Death by Marriage (1959) by E.G. Cousins

There's not much to be found online about Edmund George Cousins except that he was born in Tientsin, China, but "moved to England at an early age" and likely had a brief stint as a scriptwriter as a "E.G. Cousins" is credited with writing the script for a TV movie, I Done a Murder (1951) – a comedy mystery in which a murderer tries to confess and nobody wants to hear it. A second and last writing credit is for a 1956 episode of the drama anthology series Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Presents, entitled "Welcome My Wife," but the biggest online footprint came from his two-decade career as a novelist. 

Between 1950 and 1967, E.G. Cousins wrote eleven, standalone war novels and six mysteries starring his series-detective, Colonel Richard Barne of the War Office. The series was published from 1959 to 1967. Cousins appears to have ended his writing career and disappeared from the public eye following the publication of the last Col. Barne novel, Death in a Quiet Place (1967). The last known fact about his life, or rather death, is that he passed away in 1996 at the venerable age of 103.

Cousins is practically forgotten today, as a mystery writer, even lacking his own author's page on websites like GADWiki and Fantastic Fiction. Nobody discusses or references his work, but, surprisingly, most of his novels are neither exceedingly rare or particularly expensive to acquire. Just completely forgotten and overlooked today. So how did I get wind of Cousins and the Col. Richard Barne series? Robert Adey listed one of his novels, Death by Marriage (1959), in Locked Room Murder (1991) and described a potential fascinating impossibility – death by drowning in a locked bathroom. It got added to the wishlist and recently came across a cheap copy. 

Death by Marriage was published at the tail-end of the Golden Age's twilight years and described in the synopsis as "not so much a who-dun-it (that is clear from the beginning) but a how-did-he-do-it." It's also the first of six novels featuring Col. Barne and Cousins introduces him under somewhat unusual circumstances, which recalled the unorthodox ways in which Gladys Mitchell (Speedy Death, 1929), Jonathan Latimer (Murder in the Madhouse, 1935) and Patrick Quentin (Puzzle for Fools, 1936) debuted their series-characters. Col. Barne is a soldier and "soldiers are supposed to be inured" to violent deaths, which is alright in wartime, but the colonel preferred people "to die tidily in their beds." So he was not entirely unaffected when reading in the newspaper that his ex-wife, Brenda, unexpectedly died at her home in, what appears to have been, a tragic accident. They had been married for six years when, one day, he returned from Malta to find "she'd hopped it with Jeremy Lammert." An "extraordinary good-looking chap" and proverbial lady killer.

Col. Barne and the Lammerts have two mutual friends, Dr. Horace "Horrors" Aveley ("specialized in D.T.s and alcoholism generally") and his wife Mollie ("indisputably one of the World's Sweetest"), who were at Great Monk when Brenda died. When they arrived, the Aveleys found Jeremy restlessly walking pacing up and down in agony. Brenda is in the bathroom and he had knocked, and called, but received no answer. They rattled the door the doorknob, but the door was obviously bolted on the inside and Horrors suggesting breaking a panel, which Jeremy turns down – offering instead to get a ladder to go through the bathroom window ("they always left the bathroom window a little open"). Jeremy climbed up the ladder first, found the window latched on the inside and put his elbow through it. Horrors followed behind and they found Brenda's body. She appeared to have slipped, bumped her head and drowned. Col. Barne decides to attend the inquest and Jeremy's performance on the witness stand convinces him there's more to Brenda's death than a mere accident.

These are the thoughts that run through his head and wanted to shout to the coroner, "your witness is a phoney and these whole proceedings are bogus. If that son-of-a-bitch wanted to stove the door in, why wouldn't he have done it with a few well-directed kicked at a lower panel" instead of leaving her to drown? And what about the so-called dizzy spells "even her doctor knew nothing about." Not to mention her lifelong habit of leaving the bathroom door unlocked. But he holds his tongue. A second, more detailed talk with Horrors shows just how impossible it would have been for Jeremy to have killed Brenda. The obvious and simplest solution suggesting itself is that Jeremy had simply walked into the bathroom, bolted the door behind and drowned a stunned Brenda. Jeremy then left through the bathroom window by climbing down a ladder placed there beforehand and later simply pretended the window was fastened on the inside, before smashing a pane and feigning to unfasten it. However, the situation is not as simple or straightforward as that. Jeremy suffered a shoulder wound during the war and could neither have gotten a hold nor carried the heavy ladder, which had been stowed away along the rafters of the garage. They had to stand on soapboxes to reach it and it brought "down a cloud of dust." So it hadn't been used in a very long time and took two people to "manhandle it round to the back." Jeremy was physically incapable of getting the heavy, dusty ladder and that left only a solidly bolted door ("a locked door is subject to skillful manipulation; a bolted one is not").

So the locked room-puzzle is build up perfectly, but Death by Marriage is not only about the how-did-he-do-it and not at all a continuation of similar, John Rhode-style howdunits. Just like the previously discussed Nigel FitzGerald, Cousins was a mystery writer caught in the middle of a transitional period as the genre (not completely natural) began to abandon the plot-driven detective stories in favor of character-driven crime, thriller and suspense novels. Death by Marriage gives the impression Cousins approach, to bridge that ever widening gap, was to take the bare essentials of both and tightly weave them together into a very lean, readable novel-length story. So you get a central puzzle (the locked room) with character-driven storytelling as the story takes place over a period of roughly a year. Col. Barne has serious doubts about Brenda's "death by misadventure," but without any strong evidence, he has plenty of other things requiring his attention. Such as going to Rome on a special assignment in connection with the distribution of NATO supplies, but, along the way, the reader gets more background details about Col. Barne, Brenda and Jeremy Lammert. Jeremy is slowly turning into a regular Bluebeard and his brides-in-the-bath routine.

What about the ending? Did it succeed in bridging the gap between the established, traditional detective story and the emerging, darker and character-driven crime fiction? Yes... and no. Firstly, the plot hinges entirely on the locked room murder and Cousins was smart enough to avoid the kind of sleight-of-hand trickery suggested in the story's opening stages, because how he build up the impossibility demanded an imaginative or original answer – which Cousins absolutely delivered on. Something straight out of Arthur Porges or John Russell Fearn, but good luck anticipating it as there's not a ghost of clue to the method employed. You can't really do that when billing your story as "a how-did-he-do-it." Secondly, the lack of fair play makes the misdirection after the halfway point baffling and pointless. Col. Barne is told by Horrors and Mollie that Jeremy's hobby is tinkering and repairing clocks. This immediately conjured up images of a mechanical, wind-up clock device shooting the bolt with a looped wire and then pulling itself into a small trash bin standing next to the washstand or something. The real solution is a little bit more sophisticated, but, once again, good luck figuring it out.

I'm left in two minds about Death by Marriage. If it had been a little fairer, Death by Marriage would have been an early, neo-GAD mystery trailing not all that far behind a Roger Ormerod (Time to Kill, 1974) or Douglas Clark (Golden Rain, 1980). But it was also his first stab at the detective story. I'm always very forgiving of debuts as some of our favorite mystery writers have shown what a little time to develop, hone their skills and build an audience can do. I'm curious to see if improved in novels like Death by Treble Chance (1959), Murder in the Top Drawer (1964) and Body Behind the Curtain (1966), but Death by Marriage can only be recommended to locked room completists or genre scholars interested in transition from the classic to modern style.