BID TIME RETURN

The first novel in the series is loosely inspired by certain elements of Richard Matheson's classic and its film adaptation. The story, the setting, the characters, the circumstances, and the love story are new. It is NOT an adaptation, authorised or otherwise.

The story follows James Sherwood, a British former professional boxer turned Oscar-winning screenwriter whose career has stalled and whose spark for the work has gone. On a friend's recommendation he travels to an old hotel in the Pacific Northwest that still holds an annual marathon of hundred-year-old films. He is looking for a change of scenery and, perhaps, a clearer view of his own life. He falls asleep there and wakes in 1925, in the same hotel, at the time it served as a retreat for Hollywood's working elite.

He has no money of the period, little practical knowledge of the world he has entered, and no explanation for how he arrived or how he is to return. He must move carefully if he is not to be taken for a madman. Then he meets Margaret Ellison, a British silent-film actress whose face he already knows from the marathon he attended in his own time. What at first seems a disaster begins to look more useful. His understanding of filmmaking may not be useless in the 1920s after all.

Bid Time Return keeps the premise of a man displaced in time and the possibility of love across that distance, but the stakes, the philosophy, and the two people involved are its own.