The lady in black on the cover of Once a Window was painted by Robert McGinnis, and she’s a brilliant femme fatale depiction, even if she’s only tangentially related to the story. Lee Roberts’ 1959 thriller is about a greedy kept man who throws his rich wife off a boat into the middle of Lake Erie, but is shocked to find days later that she survived. Instead of turning her husband in, the wife pretends she has amnesia and has no idea how she ended up in the water. Her plan is to confront her husband, with whom she’s still in love. It’s not easy to understand her behavior. Does she really think she can salvage a relationship in which her partner tried to murder her?
Roberts forges ahead with this dubious theme. Meanwhile, the other women in his narrative are equally confounding. The husband’s sidepiece girlfriend is too naive and gullible to realize she’s hooked up with a sociopath, while a third important female character is delusional with love for a dead paramour. Was Roberts making a statement about women and their giving hearts? Maybe, but it isn’t a flattering one. There’s being too trusting to see the forest for the trees; and there’s recovering from a murder attempt with love still aflame. The latter, we can’t buy. But even if the book was unrealistic, it wasn’t bad.