A fairly funny detective story with time travel and a little chaos theory. The mystery writer is present in the story in the form of the “continnum”, a never-explained phenomenon which attempts to prevent historians who travel back in the past from messing up history too much by arranging for all kinds of doubtful coincidences in order to fix things and solve the crime.
In addition to numerous references to 1930’s mystery authors, like Agatha Christie, there are quite a few references to a 19th century novel called Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). Having never read that book, I probably missed a number of nods to that, apparently famous, British comedy by Jerome K. Jerome.