About the Book
Writing in 1919, popular author Guy Thorne looks into the future, to the 1930s when massive seaplanes will be flying around the world, and private aircraft are everywhere. Without warning, a high speed seaplane attacks two of these huge transatlantic flying boats and kidnaps the fiancée of the British Chief of the Air Police, the Scotland Yard of the air. The Chief, Sir John Custance, sets out to track down and destroy the Air Pirates, and recover his fiancée, Constance Shepherd, Connie, a popular singer on the London stage. With expert assistance from a Japanese bodyguard, the exciting trail leads the Chief to the lonely Land's End peninsular of South West England. Quoting a press report from the book, we read: "Sir John, though barely thirty years of age, is an official in every way worthy of his high position, an organizer of exceptional ability and a pilot of practical experience. Press and public are perfectly well aware that it is owing to his personal exertions that our magnificent Transatlantic airliners are no longer stricken down by the Night Terror of the immediate past." This book has been lightly edited.
The Air Pirate
by
Guy Thorne
(1876-1923)
First published 1919
This new edition ©North View Publishing 2016
The Air Pirate is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this edition.
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Table of Contents
Cover
About the Book
Publisher's Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
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Publisher's Note
This story was written immediately after World War I (the Great War 1914-18), and seaplanes (flying boats, or amphibious aircraft), were in their infancy. Here Guy Thorne is looking forward to the early 1930s, and imagines massive seaplanes as the future of passenger air travel. In 1945 Howard Hughes started building the so-called Spruce Goose seaplane, but it only ever flew once, for one mile in 1947, so Guy Thorne was way ahead of his time (in his imagination)!
Confusingly for us today, Guy Thorne sometimes calls his aircraft ships, or airships and airliners (air=flying, ship/liner=boat, hence his terminology), and a single-engine sea plane is a yacht. This is a problem today, because inflatable and rigid dirigibles are now called airships, and a yacht sails on the sea! It is only near the end of the story that it becomes completely clear that all Guy Thorne's airships have wings, although the pirate airship early in the story with a speed of 240 mph should raise suspicions that this is the case! The airliner that Connie took to New York had a cruising speed of just over 100 mph (taken from the story), which is why the pirate ship could easily outmanoeuvre the transatlantic airliners.
For any doubters as to the type of aircraft in this story, here is a sentence taken from halfway though the book: The pirate ship, you will remember, was -- like all the big long-distance airships -- a cross between what used to be known in the old days as the "seaplane" and the "flying-boat." Things can be confusing enough without understanding that planes are wings, so the word planes has now been changed to wings where appropriate.
Plymouth, on the south west coast of England, is the main sea and air port in this story, connected to London by a fast railway. It is reasonable to assume if it flies in the air, no matter what it is called, it has wings, and all but the smallest aircraft can land on water -- although some larger ones have wheels for land use, built into their floats.
The value of money has changed considerably since the time the story was first written, (rather than the era in which is takes place) by close to 100 times. So 10,000 pounds in the book is nearer 1,000,000 pounds or 1,500,000 US dollars today.
Some minor edits have been made to this story, to aid the flow and to replace obsolete words or words that have altered in meaning. The storyline is completely unchanged. Guy Thorne also wrote as C Ranger Gull (his real name), although nowadays his reprinted books generally go under the authorship of Guy Thorne, irrespective of the original attribution.