The Riddle of the SandsThe Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret
Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed
immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example
of the espionage novel and was extremely influential in the genre of spy
fiction. It has been made into feature-length films for both cinema and
television.The novel "owes a lot to the wonderful adventure novels of
writers like Rider Haggard, that were a staple of Victorian Britain". It
was a spy novel that "established a formula that included a mass of
verifiable detail, which gave authenticity to the story - the same ploy
that would be used so well by John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John le Carré
and many others.It was one of the early invasion novels, "... a story
with a purpose" in the author's own words, written from "a patriot's
natural sense of duty", which predicted war with Germany and called for
British preparedness.Context The whole genre of "invasion novels" raised
the public's awareness of the "potential threat" of Imperial Germany.
Although the belief has grown that the book was responsible for the
development of the naval base at Rosyth, the novel was published in May
1903, two months after the purchase of the land for the Rosyth naval
base was announced in Parliament (5 March 1903) and some time after
secret negotiations for the purchase had begun. Although Winston
Churchill later credited the book as a major reason why the Admiralty
had decided to establish the new naval bases, this seems unlikely. When
war was declared he ordered the Director of Naval Intelligence to find
Childers, whom he had met when the author was campaigning to represent a
naval seat in Parliament, and employ him. At the time Childers was
writing Riddle he was also contributing to a factual book published by
The Times in which he warned of outdated British army tactics in the
event of "conflicts of the future". He developed this theme in two
further works he published in 1911: War and the Arme Blanche and German
Influence on British Cavalry. analysis The novel contains many realistic
details based on Childers's own sailing trips along the East Frisia
coast and large parts of his logbook entries from an 1897 Baltic cruise
"appear almost unedited in the book." The yacht Dulcibella in the novel
is based upon Vixen, the boat Childers used for his exploration.
