Capstone

Poul Anderson's "Death and the Knight" is a good story but is really only a brief addendum or appendix to his Time Patrol series which had been brought to its two-volume completion a few years earlier.

"Death and the Knight" was written because Katherine Kurtz asked Anderson for a Knights Templar story and it made sense to the author to make this also a Time Patrol story. The Patrol would of course have investigated the Knights - who do not turn out to be a front for the Patrol or anything else spectacular. Instead, the connection between the two organizations is admirably understated and, in the process, we learn something about the real, authentic history of the Knights - with a behind-the-scenes input from the Patrol.

Because of the order in which Manse Everard and his colleagues experience the events in these stories, I think that "Death and the Knight" should be added to the end of the novel, The Shield Of Time, not, as it is, to the end of the omnibus collection, Time Patrol.

When the series was published complete in two volumes, two processes occurred:

first, eight previously published works of different lengths were brought together for the first time in a single volume, then entitled The Time Patrol (this continued an already existing process: Guardians Of Time had become The Guardians of Time with the addition of one more story; Annals Of The Time Patrol had brought together those five with the two from Time Patrolman);

secondly, two new works were added, The Shield Of Time as a distinct volume and "Star of the Sea" as a ninth story in The Time Patrol.

Since "Star of the Sea" was added right at the end of these two convergent processes and since, furthermore, its narrative is subtle, significant and substantial, I think that it makes sense to describe this story as the capstone of the series even though, in terms of fictional chronology, it occupies the midpoint of the series.