The year is 1956. The war is over. Everything else is rubble.

Ted Barry is an ex-Commando major with three rows of medals, no job, and a penny in his pocket for the soup kitchen. He’s one of ten thousand veterans standing in line for work that doesn’t exist — until a well-dressed stranger presses a flyer into his hand outside a chow hall.

Anachron, Inc. We can use a limited number of agents for our ”foreign” department.

Foreign doesn’t mean Paris or Shanghai.

It means 13th century France.

Armed with a forged river charter, a case of Scotch whiskey, a jazz band of Nubian slaves, and a parrot that curses in Basque and prays in Latin, Barry is dropped into medieval Europe with one order from his boss back in Manhattan: show a profit in six months, or you’re out.

The goods are real. The danger is real. The medieval French are very much real, and very much armed.

But Ted Barry sold cemetery lots in the Depression and survived Hokkaido. He can sell umbrellas to a baron who’s never seen rain gear.

He thinks.

Anachron, Inc. is Malcolm Jameson’s landmark series; a rip-roaring blend of pulp adventure, sharp commercial wit, and time-travel paradoxes handled with more intelligence than most novels three times its length.