Joseph Conrad wrote ‘The Secret Sharer’ with exceptional speed and pleasure. At the end of 1909 he had been struggling desperately to finish Under Western Eyes, harassed by sickness and debts. His depression was particularly severe in early November; but then, as he wrote to his old friend John Galsworthy, ‘I took off last week to write a short story … and no gout so far.’ Conrad said that this story – ‘The Secret Sharer’ – took him only ten days, but it probably took a bit longer. The stimulus to writing it was a happy one in two ways: Conrad received a letter, and later a visit, from Captain Carlos M. Marris, an adventurous trader in the Malayan archipelago. Marris renewed his memories of old times; and he also told Conrad that many seamen out there ‘read my books’, and ‘feel kindly to the chronicler of their lives and adventures’. Conrad was happy to hear it, and at once decided that they ‘should have some more of the stories they like’.

And so, after the years working on Western subjects – the South America of Nostromo (1904), the London of The Secret Agent (1907) and the Russia of Under Western Eyes (1911) – Conrad went to the fictional subjects of his earlier life, and his earlier writing career.