aim, Miss Daventry, and good eyesight, I dare say, but not that good."

   (14) "Murder and Its Motives" by Martin Edwards:
        "If I were to save him, I needed to be more subtle. I would try to understand something about murder, and the psychology of people who committed it."

   (15) "Alive or Dead" by Michael Jecks:
        "The excitement, the adrenalin, they could make him miss his mark and screw up. No chance he could do that today. This must be absolutely perfect."

   (16) "The Right Thing" by Michael Z. Lewin:
        "I've spent far too much of my school career trying to live my family down. I'm going to embrace my inner detective."

   (17) "The Super Recognizer of Vik" by Michael Ridpath:
        "He needed to be taught a lesson, if we could only find him."

   (18) "Digging Deep" by Ruth Dudley Edwards:
        "It was what he would have wanted."

   (19) "A Sonnet for Peter Lovesey" by Simon Brett:
        "Praise? Praise for Peter Lovesey's always due."

   (20) "A Village Affair" by Susan Moody:
        "Why would you think one of your closest friends might be a murderer, for goodness sake?"

AFTERWORD: "Spies, Superheroes and Stolen Goods: Peter Lovesey's Memories of the Detection Club in the 1970s":
   "Despite the potential for discord, Detection Club evenings were friendly to a fault, even at the more formal dinners when we couldn't choose who we sat with."

A PETER LOVESEY BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Resources:
- Another Detection Club anthology published by Crippen & Landru, this one edited by the birthday boy himself, is The Verdict of Us All (2006), in honor of H. R. F. Keating (1926-2011); go (HERE) for more.

- Martin Edwards's entertaining history of the Detection Club, The Golden Age of Murder (2015), is available in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle (HERE).

"For the First Time in the History of Crime, a Murderer Had at His Disposal the Sure Means of Ridding Himself of His Corpse"

"Murder in the Time World."
By Malcolm Jameson (1891-1945).
First appearance: Amazing Stories, August 1940.
Reprinted in The Alien Envoy and Other Stories (2012) and Anachron, Inc. and Other Stories (2013).
Short story (17 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).
(Parental caution: Strong language and violence.)

"'They can't accuse me of a crime when there is no evidence that it has been committed,' said Karl Tarig. So he sent the body of the murdered man into the future. But he didn't realize the truth of the adage: Time will tell!"

Chapter I: "I haven't time now, but ten years from now . . ."
Chapter II: "Escape"
Chapter III: "The Plot Thins"
Chapter IV: "Oblivion"

"Have his carcase" is a well-established requirement in Anglo-American jurisprudence; for the state to prosecute a case of murder against the accused there must a body, or at least evidence of it.

He might not be the sharpest crayon in the box, but Karl Tarig, a greedy wastrel with a criminal record for relatively minor offenses, knows about "have his carcase" and, feeling emboldened by it, undertakes something he's been wanting to do for a long time: murder his boss (who is also his cousin), Dr. Claude Morrison; adding to Tarig's confidence is knowing that he has the perfect means of evading suspicion, an operational time machine:

Heretofore he had refrained from major crime because he was yellow—afraid. Afraid of the law—the noose or the chair. But he was bold now. He was immune from the law. To hell with the law! For he had thought out the perfect crime. There could be no dangerous consequences. You can't hang a man for murder without a body—a corpus delicti.

As (bad) luck would have it, Dr. Morrison has just perfected a time machine (although he prefers the term D-4 Accelerator) and Tarig, although not too smart, has learned just enough to operate it. You could say that, as far as Karl Tarig's despicable plans are concerned, the future looks bright indeed—until the moment comes when he hears a voice say, "You thought you were clever, but in all my career I never saw a more stupid crime," just as he finds himself "being led towards a black door marked only by a single white death's head"...

Comment: Our author seems to have realized that, unlike time travel into the past, travelling into the future entails a lot fewer paradoxes and, therefore, not as many plot snarls.

Typos: "stringing that Waren girl along"; "There was a sign swing".

Resource:
- Our latest encounter with Malcolm Jameson was last May (HERE).

The bottom line: "If I could time travel into the future, my first port of call would be the point where medical technology is at its best because, like most people on this planet, I have this aversion to dying."
— Neal Asher

"Nothing Out of the Ordinary; Only the Robbery and Incidental Murder of an Old Man"

"The Mystery of the Centenarian."
By George Hibbard (1858-1928).
First appearance: Everybody's Magazine, January 1905.
Short story (13 pages, with 7 illos).
Online at Google Books (HERE).

"Oh, you men! Of course you can't untangle anything. Did you ever see one with a skein of yarn? A woman can always get at the thread of a thing."

One hundred year-old Hiram Kirgate, known to one and all for his miserliness and misanthro-py, is dead, and one and all aren't inclined to shed any tears about it. The police are satisfied that a burglar took advantage of the victim's age, killing him with a blow to the head as he was counting his money. Elwood, our newspaper reporter narrator, finds the case equally unremarkable, but his boss, heeding his journalistic "sixth sense," insists on him pursuing it, feeling that "something might be made of it."

Being entirely clueless as how to proceed, Elwood seeks the help of female sleuth Hermia Wyatt, possessed of "an exceptional gift of discernment—a remarkable faculty for instinctive analysis and deduction," whose assistance he's made use of before. To collect as much information as she can that relates to the crime, Hermia, in Nero Wolfeian fashion, uses Elwood as her Archie, sending him into the field and processing whatever data, however meager, that he brings back into an evolving theory that should lead to the solution.

But before then, Elwood will encounter an incensed hit-and-run victim; some skulduggery involving a mine (gold? silver? we're never told); a morose young man who's recently discovered that through no fault of his own he can't marry the girl he loves; his reclusive father from whose room come "strange sounds"; and an elusive green parrot, "a bad-tempered old beast" that happily consigns everybody it sees to perdition—the whole thing culminating in a kerfuffle involving a smashed door, fisticuffs, and Elwood having to make use of his "old foot-ball tactics."

Resources:
- In a Watsonian vein, the narrator mentions "the peculiar mystery of the Retired Banker," "the singular matter of the Stained Glass Window," "the occurrence of the Empty Carriage," and "the circumstance of the Little Hands," none of which, as far as we can determine, were ever committed to print by George Hibbard or anyone else.

                       "I ain't talkin', see?"

The bottom line: "Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity."
— Dr. Johnson

"Mr. Bond, I Am Afraid Your Safe Has Been Tampered With"

"A Twentieth Century Detective."
By Walter L. Hawley (c. 1860-1909).
First appearance: The Argosy, March 1897.
Short short story (6 pages).
Online at Comic Book Plus (HERE) (select page 194).

"Why Bond & Co. saw fit to employ John Smith on short notice — A bank robbery that was discovered under rather surprising circumstances and which develops astounding features."

Some criminals aren't content just to steal; they like doing a con as well. Poor Mr. Bond, the banker! Not only will his name be mud to the world at large but also patsy.

Resource:
- According to Walter L. Hawley's FictionMags listing, in addition to some nonfiction such as "Development of the American Newspaper" (1899; online HERE), he also penned at least a half dozen short stories, of which "A Twentieth Century Detective" is one.

Nothing as blatant as this.

The bottom line: "My buddies wanted to be firemen, farmers or policemen, something like that. Not me, I just wanted to steal people's money!"
   — John Dillinger