The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. It is an early example of the espionage novel with a strong underlying theme of militarism. It has been made into a film and TV film.It is a novel that owes a lot to the wonderful adventure novels of writers like Rider Haggard that were a staple of Victorian Britain; perhaps more significantly it was a spy novel that established a formula that included a mass of verifiable detail which gave authenticity to the story – the same ploy that would be used so well by John Buchan Ian Fleming John le Carré and many others. Ken Follett called it the first modern thriller.The Observer in a fundamentally English list published to coincide with the Big Read campaign in 2003 listed the book as #37 on its list of The 100 Greatest Novels from the past 300 years. -- from Wikipedia