A while ago, in one of those bookshops that have sprung up at so many National Trust properties, I came across a green Penguin paperback with which I was unfamiliar. This was Little Brother Fate. Nor was I familiar with the author, Mary-Carter Roberts. The paperback was published in 1961 and the first UK edition (under the Gollancz imprint - see the cover image above, taken from the internet) three years earlier, and four years after the book first appeared in the US.
Roberts was a prominent American journalist, a former book editor for the Washington Star, and she'd previously published one mainstream novel. She was born in 1899 and she died in 1979, but after Little Brother Fate, she never published another novel, whether in the crime genre or otherwise. So this title ranks as a crime 'singleton'. But I found it interesting and after a slowish start it warmed up nicely.
The novel tells the story of three murder cases, which are interwoven together so as to give us a degree of understanding of the psychological origins of the crimes in question. Each of the three cases is very clearly based on a famous real life American case which involved more than one 'bad actor': the Snyder-Gray case, the Hall-Mills case, and the Leopold and Loeb case. In one of the three real life cases, nobody was ever convicted of the crime.
Roberts builds the tension steadily as we follow a group of doomed characters along the road to their ultimate fate. She does make some changes to the facts of the real life cases, but her journalistic skills are as evident as her limitations as a novelist. She tends to tell rather than show, and really the three interlinked stories are reportage. So I'm not unduly surprised that she didn't write another crime novel. But I can't recall any other book that is quite like this one and I found it interesting and readable. It has sunk into obscurity, but in my view undeservedly.
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