John Buchan’s The Power-House (1913), and his Richard Hannay novels in particular, show a clear descent from The Riddle of the Sands. John Keegan wrote in 2004 in the TLS that ‘ The Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps remain key texts to the understanding of British attitudes towards intelligence’.Īs part of the tradition of novels from the school of physical endurance, originating in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886), The Riddle of the Sands redirected adventure writing into new channels. A copy of The Riddle of the Sands had been found in their belongings in Borkum (one of the towns featured in the novel), which Lieutenant Brandon enthusiastically admitted to having read three times. In 1910, two British naval officers, Captain Trench and Lieutenant Brandon, were charged and found guilty of espionage at a trial in Leipzig, and executed. Other readers took it as a manual for national defence. The Scotsman’s reviewer ‘hesitates to class it in the category of fiction’ St James’ Gazette called it ‘a breezy and thoroughly entertaining romance’. Many reviewers at the time disagreed as to exactly what the book was. Its author Erskine Childers was infuriated when it was described as fiction, because for him the issue of a probable German invasion by sea was real and the danger obvious. The Riddle of the Sands was published in May 1903, and it has probably sold more than two million copies in its lifetime.

An old-school hardback and beautiful embossed ship.

Riddle of the sands book