Book review:
Penguin Classics has reissued "The Riddle of the Sands
" by Erskine Childers, a 1903 novel thought to be the progenitor of all modern spy novels, and still one of the best.Childers' story of Britons trying to foil German spies takes place partly on the Baltic Sea, with which he was familiar as a yachtsman. His day job was clerking for the House of Commons, but at night he toiled away at this novel, adding a romantic subplot at the suggestion of his sister Dulcibella, whose mellifluous first name he gave to the yacht in his book.
Childers was superb at depicting action, as in this scene in which the narrator, Carruthers, senses that he is not alone on deck: "I started up involuntarily, bumped against the table, and set the stove jingling. A long step and a grab at the ladder, but just too late! I grasped something damp and greasy, there was tugging and hard breathing, and I was left clasping a big sea-boot, whose owner I heard jump on to the sand and run." (more)
