Sherry — I’m delighted to host guest Barb Goffman whose new anthology Crime Travel is just out! The cover is fabulous and what’s inside is even better.
So when I put out a call for short stories last year for my own time-travel anthology, I was excited anew by the prospect of traveling to faraway lands and times. I asked for stories involving crime and time travel, and the submissions poured in, leaving me delighted. A lot of people apparently love time travel as much as I do.
Two days ago, that anthology, Crime Travel, was published by Wildside Press. And I’m happy to be here on the Wickeds today to share with you the lands and times—both long and recent—that the Crime Travel stories visit.
Want to travel to Shakespeare’s England and meet some of his contemporaries? Anna Castle’s “The Sneeze” takes you there.
How about go to a castle in merry old England in 1801? Barbara Monajem introduces us to an earl with a family problem in “The Last Page.”
Heidi Hunter brings us to an elegant dinner party in 1935 and the last sighting of a famous diamond in “No Honor Among Thieves.”
In Cathy Wiley’s “And Then There Were Paradoxes,” British police investigating a locked-room mystery travel back to 1938 to meet a famous citizen who might have some helpful insight.
Twelve years later, the Cold War is on, and a Philadelphia PI gets caught up in a missing-persons case in James Blakey’s “The Case of the Missing Physicist.”
What would a time-travel book be without a visit to Dallas, Texas, in November 1963, and an attempt to right a wrong? Brendan DuBois takes us there in “The Dealey Paradox.”
Eleanor Cawood Jones gives us a glimpse of life in the mid-1960s for a stay-at-home mom dealing with surprising life changes in “O Crime, In Thy Flight.”
Rounding out that decade, John M. Floyd’s “Ignition” lets the reader in on a scheme to travel to 1968 to pocket a hefty bit of cash.
If you’re interested in 1975, you’re in luck, because we have two stories that will take you there.
In Michael Bracken’s “Love, or Something Like It” a scientist travels to 1975 Waco, Texas, to save the woman he loves.
While in Korina Moss’s “On the Boardwalk,” a dying woman takes us to the Jersey shore in the summer of ’75 to save the brother she loves.
Want a taste of Manhattan in 1980? Don’t miss Adam Meyer’s “The Fourteenth Floor,” in which a security guard revisits a night early in his career.
In “Hard Return” Art Taylor lets us remember life in the 1990s, when Caller ID wasn’t prevalent but landlines still were—a simpler time in some ways but definitely not in others.
If you want to go back a decade, my story “Alex’s Choice” will take you to the Maine coast and a twelve-year-old’s quest to stop a tragedy long after it’s happened.
For something even more contemporary, there’s David Dean’s “Reyna,” in which an injured girl goes back a year to the scene of her accident.
And, finally, we have Melissa H. Blaine’s “Living on Borrowed Time,” in which time travelers come from the future to present-day Kansas City at Christmas. Why Kansas City? Why now? You’ll have to read the story to find out.
So those are the stories in Crime Travel—perfect for armchair travelers who want to journey to different times as well as different places. Definitely my kind of vacation.
Readers: Now it’s your turn: If you could travel through time, where—and when—would you go?
