Founding Fathers

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Robert Bloch's "Founding Fathers" begins as a riotous time-travel caper, with Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Thomson recast as wisecracking gangsters barging into Independence Hall to rewrite history. Franklin nervously takes charge, coaching the others through a frantic, slang-filled version of the signing of the Declaration, while the comedy sharpens the contrast between patriotic legend and criminal hustle. The story then shifts into harder crime-fiction territory when a crew of bookmakers and small-time crooks, desperate over debts and hounded by police and the taxman, turns to their wealthy client, Professor Cobbett. Instead of easy money, they find a secret basement laboratory and a machine that can send people into the past. Led by the pragmatic Thinker, the gang sees history itself as a bank vault, researches the Revolution, and targets the hidden treasury in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. To get close enough, they impersonate the Founding Fathers and force Cobbett into the plan, only to discover that changing the past has changed everything. Their attempt to escape collapses into a grimly comic trap: the Revolution has gone differently, the machine no longer works, and the crew is stranded in an alternate world where their scheme has gone disastrously wrong.