cambridge-crime-fiction

david seed
The one ‘invasion scare’ novel to have remained in print right up to the
present is Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) which has survived
because it totally avoids the sensationalism and xenophobia of Le
Queux and other contemporaries. Childers skilfully integrates a narrative
of a yachting cruise on the Frisian coast with a tale of detection where the
land itself becomes the source of mystery. The novel includes within the text
a number of maps and charts so that we can follow the latter’s logic in its
discussions of the strategic importance of the north-west coast of Germany
for launching an invasion fleet towards England. Although Childers claimed
he had invented the whole thing, such a plan was considered by Germany in
the 1890s and the novel was taken so seriously that it was assessed by the
Director of Naval Intelligence. 16
The novel is ‘edited’ by Childers and narrated by a Foreign Office employee
called Carruthers. He responds to a call from his friend Davies to
join him on his yacht, ostensibly for a holiday. Once Carruthers arrives,
Davies describes how he has met a Captain Dollmann whom he suspects of
being a spy partly because he has tried to run him aground when he realises
that Davies is exploring the coast. Carruthers possesses linguistic competence
in German; Davies is the seaman. Together they make up the two sides
of a single investigating consciousness. When Davies asks Carruthers if he
looks like a spy, his friend refers ironically to ‘those romantic gentlemen
that one reads of in sixpenny magazines’, each ‘with a Kodak in his tie-pin,
a sketch-book in the lining of his coat, and a selection of disguises in his
hand luggage’. 17 Because the spy genre has been concerned from the very
beginning with issues of representation and plausibility such self-conscious
gestures are common. Here Carruthers anticipates and deflects the implied
reader’s scepticism towards the subject.
Of course the image does not fit at all. Childers establishes the credentials
of his protagonists as investigators through their common rejection of the
old-fashioned glamorous image of the spy and cues in his own narrative
method which rejects melodrama in favour of a slow and patient examination
of characters, events, and terrain. Childers’s management of suspense
through small details drew particular praise from John Buchan who saw
The Riddle of the Sands as one of the best examples of the modern adventure
story. ‘It is a tale of the puzzling out of a mystery’, he declared,
‘which only gradually reveals itself, and not till the very end reaches its true
magnificence’. 18 The culminating realisation comes when Carruthers senses
that he is witnessing history in the making: ‘I was assisting at an experimental
rehearsal of a greater scene, to be enacted, perhaps, in the near future’,
of a sea-borne invasion of England. 19 In a rare instance of political action
following fiction, two officers of Naval Intelligence were arrested in 1910
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