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.