Book review: ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ by Erskine Childers

Erskine Childers was born in London in 1870 and educated at Cambridge; he married an American, fell in love with Ireland and served with distinction on the English side during World War I. Later he joined the Irish Republican Army, running guns and fighting against the British — offenses for which he was arrested, sentenced and swiftly executed in the Irish Civil War of 1922.

His was a life of tragic gallantry and compromised loyalties, issues very much at the heart of his sole novel, “The Riddle of the Sands,” first published in 1903 and newly reissued, enshrined indeed, with the shiny black spine of a Penguin Classic and as a new edition from Adlard Coles Nautical, complete with maps and photos of places of the novel’s locales. The story features two young Englishmen who, while sailing among the treacherous waters and shifting sands of the Frisian Islands, stumble across secret German plans to invade England.

“The Riddle of the Sands” has been described by John le Carré as the foundation stone of the contemporary novel of espionage and the creation of an archetype — the smart, resourceful loner who finds himself in danger but manages to cope. The book does indeed predict not only Le Carré’s Smiley but also John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, the best heroes of Eric Ambler’s wonderful books … and even James Bond.

Childers’ central character, Carruthers (how English can you get?), enters the story as little more than a peevish dandy but evolves into an agent of daring. The transformation, believably handled, takes place against a background of changing tides, freezing winds, a maze of dangerous shoals. Atmosphere becomes metaphor: “It was a cold, vaporous dawn, the glass rising, and the wind fallen to a light air still from the north-east. Our creased and sodden sails scarcely answered to it as we crept across the oily swell to Langeoog.”

The novel’s climax, a fog-bound journey in a dingy, goes on for 50 pages and more, working as a masterful exercise in suspense because Childers makes his readers really feel that any one of many fateful moments of chance might indeed halt his heroes’ escape and lead to their death.

Childers lived a somehow very English life of risk and high romantic adventure. “The Riddle of the Sands” retains its ability to thrill and surprise perhaps because it’s a one-off, penned by a gifted amateur, a man who was only beginning to suspect how history might, like wind gusting along an estuary, change the course of his own honor and loyalty.

Rayner writes the column Paperback Writers, which appears at latimes.com/books.