'Tom Swift' is an institution in American publishing. This first book was originally published in 1910 by Grosset & Dunlap and served as the first in a series of forty books and be followed by five other series with books published as recently in 2022: 'Tom Swift, Jr.', 'Tom Swift III', 'Tom Swift IV', 'Tom Swift, Young Inventor' and 'Tom Swift Inventor's Academy'. At this point, the focus is on inventing and engineering, but it would gradually move into science fiction. The tenth book, 'Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle' inspired the Taser, the original TSER standing for "Tom Swift's Electric Rifle".

I found 'Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle' to be a real glimpse into another time, both in a good and a bad way. It's a manifesto for individual responsibility, as applied to self-learning and charitable behaviour and personal freedom. Some of that is admirable and makes us hearken back to a time when that sort of thing was valued. However, some of it certainly isn't and makes us rather happy to be alive in a time when we're not likely to die long before our time, just because of the laws of averages. It's surprisingly ahead of its time socially, too; as Tom treats the black character just as he would treat anyone else, with decency and concern.

That said, that character could easily be considered token representation and the very word is an awfully polite way of saying "caricature of a stereotype". Even deliberately racist characters don't talk quite this stereotypically nowadays; what's more, the state of New York doesn't seem to have any driving laws at all. The motor cycle of the title (yes, two words) starts out in the possession of a man who bought it, read the manual and promptly took it out on the road. It's not unfair to read this book as a plea for road safety.

As a beginning, Howard Garis, the author behind the house name of Victor Appleton for the first thirty-five books, is careful to set up the main characters and set the tone for the series to come.

Tom Swift is a young man who's graduated high school but isn't proceeding on to college because he's doing hands-on training with his dad instead. His mother died when he was three, so it's just him and Barton Swift, who are "better chums than many boys are", plus Mrs. Baggert who's kept their household, outside the small town of Shopton, New York, for the past decade. Mr. Swift is an inventor with a string of patents and a number of workshops that have brought him considerable wealth. Tom has a patent of his own and clearly knows his stuff. He spends much of this book fixing and improving a variety of machines. We also meet a few supporting characters with potential to become regulars.

There's also a story in play that gets more focus than I expected it would in an opening volume. It has to do with a new patent that Barton Swift is trying to file in New York for a revolutionary new turbine design. The problem is that it has to get to his lawyers there and some unscrupulous rivals are eager to intercept it for themselves. He has Tom cycle over to Mansburg to mail the details as they might be watching in Shopton. He bumps into three of them there, too, and none of them are going anywhere. The first comes to the house to offer money, the second intimidates Tom from a car, and the third outright steals the plans.

That leads to a more ambitious mission. Once Tom's bought his motor cycle, Barton hands him the plans and the scale model to transport all the way to Albany to hand over to his lawyers there. It's not that straightforward, of course, and the bad guys are ready and waiting for him on the road. One lurks on a back road disguised as a tramp to sabotage his bike after a near miss, but he's able to fix that with some barbed wire. The others trap him during a storm, club him unconscious, use chloroform to keep him that way and dump him in a farmer's shed seventy miles away without his motor bike. They're not messing around. And, of course, that sparks the crucial part of the story: the MacGuffin is gone and it's up to Tom to get it back.

I've skipped ahead a lot here and there are details I should jump back to. The man who thought a reading of a motor cycle manual was enough is Wakefield Damon and he's the accident waiting to happen that you might expect. Tom's cycling down a road when he first sees him kicking up a cloud of dust ahead of him and it's only a rock on the road that avoids a collision. That's on page twelve and it's the second near-accident in the book.

The third is only ten pages further in, but that's just a runaway horse and wagon; Mary Nestor the grateful passenger when Tom manages to stop it. Another five pages and Damon crashes his bike into a tree. We don't meet the "colored man"/"darky"/"negro" (it's this character who uses both ethnic slurs rather than the author or another character) for as long again but we do so when Tom crashes into him, albeit at heavily reduced speed. These roads really aren't safe! Happy Harry the tramp was deliberately trying to cause an accident, at least. He succeeded.

We're fewer than forty pages in when Damon decides that he really doesn't want his brand new motor cycle after all and sells it to Tom for fifty bucks, a considerable mark down, even given the damage caused by hitting a tree. Tom thinks he can fix it up easily enough and he can. In fact, he promptly reworks the gearing and gets fifteen per cent more speed. He forgets to fix the brakes before heading out on a thirty-mile trial in the morning, but does once he notices the problem. A blink later and he's changing the gasoline and spark control. Perhaps, most crucially, all of these improvements work.

His first fix for someone other than himself is for Eradicate Sampson, better known as Rad, given that his full name is Eradicate Andrew Jackson Abraham Lincoln Sampson. I bet you can guess his colour. Stereotypical dialogue aside—"I'se killed, dat's what I is! I ain't got a whole bone in mah body!"—he's an interesting character. We first meet him with his mule Boomerang and a broken wagon, which Tom promptly fixes in apology. Tom offers him work and fixes his brush so it doesn't drip on him. Rad keeps showing back up again, demonstrating in the process his habit of trading tools and ending up with broken ones. At least, that is, until Tom fixes them.

I rather like Rad and expect that he'll reappear in future books, as might Wakefield Damon, Mary Nestor and Andy Foger. The latter is the first character we meet, a young man speeding along in a motor car with as much abandon as Mr. Toad, who I'm shocked to realise did his toot-tooting only a couple of years earlier. This was published in 1910 but 'The Wind in the Willows' only just beat it to print in 1908. I should also add that, while Tom inevitably succeeds in reaching a happy ending for the patent saga, the bad guys get away, leaving us with an open ending that I expect will roll right into the second book, 'Tom Swift and His Motor Boat'. ~~ Hal C F Astell