Erskine Childers was born in England in 1870, the second of five children, but after being orphaned as a young boy he grew up in Ireland. He was an avid sailor, as The Riddle of the Sands (1903), his only work of fiction and his greatest publishing success, attests. Childers fought with the British Army in the Boer War in South Africa and later in World War I, but his growing commitment to Irish independence led him to smuggle guns into Ireland in 1914 and to join Sinn Fein after the war. In 1922 he was shot by the Irish government.