My copy of Margery Allingham's Sweet Danger (1933) is a precious one, despite lacking a dust jacket, because it's inscribed by the author (and her husband Pip) to a friend. It also benefits from endpapers which have a rather splendid map labelled 'The village of Pontisbright where it all happened'. It's taken me a while to get round to reading it but I was amused to find that the prime villain rejoices in the name Savanake (so spelled differently from Rachel, whose name was inspired by Henrietta Savernake in Agatha Christie's The Hollow).
The description often applied to Sweet Danger is 'romp' and that tells you most of what you need to know about the novel. A disputed territory in central Europe plays a significant part in the plot, so in some ways this is one of those Golden Age novels which have a Ruritanian element - rather like Christie's The Secret of Chimneys, for instance.
Thankfully, the vast majority of the action takes place in Pontisbright, which is in Suffolk, and the story is particularly significant in the Allingham canon for introducing Albert Campion to Amanda Fitton, who at the tender age of seventeen makes a big impression on him and was to play a key role in several of Allingham's later books. Was this the influence of Sayers' success in introducing Wimsey to Harriet Vane? I tend to think so.
The storyline concerns inheritance and a coded message and it didn't make much of an impression on me. The chapter which made the greatest impact was the one in which Campion ventures to London and encounters Savanake at his HQ: this is very well done, and so is the climactic battle between the men in the mill at Pontisbright. But if anything this book reinforces me in the perhaps controversial view that much of Allingham's finest work was in the short story form, which compelled a discipline not always evident in her novels.
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