The Riddle of the Sands

A holiday on a small boat

Carruthers is a young man at the Foreign Office, stuck in London in late summer when everyone else has left. An old university friend, Arthur Davies, invites him to come sailing and duck shooting in the Baltic. Carruthers arrives expecting a yacht with a crew; he finds a cramped little boat called the Dulcibella, no crew at all, and Davies, who has something on his mind. Davies was nearly wrecked among the sandbanks and channels of the Frisian coast, and he doesn’t believe it was an accident. Erskine Childers published the novel in 1903, and it is often called one of the first modern spy novels.

Why it works for learners

This is a book for patient readers who like detail. Much of it is about sailing a small boat in tidal waters: anchors, charts, tides, fog, rowing, running aground. If you enjoy learning a specialist vocabulary thoroughly, few novels teach one so well. The friendship between the fussy, sociable Carruthers and the shy, obsessive Davies is warm and funny, and the mystery tightens slowly into real suspense.

Which level to start at

B2 and up. A B1 edition keeps the mystery and the friendship clear, but much of the book’s pleasure lies in its texture: the long foggy passages and the slow realization of what is going on. If you start at B1, you can come back later at a higher level; another level of a book you own costs less than a new book. At C1 and C2 every sailing term is a tap away, explained in the sentence where it appears.

Read next

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, a faster, shorter spy chase
• Moonfleet, tides, caves and smugglers on the English coast
• The Scarlet Pimpernel, English secret agents crossing the Channel a century earlier