The Life and Times Of Professor Crypto

By James R. Stefanie

Discovered in the ruins of the Benedictine Abbey of Solo Virtutae in the Pyrenees, buried in a pile of desiccated, grimy, and not too healthy looking books, a folio was uncovered - a folio which presented, as a series of adventures, the life of Fritz Edmund Von, who was to attain narrow immortality as Professor Crypto. This lightly edited version of those adventures brings to light an amazing person who traveled the world in sputtering biplanes, knitted dirigibles, and exploding camels. Engineer, barrister, consulting detective - the professor could turn a trick at whatever he put his hand to and turn a phrase to whatever he put his mind to. His observations on life, love, the universe, and sausage casings sing through this collection of twenty-two nifty tales, you’ll come to understand how many hands make light work and truly understand why, if it feels good, do it! In fact, you’ll discover how many of our pithy sayings, commonly batted around in joyful conversation, found their birth in the Professor’s brain.

The Life and Times Of Professor Crypto is where Monty Python smashes into Steampunk and any idea you ever had that alternate worlds were possible, well, this may support it! Take a whirly-gig ride through the Professor’s life, experience the puns, the fun, and the freedom of roaring from the quaint village of Stilton-on-Hedgehog to the burning sands of Abou-bou and the Gobi Desert. Your brainstem will never be the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James R. Stefanie
• Release date: Dec 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005705800

James R. Stefanie

James R. Stefanie is a business analyst with a long interest in science fiction, Sherlock Holmes, and mischievous writings! He started writing at age 12, his first published piece was in the Sherlock Holmes Journal of London. Since then (which is a long 'since then') he has contributed to several Sherlockian journals, edited and published various journals, held membership in professional and literary associations, and published his first Sherlockian novel in 2001.

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The

Life and Times

Of

Professor Crypto

By J.R. Stefanie

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 J. R. Stefanie

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimers

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner, except, of course, when they are not. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental (maybe).

No animals were harmed in the making of this work. The exploding camel was not the result of creating this work; in fact, it appeared without good reason and caused a good bit of washing up afterword.

Dedication

To My Wife, Bonnie

Who accepts my whimsy, as long as the trash is hauled out

Table of Contents

Introductory Notes

Dumwitty If It Feels Good, Do It

Millicent Quoth the Raven, Nevermore!

Bitters It's Better To Be Pissed Off, Than Pissed On

Edison If You Can't Do It Right, Don't Do It At All

Blaze All the News That's Fit to Print

Camber Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Rancid Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Doris Don't Lock the Barn Door Once the Horses are Gone

Dover She Walks Like Beauty In The Night

Doolittle Believe Nothing of What You Hear and Only Half of What You See

The Rhine A Stitch In Time Saves Nine

Moon One Small Step for a Man; One Giant Step for Mankind

Annie A Rose By Any Other Name

Cheddar No One Knows the Trouble I Seen

Chocolate War The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down

Light Many Hands Make Light Work

Gold Bug Silver Threads Amongst the Gold

Penny A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned

Mitzy A Watched Pot Never Boils

Carryon Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Phill A Fool and His Money are Soon Parted

Philomena There's No Fool Like an Old Fool

Connect With Me!

About the Author

Other Books

Introductory Notes

This planet has engendered many notable Men and Women, each of whom, through their various and sundry efforts, has contributed to the sum total of what we, as a People, now know of the Earth and the Cosmos. One such Person, who is the subject of these Studies, exploded upon the firmament like a glorious meteor, flashing across the onyx skies and trailing a silver gold sheen; a light in which we, as a Species, continue to bathe.

Fritz Edmund Von Durksteiner was born of an ignoble parentage in a small mountain village somewhere in the wild mountains of Austria. We have little reliable information concerning his early life, it being wrapped tightly in mystery and enigma. The few pieces we do have, however, come from Von Durksteiner's own writings.

Von Durksteiner took his several degrees in various esoteric subjects and became known as 'Professor Crypto', the nom de homme under which the world has come to know him. Professor Crypto’s vast library of journals record the various aspects of his life and times, not as a continuing diary, but as a series of episodes, or ‘adventures’, as the good professor phrased it, for it was his belief that all of life was comprised of such. In a small folio, found in the Benedictine Abbey of Solo Virtutae in the Pyrenees, Crypto described life as 'a flashing sequence of magic lantern slides, each telling a story, an adventure, through which each one of us sojourns.'

This strange folio, like so many others, was found in an inaccessible location, tucked away amongst the grimy, grim volumes of a desiccating monastic library. None of Crypto's works has yet to be located anywhere except in such locations   it is almost as if Crypto has provided us with a chase around the Globe as the only means of discovering who he was.

It has been my good fortune to have assembled quite a variety of these 'adventures' and to present them, at other times and other places, as new folios for a new audience. It is instructive to note, especially for new readers, that Crypto's grand life took him to various places   some strange and exotic, such as the North Pole   and others more prosaic, such as the Ale Festival held not more than a day's journey from his home. More importantly, the new reader will note that Crypto was not a man of a single occupation   he was, at various points, and on the among other professions, a veterinarian, an engineer with the Royal Engineer Corps., and a consulting detective.

Crypto's greatest single contribution to Mankind, however, lay in his ability to 'turn a phrase', or describe a situation so perfectly that the utterance has passed down and become a commonly used expression in our day. We have the adventures in which 'A stitch in time saves nine', for example, is uttered for the first time. Of course, the original phrase is not quite like the one we use today, for it has passed its way through many generations of tongues; but the essentials are there, in the adventure, for us to be able to point to and identify as the landmark moment.

It should also be noted that it is I, not Crypto, who has assigned the Titles to each adventure. These Titles are, in fact, the utterance which we have come to recognize as part of the common day speech. Occasionally, Crypto himself was not the one to provide the phrase; but if it were not for his dedication in journaling his adventures, we would have no idea where 'A Rose By Any Other Name' originated.

Additional Note

The tales in this volume are derived from an earlier collection. Not all the tales have been included in this new publication for they were too incomprehensible to consider for inclusion. We have, however, reproduced the original title page of this rare volume below, as an historical asterisk.

The

Life and Times

Of

Professor Crypto

Told In His Own Words

and Slightly Edited Where Necessary By

Major General J. R. Von Rhinder Rhin

OBC, M.A., Ph.D., LL.D, J.D.

Her Majesty’s Own Dalmatians

Headmaster

Tittle on Croak Boys' School, Hans.

Printed Without Regard To Merit By

Frig Stapleton

Tohl House

Barking on the Woofing, Lancas.

Dumwitty

If It Feels Good, Do It

Although I may not have indicated it, there was a time in my youth when I was considered by many to be something of an athlete. While I must grant that my body was not heavily endowed with rippling muscle, I nevertheless maintained a compact and agile frame suited to some sport not requiring exhaustive and painful physical contact. Badminton, for example, was one athletic endeavour I could have most easily pointed myself in the direction of, but batting birds with racquets had little appeal to me.

The simple fact is I had little interest in athletics, if truth be known. The effort and exertions necessary dissuaded me from taking up the athletic arts, including the aforementioned badminton. I had at one point, being ragged on by my chums, to give a go at lawn bowling, but hefting and whipping those metal cannonades down innocent green lawns was abhorrent to me. Therefore, it was by mere happenstance that I became involved with a quaint American sport called 'baseball'.

It was the summer of my tour year, the year when most university students took to their heels and traveled in every direction, it seems, at once, when I arrived for a visit to America and my great Aunt Fanny who lived in a small town precariously too near New York City.

My dear great Aunt was an unusual woman, to say the least. She had left her homeland at a tender age and traveled the length and breadth of Europe taking on various occupations until she at last procured the position of sales representative for a highway constructing company. After several years of successful effort (she was, at one time, known as the 'Macadam Madam'), Aunt Fanny turned her prodigious talents to the West, sailed for America, and set herself up as a consultant to the highway construction trade. Her most famous effort was in convincing several major contractors to reduce the cost of highway construction by offering reduced prices only at twilight. Due to her fine efforts America was quickly beribboned with inexpensive highways and a famous song, 'Road Sales in the Sunset' was written to memorialize her feats.

Having exceeded everyone's expectations, including her own, Aunt Fanny deigned to retire herself from the hurly-burly of the commercial world and establish herself in the aforementioned town not a spit and a throw from the great metropolis, New York City. The majestic sailing vessel that had transported me across the broad Atlantic Ocean, bumped into the pier, dropped its landing steps, and encouraged one in all to disembark with dispatch, enhancing the request by throwing all the passenger luggage onto the pier in a great muddled huddle. The steamship company who provided our transport was known throughout the industry as advertising their timeliness in departure and arrival, but a storm in the ocean not 200 miles out, forced the captain to slow the leviathan of the deep to a front crawl, upsetting the planned arrival schedule. In all honesty, we had been warned ahead of time by crew and officers alike that they could brook no delay in having us exit the ship. The little matter of heaving our luggage overboard underscored the seriousness of their commitment to their schedule.

After an hour's fight to locate my various trunks, valises, cases, and a fortnighter I had especially procured for this voyage, I hailed a porter who accommodated me by calling for a cab and observing my care in hefting the paraphernalia aboard. After tucking the last valise into an available space, the porter shoved out his hairy paw in expectation of a lagniappe, I complied by depositing a crushed jelly roll which had become incontestably distressed during my efforts to extricate my baggage from the aforementioned baggage pile.

We set off from the dock, traveled through Gotham at a casual pace, and ended our rocking sojourn through New York's busy streets and pulsating neighborhoods at the train station. I had calculated much earlier on that a cab trip to my aunt's residence would cost nearly six times the cost of a train, so I instructed the cabby to the destination, where, with the cabby watching carefully, I removed all my luggage and hailed a train porter.

After I loaded my baggage onto the cart, and pushed it to meet up with the baggage car, all under the porter's watchful and critical eye, I debarked my cargo into the ill-illuminated interior of the baggage car and went on to find my coach.

The trip to the little town outside of New York was pleasant enough until I came to the realization that whilst I had loaded my baggage onto a baggage car, it was not the baggage car attached to this particular train. A whispered word to an efficient conductor and I was given every assurance the baggage car, which was destined to terminate in Chicago, would be emptied of my possessions once the train reached the Windy City and placed on a train destined for New York. Since I had retained a fortnighter and a valise with all the essentials, I spent the remainder of the journey looking forward to visiting once again with my aunt.

I had been welcomed warmly by Aunt Fanny and was ushered into her large home, settled quickly with tea and raspberry buns, and introduced to a large gentleman who was just on my arrival in the process of calling on my aunt. He was a rotund sort of chap shaped, in all, like a snowman, with two round ball legs, a Tumbledee torso, and a pink round head which contained two eyes sunk deeply into the folds of the skin that slipped down from his forehead in an effort to meet up with the flush cheeks that were swollen on both sides of a bulbous nose. He was casually dressed in a mohair suit, a stiff white linen shirt sans cravat and sturdy black shoes which I could easily see being used in kicking a recalcitrant elephant across a busy highway.

The man-person's name was given to me as Horace Dumwitty and his occupation was placed as 'Baseball Coach', or some such thing. Not knowing quite what baseball was, I made the unpardonable faux pas of enquiring about it.

Baseball, son? You never heard of baseball?, he shouted, the tea in my porcelain cup swishing with every noise syllable he spat in my general direction.

I admitted that my knowledge of the 'sport' was limited. Actually, it was less than limited, but why tell this coach person how little I knew. But he smelled out my ignorance for, over the course of the next three hours, Horace Baseball-person regaled me with the highlights, sidelights, lowlights, and stop lights of the game.

My tea had gone to ice; the raspberry buns had atrophied, and I sat upright in my chair - the wind of Mr. Baseball Dumwitty's voice tossing me to and fro. With what seemed a last, feeble burst of energy, I suggested to Mr. Captain Coach Baseball in order for me to truly appreciate the sport, it would be best to see it in action. 'Words', I remember saying in a moment of sheer terror and exhaustion, 'fail the potential of the sport. It, like a fine woman or wine, is best experienced, not merely gossiped about'.

Mr. Stumblewitty accepted the suggestion with such great alacrity that I felt that I had ensnared myself in what would, for me, be a costly, fatiguing mental trap. I was invited to see my first game of baseball the next day when Captain Dimblewitty's team 'took the field'. (I never quite understood where they 'took the field' to, but I would imagine that it was to some large sort of place.)

I arrived at the ball park according to the directions given me by my aunt who excused herself from accompanying me explaining she had scheduled the day for cleaning the reed pipes of the Great Winston Pipe Organ housed in the Fifth Avenue Gaiety Theatre in the middle of New York.

My aunt had also provided me with the means by which I was to enter the park. I first paid a gentleman behind a wicket for the right to enter and received a paper chit as proof, I supposed, that I had a right to enter. I then followed along a wide corridor which had the tendency to attract numerous individuals bustling to and fro. I also noted, whilst walking to the left, there appeared openings in the corridor which led to other corridors which led out into the seating arena itself. I selected a corridor, sailed through the it, and stopped. The expanse of emerald green lawn and camel sand took my breath away. Had it not been for the fellows running into me from behind, I imagine I would have stood there for hours.

Stirred by the onrush of spectators attempting to find a seat, I moved quickly through the ranks of chairs and found a perch I thought would provide me with a solid view of the proceedings. A chap next to me, upon introductions, offered to explain the various aspects of the game, such as the rules, who the players were, what they did, and so on. I had believed that, based upon earlier discussions with my aunt, baseball was much like cricket. This assumption was injured when I first saw the play field and assassinated as my fellow spectator took me through the game.

After three months of spectating at baseball, dutifully following the good coach to every game, whether held in his 'home' stadium or 'on the road', I became quite an expert at judging the relative merits of each player on the team. I must admit to some secret joy in being able to determine how effective a man would be in certain positions as well as at certain critical junctures of the game. I was especially intrigued by the athletic prowess of the young left fielder, Benny Tippet, who was quite good with the bat, a regular speedster on the basepaths, and no Johnny-Come-Lately in the field, either. The baseball coach, however, seemed unsure of Tippet's skills, even at the end of the season. I could not understand why Dundertwitty was reluctant to praise and merit the boy as he deserved - for as