Books / Authors
This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in The Riddle of the Sands
with a note of reference.
During a tour of Ireland's southwest counties in 1908 Childers so far revised his Unionist position as to espouse Home Rule in the orthodox sense, thereby going far beyond what most Englishmen were willing to accept. Characteristically, he gave himself wholeheartedly to his new cause, resigning his House of Commons post to write The Framework of Home Rule (1911), a closely reasoned case for giving Ireland dominion status like Canada - that is, independence in internal affairs under the British flag.
We are fortunate to be able to see him in his last unhappy months through the eyes of a youth who was later to adopt his mother's surname and become the noted writer "Frank O'Connor."
He recalled him ... in An Only Child as:
a small, slight, grey-haired man in tweeds with a tweed cap pulled over his eyes, wearing a light mackintiosh stuffed with papers and carrying another coat over his arm. Apart from his accent, which would have identified him anywhere, there was something peculiarly English about him; something that nowadays reminds me of some old parson or public-school teacher I have known, conscientious to a fault and overburdened with minor cares. His thin, grey face, shrunk almost to its mould of bone, had a coldness as though life had contracted behind it to its narrowest span; the brows were puckered in a triangle of obsessive thought like pain, and the eyes were clear, pale and tragic.
Wodehouse's little known novel tells the story of how England, invaded by Germans, was saved by a Boy Scout, Clarence MacAndrew Chugwater.
Eric Ambler, himself a leading writer in the genre, has indeed described Childers's book as the earliest of all spy novels, recognizing the prior claim of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1821) only to dismiss the book, which treats of the American War of Independence as unreadable.
Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which appeared the year before Childers's romance, clearly falls outside the canon; the eponymous hero's apprenticeship in the Secret Service is not central to the book's theme, serving merely to educate him in the shady walks of Anglo-Indian life.
Childers was followed by Joseph Conrad with his masterpiece, The Secret Agent (1907), and by the innumerable novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim and, on a lower level, William Le Queux.
John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) was the first of several adventures of Richard Hamby.
W. Somerset Maugham's highly realistic Ashenden was published in 1928 and Compton MacKenzie's lighthearted but important The Three Couriers a year later.
Several of Graham Greene's novels, including The Confidential Agent (1939), qualify on anyone's list of the best spy novels.
More recently the fantasy of Ian Fleming's James Bond Novels has been balanced by the shabby realism of John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963)
A passing thirst, which I dare say many have shared, for adventure of the fascinating kind described in the New Arabian Nights led me on a few evenings into some shady haunts in Soho and further eastward .....
We found her wedged among a stack of galliots, and her skipper sitting primly below before a blazing stove, reading his Bible through spectacles.
What a race it was! Homeric, in effect; a struggle of men with gods, for what were the gods but forces of nature personified? If the God of the Falling Tide did not figure in the Olympian circle he is none the less a mighty divinity.
War-scare fiction in Britain between about 1870 and the outbreak of World War I is a sub-genre that deserves a historian of its own. When it finally receives one he must surely take note of The Battle of Dorking (1871) at one extreme and P.G. Wodehouse's The Swoop (1909) at the other.
Wodehouse's little known novel tells the story of how England, invaded by Germans, was saved by a Boy Scout, Clarence MacAndrew Chugwater.
Eric Ambler, himself a leading writer in the genre, has indeed described Childers's book as the earliest of all spy novels, recognizing the prior claim of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1821) only to dismiss the book, which treats of the American War of Independence as unreadable.
Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which appeared the year before Childers's romance, clearly falls outside the canon; the eponymous hero's apprenticeship in the Secret Service is not central to the book's theme, serving merely to educate him in the shady walks of Anglo-Indian life.
Childers was followed by Joseph Conrad with his masterpiece, The Secret Agent (1907), and by the innumerable novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim and, on a lower level, William Le Queux.
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| E. Phillips Oppenheim |
John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) was the first of several adventures of Richard Hamby.
W. Somerset Maugham's highly realistic Ashenden was published in 1928 and Compton MacKenzie's lighthearted but important The Three Couriers a year later.
Several of Graham Greene's novels, including The Confidential Agent (1939), qualify on anyone's list of the best spy novels.
More recently the fantasy of Ian Fleming's James Bond Novels has been balanced by the shabby realism of John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963)
A passing thirst, which I dare say many have shared, for adventure of the fascinating kind described in the New Arabian Nights led me on a few evenings into some shady haunts in Soho and further eastward .....
We found her wedged among a stack of galliots, and her skipper sitting primly below before a blazing stove, reading his Bible through spectacles.
What a race it was! Homeric, in effect; a struggle of men with gods, for what were the gods but forces of nature personified? If the God of the Falling Tide did not figure in the Olympian circle he is none the less a mighty divinity.
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