[1] It was the penultimate novel in the series, with a gap or more than twenty five years before the next entry The Glimpses of the Moon, although a collection of short stories Beware of the Trains was published in 1953.

The title doesn't refer to a marriage but is a quote from Shakespeare's Henry VIII "the long divorce of steel".

Amongst those receiving the messages are an attractive, young female doctor and a bluff Yorkshire businessman whose teenage daughter has become infatuated with a Swiss schoolmaster.

Things take a more serious turn when a woman commits suicide after receiving a letter threatening to expose a deeply-held secret, and the case continues to baffle the local police force, including the chief constable of the county who lives in the village.

To add to the mystery, a man arrives to stay at the inn calling himself Mr. Datchery (an alias he has clearly taken from Dickens' Edwin Drood) and an unlikely story that he is there conducting research for Mass Observation.