1903 thriller. On a sailing trip in the Baltic and points nearby, two
young men discover a German plot.
Indeed, this could reasonably be said to be the first thriller,
and the first of the modern sort of spy story; I certainly got a
feeling that Hitchcock would echo in North by Northwest, of the
writer aiming to portray the potential effectiveness of a normal
person against professional wrongdoers.
What's really significant, though, which writers like Fleming and le
Carré would imitate even if Buchan wouldn't, is the mass of technical
detail. Here it's Childers' own obsession of sailing small boats in
shallow water, complete with that stock device of a narrator who
doesn't know this stuff and has to have it explained for him (and thus
the reader); indeed, the early chapters have something of the air of
Three Men in a Boat, the litany of complaints in a comic tone.
But soon enough we shift to the meat of the story, and this is where
you should make sure you have a nice legible copy of Chart A and Chart
B on which to follow the action. Davies, who'd been out here on his
own before summoning the narrator, made an acquaintance, followed his
boat through a dubious channel in rough weather, and is now certain
that the other man meant him to be wrecked and die. But why?
There are several strands meeting here: the technical business of
getting the boat through marginal channels (largely based on a
specific trip Childers had taken in the summer of 1897), the
uncovering of the fiendish German plot, and at the same time a respect
for the Germans collectively and individually: they're the enemy
because (waves hands vaguely, above my pay grade), but an enemy who
basically does things right—there's none of that demonisation of the
people, or indeed of Kaiser Wilhelm, which you'd find in a lot of
invasion literature and other propaganda. It feels very much like the
respect from one professional spy or soldier to another of the same
who happens to be on the other side. (All right, a German torpedo boat
is "a low, grey rat of a vessel", which one feels a British one would
probably not have been.) Indeed, in order to have a villain rather
than mere opposition, there has to be an underhand plan promulgated by
an English traitor, who of course is spotted for an Englishman at
once.
"It was something in his looks and manner; you know how different we
are from foreigners."
(Our Hero later disguises himself as a German sailor and arouses
almost no suspicion.)
There's also the traitor's beautiful daughter, who doesn't get to do
much but at least does something more than sitting and waiting to be
claimed.
This was written as "a story with a purpose" in response fo Kaiser
Wilhelm's building-up of the German navy, and seems (with its brethren
in the invasion-literature genre) to have had at least some effect.
Winston Churchill even claimed that this book was a reason for the
establishment of the Rosyth naval base, but he was almost certainly…
creatively misremembering, since the land had already been purchased
before the book came out.
This was the book that turned the standard enemy of the invasion story
from France to Germany. Its stylistic influence on Buchan and on
Fleming is very apparent, and of course both of them were widely
imitated in turn. It can be sluggish at times, but keep the charts to
hand and you should make it through without running aground too
often.
Freely available from Project
Gutenberg and Standard
Ebooks.