Childers’s is the most important literary voice in the movement to wake up England’s sleeping military preparedness around the turn of the century, well before the First World War.
Carruthers the narrator, fashionable, successful and complacent, has missed the fall shooting season and out of boredom accepts the invitation of his old college friend Davies to join him in a yachting and duck-shooting expedition in the Baltic. Carruthers meets Davies in Flensburg and before long Davies reveals that he really wants to cruise the Frisian Islands in the North Sea because he is convinced the Germans are up to something among the little sand channels there. What convinces him is that when he spends some time with Dolman, a supposed German, and his pretty daughter, he begins to suspect that the German is really an Englishman and a spy for the Germans, which is confirmed for him when Dolman tries to kill him by leading him into a labyrinth of sand channels in a storm off Kiel.
Davies is smitten by Dolman’s daughter and convinced she is innocent of her father’s espionage. Davies and Carruthers find that the Germans are concealing their activities with a supposed treasure salvage operation. Carruthers eavesdrops at the site of the salvage operation and hears enough of the Germans’ coded information to work out later a network of sandy channels emanating from seven Frisian and German ports, which have a semicircle of rail lines feeding to them on the mainland. Carruthers returns briefly to England to find out more about Dolman. Coming back, he gets on board a tug as it runs a test invasion with a coal lighter instead of a troop carrier in tow.
Carruthers and Davies confront Dolman with their knowledge and promise him immunity in England. He and Clara, the daughter, go with Carruthers and Davies, but on the way, Dolman jumps overboard when no one is looking; he is apparently the author of the German invasion plan.
The book makes it onto many lists of important crime novels and mysteries of historical significance. Occasionally the technicalities of sailing a small ocean-going boat and navigating the channels in the sands while keeping track of the tides dulls the suspense, but the book is still very readable.
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