Short Stories 366:227 — “The Case of the Missing Physicist,” by James Blakey

[image error]Marrying time travel to crime stories, Crime Travel‘s next story, “The Case of the Missing Physicist,” from James Blakey, is a kind of noir, cold-war detective story (only with time travel) and I adored it. We’ve got everything here of the usual set-up: hard-luck detective Mikey Sturgis with a gambling debt hanging over his head, a leggy woman who needs him to find someone: her physicist father. She wants to reconcile with him (they’re estranged) but there’s no sign of the man. So, off Mikey goes to figure things out, tracks the man down to his former mansion, and just before he discovers what he might be looking for, he’s taken down for the count.

Mikey comes to with a few more mysteries: why didn’t whoever clocked him kill him? They didn’t even take his money. He gets back to the search for the professor—was that who hit him?—and then discovers a hidden elevator, opens the doors to see he’s not alone and is presented with very hard evidence that what he just used isn’t an elevator at all, but a time machine. Which is when all the Russians and Germans hoping to heat up the cold war (or just end WWII differently) show up, and things get all the more complicated.

The story flows with great style, the setting and characters all chewing the dialog and scenery with equal verve for a noir detective style story, and the time-travel is just an added touch of flavour. The route of Mikey’s survival is clever, and the final moments of the story are another moment that had me intrigued, as it opened up the door to different possibilities (or, rather, closed some quite completely) and leaves the reader wondering what will happen “next” time.