The Motor Pirate

Motoring was still an alarming novelty in 1903, and G. Sidney Paternoster gave the open road a villain to match it. James Sutgrove, a young Norfolk landowner who has taken a cottage outside St. Albans to be near Evie Maitland, is stopped one moonlit night by a masked man in a long, boat-shaped car that overhauls anything on the road and runs at close to a hundred miles an hour without noise or vibration. A pistol comes out, valuables change hands, and the machine is gone. Inspector Forrest of Scotland Yard gets nowhere, the robberies harden into worse crimes, and Sutgrove’s suspicions keep drifting toward Randolph Mannering, his rival for Evie and an inventor who has been trying to build exactly that car. It is one of the first thrillers to build its suspense out of sheer speed.