Yes, whenever I want to read something to kill time while I wait for something else to happen (in this instance for movies of mine to very, VERY slowly upload to YouTube), it's a not-particularly-guilty pleasure to turn to Goulart - & I still haven't exhausted his selections yet. Once again, we have the futuristic mutations of 1930s pulp detectives & the usual host of stereotype parody characters - many of wch I really wdn't miss if they were to go away - the faux-gay crime-lord nazi for example. AND Goulart's trademark semi-dysfunctional back-talking robot - in this case a robot time-machine. Sam Brimmer & the robot, Tempo, are "time cops".

Making it particularly interesting for me is that there's a "Chronic Argonauts Club", a time-travelers club. I'm a member of a time-travel society founded by Richard Ellsberry in Maryland back in the 1970s. This bk was published in 1976. Richard wd've conceived of the Chrononautic Society around the same time & I'm more or less positive he thought of it independently of Goulart. The Chrononauts eventually became the Krononautic Organism. Of course, there may be even earlier examples of such a name for a time-traveler society. I may've even commented on it elsewhere w/o now remembering. You know how memories get all jumbled together when you time-travel into the future & get older.

All the clichés are here but.. Goulart manages to make them entertaining for me - if only b/c he packs so much silliness in. Tempo's constantly talking about the people he hangs w/ when he makes his illegal time jaunts - putting down Aristotle in favor of Anaxagoras, eg. Then there are touches like the motorcycle thugs who're really nazi strike breakers (strictly speaking, maybe only one of them) from the past brought into the future to try to kill the time cop to get the confessional tape spools from him that he found in the murdered man's apartment: ok, it's another stereotype: thugs who ride motorcycles who're also Germans who're nazis - but, in this case, they talk like the Katzenjammer Kids (considered by some to be the 1st real newspaper comic strip - in competition w/ the Yellow Kid (not really the name of the strip - just of a character from the strip) - from whom the term "Yellow Journalism" may've obliquely originated) - wch in itself cd make it another annoying stereotype projection offensive to immigrants for some. The thing is that Goulart just throws it all in there - including a healthy enuf dose of cultural-historical reference to make it over-the-top. &, yes, if someone asked me: "What shd I read at the beach?" I might even recommend it. OR: "What shd I read while I wait for a YouTube upload?" ( )

Goulart is not one of my favourite authors, but this is a plausible entertainment. We are in Sci-Fi noire territory, with a time traveller, and a mildly malfunctioning robot. If you are on a plane, or really attacking your To be read pile, this would not be bad. ( )

Sam Brimmer is a P.I. specializing in cases involving time travel, an activity governed by the Time Travel Overseeing Committee. Together with his time machine -- which takes the form of a robot/android called Tempo-203 -- and his sidekick Sanchez, Brimmer investigates the abduction of a modern babe back to 1933's Hollywood, and in so doing uncovers a massive plot to give criminal bosses safe haven in the past and to supply the Nazis with modern weapons so they can win World War II. The Big Hourglass of the title is the illicit time machine, its activities invisible to the detectors of the TTOC, that's being used to effect all this.

This is fairly standard Goulart fare: a somewhat shambolic plot, cranky malfunctioning robots, plenty of excellent one-liners, deliciously skewed logic all over the place. It also makes (page 33) a very perceptive point about the psychological side-effects time travel might have:

As a matter of fact, I don't even enjoy time travel much at all. Whenever I go back more than a hundred years or so I get a very spooky feeling. I keep thinking how everyone I meet, with the exception of a few stray time travelers, is actually dead.

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