{"id":7273,"date":"2026-02-01T15:26:43","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T05:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=7273"},"modified":"2026-02-01T15:26:43","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T05:26:43","slug":"sweet-danger-by-margery-allingham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=7273","title":{"rendered":"SWEET DANGER by Margery Allingham"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.<\/em>
\nRed sky at morning, shepherd’s warning…<\/em><\/p>\n

The camera in my phone can’t quite capture what the sky looked like at dawn on Wednesday last. It was really red, and quite ominous; the day was already warm. My home state of Victoria was sweltering through what turned out to be a week-long heatwave, with temperatures here in Castlemaine reaching 42.4.\u00a0 It was almost 50 degrees in places like Mildura and Ouyen. Following on from the devastating fires in Harcourt, just down the road from us, it really did feel as if we were under siege. \u00a0The emergency app kept pinging with local fires but they were all small and rapidly under control; despite the extreme heat, there was relatively little wind to boost the danger.
\nIt\u2019s times like these that I realise how very, very lucky we are to have the volunteers of the CFA to keep us safe. Firefighters came from South Australia, too. Even from Canada. All I can really do is donate to the local fundraiser for the Harcourt community and think ‘Bless you’ when I see the familiar red trucks.<\/p>\n

I was lucky also to have excellent air conditioning and lots of books to read when not obsessing about fires and heat. And I hit the jackpot with my first Margery Allingham, Sweet Danger<\/em>. It was a cracker, and reminded me of all the things I enjoy about Joan Aiken’s books for children. It is inventive, imaginative, fast-paced, with a ridiculously complicated plot – and funny as well.\u00a0 If you were after a conventional Golden Age crime novel, you would be bitterly disappointed, but I was delighted to get out of the libraries and drawing rooms and into the Suffolk countryside of villages, pubs, watermills, rivers, hills and fields and rivers, peopled with all kinds of characters and eccentrics.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>We first meet the Allingham’s detective, Albert Campion, in a hotel on the French Riviera, where he’s posing as the Grand Paladin of Averna. Averna is not only a delicious Sicilian liqueur, but a small Balkan principality which, in the world of the book, is suddenly of strategic interest to Britain. Thus the British government is trying to track down the long lost proofs to its hereditary ownership. So are a gang of criminals masterminded by the elusive financier Savanake, who will – as they say – stop at nothing to gain control of Averna’s natural resources.
\nSo far, so complicated. Next, we are in the village of Pontisbright, on the trail of the crown and deeds to Averna. Campion and his friends take lodgings at an ancient mill, making the acquaintance of the impoverished but aristocratic Fitton family\u00a0 – the lovely Mary, feisty Amanda and the youngest, 16-year-old Hal. They are the last of the line that could inherit Averna – if only the crown etc could be found…<\/p>\n

No spoilers. I don’t think I could manage a coherent precis of the plot, anyway. I am so looking forward to more of these; from the early 1930s to the 1960s, Allingham wrote 27 novels with Campion as the primary sleuth. Campion himself is an agreeably enigmatic character; I did read that it’s been suggested he’s a parody of Lord Peter Wimsey, but even if he is, he’s a great character in his own right.\u00a0 Tall, thin, wearing large horn-rimmed glasses and a vacuous expression to hide his intellect, he’s given to inane chatter, silly jokes and sudden bursts of decisive action. His manservant\/companion Magersfontein Lugg, an ex-con, is a wonderful comic foil.\u00a0 And the heroine of this book, 17-year-old Amanda is a relief after the beautiful, rich and idle young ladies I’ve met so far in Golden Age land. She’s a feisty, outspoken, brave and clever young woman.\u00a0 And she actually does<\/em> something, unlike the beautiful, rich young ladies I’ve met so far – she’s an engineering and electronics wiz.\u00a0 And potential love interest for Albert, when she grows up? He’s still mending a broken heard, but who knows.<\/p>\n

I don’t rate books, but if I did – heaps and heaps of stars!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning… The camera in my phone can’t quite capture what the sky looked like at dawn on Wednesday last. It was really red, and quite ominous; the day was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7273"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7285,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7273\/revisions\/7285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}