The Riddle of the Sands. A Record of Secret Service. With Two Maps and Two Charts. Seventh Impression (Second Edition).

Bookseller Notes

Inscribed by the author on the verso of the flyleaf: 'To L.S. Amery, from Erskine Childers, August 1907'. Childers and Amery, at this point a journalist and later a Conservative politician, lived near one another in Chelsea, and were introduced by Eddie Marsh. In the same year, the commission arising in part because of the success of this novel, Childers contributed the fifth volume to the Times History of the War in South Africa, published by Sampson, Low & Marston under the editorship of Amery - the two men notably disagreeing on Childers' assessment of Lord Milner, leading to a disclaimer in his Preface having been overruled by Amery. This presentation copy is the record of a collaboration and friendship that could only have happened in Childers' early career, before the question of Irish rule dominated his outlook. Amery had, in the year that he was elected to Parliament, criticised Childers' 1911 work, 'The Framework of Home Rule', as founded on 'a series of confusions'; as Amery's political standing grew, Childers withdrew from the mainstream of British politics, resigning from the Liberal Party in 1914 and turning his attention towards Ireland - the cause for which he gave his life in 1922, 'executed at Dublin's Beggars Bush barracks [...] after first shaking hands with the firing squad' (ODNB). In marked disparity, Amery rose to prominence in the Colonial Office - working in the service of the British Empire that Childers had once endorsed (including in this 'fervently patriotic' novel), and in opposition to which he had died. Amery remembered the latter in his memoirs as his 'poor, ill-fated friend, Erskine Childers'; in an echo of that fate, his own son, John Amery, was executed as a traitor in 1945, having attempted to recruit Allied forces to fight for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front.This book is a seminal work in the spy-novel genre, which Jim Ring, in the ODNB, summarises thus: 'a fictional account of German preparations to invade England, it drew upon his experiences of sailing in the German Frisian Islands, and brought to the central theme an unyielding verisimilitude. A fine thriller which has withstood the test of time, it is also marked by a richness of characterization, a matchless sense of pace, and a superb evocation of land- and seascape'.