You know trying to pick out a book to read from the ocean that is available is tough. I heard about Erskine Childer’s “The Riddle of the Sands” published in 1903 and I had to read it. The thing that piqued my interest is that it has been considered the first English spy novel and was an influence on Ian Fleming, John Le Carre, and Ken Follett. Also the book was very influential on the British public because he described the the vulnerability of Great Britain by an attack from Britain.. The thing that hooked it for me was that the author was executed by an Irish firing squad in 1922 for possession of a firearm in violation of martial law during Irish Civil War. It’s all terribly complex and I refer you to Erskine Childer’s Wikipedia page for reference.


The book itself is marvelous. It is about two young guys in a sailing craft of shallow draft who while sailing along the German North Sea coast get more and more suspicious of what they see. The book is full of sailing references and chart entries, tides, currents, canals and such and it is easy to get lost but hang with it. The atmosphere and tension of the novel gets denser and darker as time goes on. The prose is dense and deep as I find books from the pre-television era are. 


I found the book to be the perfect combination of story and back story. I give it four stars out of five.