We've separated out those of Schmitz's stories with a specific crime theme and have put them in here. Among these half dozen stories are the three stories which Schmitz wrote that have no science fiction element at all, but are purely "crime fiction." (Although, even there, the longest of the stories"Crime Buff"has a vaguely fantastical feeling about it, at least in the nature of the peculiar family which lies at the center of the tale.) But we've also included three others which, though technically SF, could also be described as crime stories with a twist.
With Schmitz, the distinction is somewhat artificial anyway. A large number of Schmitz's stories focused on crime, including some of his very best Hub storiessuch as "The Searcher," to give just one example. For that matter, the first and longest story in "Homo Excelsior," "The Ties of Earth," is hard-boiled enough that we considered including it here and giving this section the alternate title "Schmitz Noir." "The Ties of Earth" is probably the closest science fiction has ever come to the spirit which infuses the writings of the great crime novelist Raymond Chandler. And "Just Curious," of course, is as much of a crime story as it is a psi horror story.
Still, making fine distinctions is part of what editors do, and so we put together the six stories which we think, taken as a whole, give the spectrum of Schmitz's approach to mixing crime and speculative fiction. In fact, the title of the section itself ("Time for Crime") was determined by one of the stories, which, in a whimsical manner, posits the idea that stealing time itself might someday be a crime.