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...