The Riddle of the Sands is the first modern English espionage novel. Long before World War I, but in an atmosphere of growing mistrust between Britain and Germany, two English sailors stumble into a secret spying mystery on the treacherous and stormy mudflats of the German coast. They sail the
Dulcibella into wild wind and weather, and enter a battle of wits with the sea as well as with the mysterious Herr Dollmann and his innocent daughter, Clara. Childers narrative style is clear and uncomplicated, and his sailing adventure is a joy to read, still popular after one hundred years. He hauled spies and detectives into the twentieth century by favoring fact over romance and combined nineteenth-century adventure from Scott and Stevenson with schoolboy stories, Kiplings Empire, and prophecies of war.
Circa l’autore
Erskine Childers was born in England in 1870, the second of five children, but after being orphaned as a young boy he grew up in Ireland. He was an avid sailor, as
The Riddle of the Sands (1903), his only work of fiction and his greatest publishing success, attests. Childers fought with the British Army in the Boer War in South Africa and later in World War I, but his growing commitment to Irish independence led him to smuggle guns into Ireland in 1914 and to join Sinn Fein after the war. In 1922 he was shot by the Irish government.
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