Writer (and Carr surrogate) Dick Markham lives in the lovely English village of Six Ashes in 1937 (?), before, one can infer from the first page, those Labour types came along pushing their heady visions of a New Millennium (and as a by-product eventually driving Carr out of England). He's in love with lovely but mysterious Lesley Grant, who admits to 28 but looks 18. In a fortune teller's tent having her fortune told by Sir Harvey Gilman, the famed Home Office pathologist, Lesley is clearly upset by something he said to her. Later she "accidentally" shoots the man. Then Dick finds out from Sir Harvey, who was only superficially wounded, that his beloved Lesley is supposedly a twice-widowed woman of 41(!), who somehow poisoned both her husbands in locked rooms, making the deaths appear to be suicides. Soon afterward, Sir Henry himself is found poisoned in the locked room. His death also appears to be a suicide. Then there is the matter of the person who shot at Sir Harvey with a rifle just at that very moment. It's highly mysterious and a case for Dr. Fell (conveniently visiting nearby).
At the heart of Till Death Do Us part is a very clever and sufficiently plausible locked room murder. Carr was truly amazing at this sort of thing, and the situation he constructs here is a beauty. Otherwise, I would not classify the novel as among the best Carrs. I think it shows some of that influence from Carr's work on radio scripts that Doug Greene has documented. The title I believe was borrowed from a previous radio play, though that play had a different plot. The first half or so of the novel, which centers on the question of whether Lesley is really a mad poisoner, feels rather like an episode of Suspense! It's entertaining and Lesley's back story is interesting, but to me it does not carry the dramatic force of a similar plot point in the later novel He Who Whispers (to me TDDUP felt like a run-through for that superior novel). The title is only weakly integrated with the book.
Like with a radio script Carr uses cliffhanger endings for some chapters. A character will drop some verbal bomb, then we have to wait an entire intervening chapter to find out what the heck happened. In one case, we find the verbal bomb was a total red herring. Carr also uses exclamation points and verbal repetition to enhance emotional tension ("(True! True! True!)"; "Lesley! Lesley! Lesley!"; "The whole damned business was too close! Too personal! Too entwined with emotion!"). For me there's just too much verbal striving for emotional tension.
Of course this is a Fell tale and I prefer Merrivale, but Fell is acceptable, though he insists on calling a prostitute a bawd, shouts "wow, wow, wow!" and "roars" at poor Hadley quite unfairly, I thought. It's also an English village tale, which is always nice, though we don't get the same feel for the village as we would, say, in Agatha Christie. There's a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, the local lord, a minister rather improbably named Reverend Goodflower and a postmistress (though neither butcher, baker nor candlestick maker), but they don't really distinguish themselves to the reader. Indeed, one character essentially only appears to be killed, which seemed a little slipshod. My favorite minor character was Lesley's housekeeper, though she conscientiously drops all her aitches. Carr gets some good humor our of her exaggerated concern for the proprieties.
In its favor, the book is fair play (with the exception, I think it's fair to say, of the matter of the murderer's motive), it moves along smoothly and the locked room situation is splendid. People who don't share my issues with its style will probably rank this one more highly.
My preference remains with less emotion-fraught thirties Carrs, though I do like some of the forties titles too. I'm even a great fan of some of the broad Sir Henry Merrivale humor from the 1940s, which I think a lot of people tend to find too broad (S. T. Joshi most notably). H. M.'s magic act in The Gilded Man (an underrated book, I say!) is one of the funniest things I have ever read.
Next up on my rereads: The Black Spectacles/The Problem of the Green Capsule -- one of my traditional favorites from my 1990s reading!
Curt Evans
See also: http://kontonnohazama.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/till-death-do-us-part.html
Comments (3)
Jon said
at 10:52 am on Mar 18, 2010
Here are some colorful expressions from Carr's Till Death Do Us Part, which I just reread:
"whang in the bull's eye"
Google Books lists three uses of this, two from Carr (Till Death Do Us Part and The Cavalier's Cup) and one from At Dawn We Slept: the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor). I seem to recall Lord Peter saying something like "whang on the crumpet" however!
"For the love of Mike" (I always assumed this was American, but it's listed in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms as having been used by James Joyce in Ulysses)
"Wow, wow, wow!" (another word I've always thought of as American)
By the way, I should have mentioned that I noticed that in The Reader Is Warned the lead character, Sanders, I believe it was, appeared in the previous Death in Five Boxes and his romantic relationship with Marcia Blystone, also from Death in Five Boxes, is alluded to.
Also, I think TRIW must have influenced J. J. Connington when he wrote Jack-in-the-Box five years later. There's a character in that book who is extremely similar to Herman Pennik.
I do agree this is a very clever book.
Curt Evans
Jon said
at 2:07 pm on Mar 23, 2010
A woman who may be far older than she appears strikes terror into Carr's heroes, and Lesley is a good example of this ambiguity. In its extreme it
happens in The Burning Court, where our hero fears that his wife was actually born in the 18th century, yikes. I wonder if it's some sublimated form of the Oedipal neurosis Freud wrote about, that men are secretly afraid of winding up in bed with their mothers?
Kevin K.
Jon said
at 2:07 pm on Mar 23, 2010
It's a smooth read, but, I don't know, I think the whole maybe my girlfriend is a maniacal triple murderess theme might have deserved a darker treatment, like in He Who Whispers. I spotted the disappearing gun solution and hence the murderer right off, but then I had read this before and may have had a subconscious recollection about it. It's a good example of clueing. I figured out a lot of the locked room too, but, again, maybe I had a subconscious recollection. When I started this book, the only thing I consciously recalled was the back story of Lesley and the fortune teller, but there may have been more lurking in the recesses.
One thing that was hard to swallow: the reason for a certain character being on the scene of the first murder!
It's funny what one remembers. With The Reader Is Warned, I recalled the teleforce idea and that was it. I'd forgotten both murderer and means. I saw an indication as to who the murderer might be (there are not many suspects) but didn't comprehend actual sequences, so couldn't put it together.
I think I read these books more acutely today and will not forget them this time! Of course some you can't forget, like the solution of The Crooked Hinge!
Curt
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