WILLIAM GODWIN

A servant reads his master's face too well, guesses the secret of an old murder, and learns that a gentleman's reputation is a machine that can pursue a man across an entire country. Godwin was the most famous radical in England when he wrote it - Mary Wollstonecraft's husband, Mary Shelley's father - and built the first thriller as an argument: things as they are, with the law belonging to whoever can pay for it.