Get the classic spy novel The Riddle of the Sands delivered in weekly installments!
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
Letters from Carruthers
Inspired by the excellent Dracula Daily and Letters from Watson, this is going to apply the email newsletter method to another novel.
The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service, published in 1903 by Erskine Childers, is an early example of the spy novel and hugely influential in the genre. It also, with its air of a looming German threat, played a role in the build-up to the First World War, being an example of the “invasion literature” that spurred the European arms race.
Childers was a keen yachtsman and he put a lot of detail about yachting in this book.
Yet Erskine Childers (1870-1922) was no mere imperialist. Born in England, he became an ardent Irish nationalist, bring in weapons - from Germany no less - to support an Irish uprising. He would later be involved in the negotiations to create an independent Ireland in 1921, but his opposition to the deal, which included the partition of the island, would place him on the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War that followed. This would ultimately result in his execution by firing squad in 1922, aged 52.
About The Riddle of the Sands
The story is set up as a sort of “found footage” - or rather “shared footage” affair - Childers purporting to have received the story from two pseudonymous sources and then turned it into a narrative work, changing details to protect the people involved.
Around the turn of the 20th century - the year is deliberately omitted - a minor official in British Foreign Office called “Carruthers” is invited on a yachting holiday on the Baltic coast of Germany by an acquaintance called “Davies”.
When Carruthers arrives, he finds Davies has an ulterior motive for the trip. He believes Germany is engaging in something sinister off its coast after a German entrepreneur called Dollmann nearly got him shipwrecked on a previous trip. Davies has also fallen in love with Dollmann’s daughter, Clara - but thinks she’s innocent of all this.
Davies raised an alarm with the British government, but no-one was interested. He decides it’s his patriotic duty to investigate and Carruthers is persuaded to join him.
Schedule
This will start on 16 September 2024 and then go weekly from that point. There are a total of 32 chapters - so this will be running until July 2025.
Content Warning
This is a book written in the Edwardian era, when attitudes towards ethnicity and gender were rather different from what they were today.
This story includes some racial epithets, some sexism and some classism.
