Wilma Rathjen Is a Troubled Woman on a Roof in This Novel from Helen Nielsen

The Woman on the Roof was first published in 1954 and has now been published in a new edition by Stark House. At the center of the story is a woman named Wilma Rathjen who has just returned home from a sanitarium following a nervous breakdown. Her brother, Curtis, is a landlord and he has created a home for Wilma in a small apartment above a garage in a complex that he owns. Wilma lives there with her cat and has taken a job at a bakery, but she's still clearly nervous and unsettled.

Wilma is particularly unnerved when she looks down from her apartment one night into the window of one of the other units in the complex and sees a young woman lying dead in a bathtub. Or does she? Wilma fears that she might be imagining the sight and worries that if she reports it and it turns out not to be true, she could be taken back to the sanitarium.

Accordingly, she makes no mention of what she has seen and when the body is discovered, two days later, Wilma feigns ignorance. Initially it appears that the woman died accidentally when her hair dryer fell into the tub and electrocuted her. But then the detective investigating the death, a Sergeant Osgood, begins to notice a number of strange things going on in and around the complex where the young woman died. He also notes that poor Wilma Rathjen is not the only odd, strange and curious character who's living there. As Osgood digs deeper into the mystery, Wilma finds herself, or imagines herself, in increasing trouble and her own survival may be at stake.

This is a mystery that seems very much of its time, and as a crime novel it really hasn't aged all that well. There are no clues that would really enable a reader to anticipate the guilty party and, frankly, by the end of the book, it really didn't seem to matter, at least not to this reader, who the guilty party was. However, the book is a fairly interesting psychological portrait of a woman who may or may not be imagining the dangers that surround her. The author has very skillfully drawn the character of Wilma Rathjen, and the reader can't help caring about her and wondering what might become of her. An interesting read both for that and as a glance back to the nature of the mystery novel three-quarters of a century ago.