The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a novel by the Irish writer Erskine Childers, published in 1903. It is an early example of the espionage novel and was widely read in the years before the First World War.

The story is told by Carruthers, a Foreign Office clerk who is invited by an acquaintance from his school days to join him on a sailing holiday among the Frisian Islands. Arthur Davies is not a spy and the German coast is not obviously a threat, but the two of them begin to investigate a wreck, a set of channels that do not appear on the charts and a German businessman who takes an interest in them. Childers wrote the book out of his own experience of sailing the same waters, and the practical detail of navigation, tides, fog and sandbanks is what gives the novel its realism and what later writers in the genre borrowed from it. The book's argument was that a hostile power could use those waters against Britain, and it was read as a warning as much as a story.

Childers had sailed the area himself, and the novel is dedicated to the kind of amateur who does the work for the love of it rather than for a department.