Review: Sweet Danger

Sweet Danger by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

More of a thriller than a mystery. (My working definition: in a mystery, the protagonists are trying to solve a crime that's already happened, while in a thriller, they're trying to prevent a crime from happening or otherwise battling criminal opposition.) In this case, it's a treasure hunt, racing against a powerful and unscrupulous enemy. The complicated and somewhat unlikely backstory is that there's a very small Balkan country that was granted to an English earl in the Middle Ages, and then bought by one of his descendants from Metternich when the map of Europe was being redrawn after the Napoleonic Wars, and now an earthquake has opened it up to the sea and also revealed that there is oil there - meaning it could become a refueling point for the British Navy. But the line of earls has died out - or has it? There's a family that claims to be the legitimate descendants of the last earl, but they can't prove that their ancestress was married to him, and they also need to find three items to make their claim - a crown, the medieval grant, and the Metternich receipt - which have been hidden for decades, nobody knows where.

It's packed full of eccentric English characters, from the pub owner who keeps telling everyone that he's honest and the wacky local doctor to, of course, Campion himself and his manservant Lugg. The family with the claim to the earldom and its associated tiny kingdom features a gamine young woman (not quite 18) who is running the local mill, but makes most of her income from running a dynamo to charge the batteries for people's wireless sets. It's a backwater rural village with no phone and no mains power.

On the other hand, there are some bland characters too, notably Campion's three assistants, barely distinguishable upper-class chaps who could step straight into the Drones Club and no questions asked. The miller's older sister is also quite bland and generic, and while her younger brother, the putative earl, does have some distinguishing characteristics, he isn't one of the great eccentrics either.

Campion shines throughout, manipulating events, anticipating problems, hatching complicated schemes and pulling off daring feats when things go wrong. His pose of upper-class near-idiocy fools almost nobody. The villain is appropriately sinister, an unscrupulous businessman who's used to having his own way, with plenty of loyal minions to do his bidding. The plot zips along, and the action is, as always from this author, well described and original. It's a fun ride, and I was happy to ignore the unlikely elements and be carried along by the excellent writing.

The Vintage Digital ebook edition is not the worst edition I've seen of a classic novel, but it does have a good few scan errors that have gone uncorrected, including a lot of commas missing or inserted and several misreadings, and I don't recommend it.

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