Temperance's Temporal Detective Agency, Finding Time: A Serialized Pipe Fiction

Temperance's Temporal Detective Agency, Finding Time is a work of fiction that a writer using the pen name "Professor Stanwell P. Briar" publishes in installments on Pipedia. Serializing a literary text within the pages of a pipe encyclopedia is an unusual thing to find; what explains the page's presence there is that it continues a series of novels whose characters are pipe smokers. The single installment published so far is titled "Doing Time," a note promising the next installment "soon" has been left standing, and the page has not been updated since May 2024.

The Pen Name and the Series

The name the author chose winks at pipe enthusiasts: Stanwell and Peterson are the names of two long-established pipe brands, and "briar" is the wood that pipes are principally made from. According to the author's page on Pipedia, the person behind the name is also the publisher of a self-published paper called the Agricultural and Mechanical Gazette, which they began in November 1988 and kept running until 1997. The Dirigible Pirates stories, the first link in the series, first appeared piece by piece in that paper before being collected and published as a book.

The common setting of the narratives is a fictional village called "Black Hart" and its library. Within the fiction, the library is said to have grown out of a private club: its collection grew when, in lean years, regulars left books instead of money, and its staff gradually turned into librarians. Tales from the Black Hart, which gives the series its name, is dated in catalogs to the mid-2010s: its electronic edition is recorded as 2015, and its self-published print edition as 2017. The Revenge of Dr. Minneapolis St. Paul was published in 2019 and reprinted in 2021. The volume concerning Temperance's detective agency is said, according to records, to have come out in the final months of 2023; because this title does not appear in library catalogs, its date cannot be confirmed. Finding Time is presented as the sequel to this last book.

The Narrative's Framework

The text combines a steampunk universe of flying airships with time travel. A made-up field of science called "temporal mechanix" is invented complete with its own university and professors. In the first installment, the narrator Bran is being held in the Black Hart village jail; Temperance and her crewmates come to collect him for a new investigation. The subject of the investigation is a phenomenon the fiction's own terminology calls a "Wandering Temporal Fragment"; the fact that this term's English abbreviation collides with an everyday exclamation is one example of the humor the author spreads through the text. Details such as the village's contradictory dual court system, the local militia's catapult, and the jailhouse kitchen carry the same comic vein.

The Pipe Details in the Text

In the narrative, the pipe serves less as set dressing than as an identity marker: characters are introduced together with their brands. Temperance is given a Peterson System with the day's Balkan blend, the jailed narrator Bran an aged Medico, and the professor character a Savinelli. According to the author's bio on Pipedia, the Peterson System is also the preference of the person behind the pen name. Details of this kind tie the text into the fictional branch of the literature gathered under the heading pipe books and publications.