<p>The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a patriotic British 1903 novel by Erskine Childers.<br><br>It is a novel that "owes a lot to the wonderful adventure novels of writers like Rider Haggard, that were a staple of Victorian Britain"; perhaps more significantly, it was a spy novel that "established a formula that included a mass of verifiable detail, which gave authenticity to the story ? the same ploy that would be used so we...