Morning after morning the sun rose triumphantly waving golden streamers, to blaze relentlessly through fifteen hours. When at last it subsided into a scarlet bed, the night brought no relief in the heavy pall that closed down upon a gasping people.

Marion Ryan and Robert Ord’s “The Heat Wave: A Strange Story of Ancient Rome and Modern New York” (1929) begins in a city dripping with sweat. Relief agencies dole out ice; churchgoers pray for rain; the grass in Central Park turns black from scorching; the paint on buildings bubbles and peels. Paul Feron walks down the street in a huff, oblivious to his hatless head. He is twenty or so, handsome, and suddenly out of work — free at last from his boss Mr. Behren’s vile temper and “cold, cruel insults”. His wife Beth waits at home, unaware that Feron got fired for standing up for “poor little Lou Harding”, and ignorant, as well, of his motivations for doing so. Suddenly Ferron is overcome by exhaustion and falls asleep on a bench.

Feron (now Ferronius) wakes in Ancient Rome. The sun is hot here too. “Its burning rays even penetrated the purple splendor of the gold-fringed awnings over the seventy thousand perspiring people who sat or sprawled on the marble benches, gasping with heat and excitement, their dripping bodies swaying with the motion of the contests below.” The city is in the midst of a three-month drought, the Tiber running low and oily. What are the people to do but enjoy the bread and circus of the Colosseum? Ferronius sits beside the emperor and silently rehashes his scheme. Days earlier, he had bribed Marcellus, the director of bloodsports, to smuggle his slender Christian lover, Vedia, out of prison. But he has been double-crossed. The gloating Marcellus, “thick lips hanging moist and red”, signals for Vedia to be led into the pit. She’s torn to pieces by three lions before his eyes. Hot-headed Ferronius strangles Marcellus to death in revenge.

Ferron wakes on the bench to the relief of rain and heads home to Beth. She opens the door with horror. An hour ago, her husband was seen coming out of Mr. Behren’s office. “He was found strangled—choked to death!”

Very little is known about the authors of this story, which was published in an April 1929 issue of Munsey’s Magazine, months before a heatwave swept across the US and blistered New York. Robert Ord is thought to be the pseudonym of W. Gayer Mackay (née Edith Ostlere). The two collaborated on a number of plays, including an adaptation of Gertrude Page’s romantic comedy novel, Paddy the Next Best Thing (1908). Curiously, their time-traveling “Heat Wave” had a fitting afterlife, appearing four years later in the August-September issue of Amazing as a story titled “Across the Ages” by Allen Glasser, an editor of science fiction fandom magazines. When Glasser’s word-for-word theft came to light, he promptly vanished from view. Perhaps a feverish summer heatwave was to blame for this plagiaristic fugue.