The Time Patrol V

One difference between the timeline that we read about in the newspapers and the timeline that we read about in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series is that Sherlock Holmes is a fictitious character in the former but a historical person in the latter, although Anderson consistently observes certain literary niceties: whenever the names "Holmes" or "Watson" are used, these could be references to the familiar fictitious characters whereas, whenever Holmes is referred to as really existing, he is either unnamed or called "Altamont," his alias in His Last Bow.

"The private agent...was tall, thin, hawk-faced, and accompanied by a burly, mustached fellow with a limp who seemed a kind of amanuensis."
- Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 25.

That is clear enough although I missed it on first reading. I managed to read a Public Library copy of the first British hardback edition of Guardians Of Time in the very early sixties and was not yet sufficiently familiar either with the characters' physical appearances or with the idea of literary references. On a second reading, I was surprised not to have understood. Still later, reading the Complete Sherlock Holmes, I was again surprised to find the reference to the contents of an ancient British barrow that had set Everard on the trail of unauthorized time travel in fifth century Britain.

Everard found the reference in "...a collection of Victorian and Edwardian stories." (p. 18) At the beginning of the second Time Patrol story, "Brave To Be A King," "...the lost narratives of Dr Watson" (p. 55) are mentioned but there is now no suggestion that they are anything but fiction. This ambiguity reflects the pretence of the Baker Street Irregulars that Holmes was real and that everything written by Watson was true despite inconsistencies which, of course, are there to be explained away.

Everard's reading of Watson is interrupted by the arrival of Cynthia Denison and here we have what, for me in the early sixties, read like a very adult piece of prose fiction. Everard likes Cynthia but she married his friend, Keith, and now he must try to rescue Keith for her. Cynthia, blowing a cloud of smoke, speaks bitterly of:

"'Entropic time. Regular, untampered-with, twenty-four-hours-to-the-day time.'" (p. 56)

Here the science fictional idea of time travel was being discussed by realistic characters in a book written for adults. I had wondered what science fiction books as opposed to comic strips were like and now I was finding out.