The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example of the espionage novel and was extremely in uential in the genre of spy ction. It has been made into feature-length lms for both cinema and television. The novel "owes a lot to the wonderful adventure novels of writers like Rider Haggard, that were a staple of Victorian Britain". It was a spy novel that established a formula that included a mass of veri able 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. Childers's biographer Andrew Boyle noted: "For the next ten years Childers's book remained the most powerful contribution of any English writer to the debate on Britain's alleged military unpreparedness". It was a notable in uence on John Buchan and Ken Follett, who described it as "an open-air adventure thriller about two young men who stumble upon a German armada preparing to invade England." Follett has also called it "the rst modern thriller." Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones listed The Riddle of the Sands as one of the ten classic spy novels, in its best spy novel list and Robert McCrum of The Observer included it in his list of the 100 greatest novels of all time.This classic title has been published by RADLEY BOOKS. Each RADLEY CLASSIC is a meticulously restored, luxurious and faithful reproduction of a classic book; produced with elegant text layout, clarity of presentation, and stylistic features that make reading a true pleasure. Special attention is given to legible fonts and adequate letter sizing, correct line length for readability, generous margins and triple lead (lavish line separation); plus we do not allow any mistakes/changes/additions to creep into the author's words.Visit RADLEY BOOKS at www.radleybooks.com (or search RADLEY CLASSIC on Amazon) to see more classic book titles in this series.