Lab Nurse

By Rona Randall, ©1958
Also published as Sisters in Nursing

They were three beautiful sisters, triplets in fact, but each girl had her own distinct personality: Faith, the lab assistant, was the serious and intense sister. Her hair was dark and her eyes, a deep blue. Hope, the staff nurse, had flaming copper-colored hair and she was always gay. Charity, the physiotherapist, was blonde, gentle, graceful—and blind … The three girls were entirely devoted to one another, to nursing and to St. Bede’s hospital where they lived and worked. When three young and attractive doctors arrived—a visiting surgeon, a pathologist, and a house physician—each girl found the happiness, excitement and romance that were needed to make her life full and complete …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“In endeavoring to antagonize no one he failed to succeed in pleasing anyone.” 

“Nothing had worked out as she planned. Not a doctor here had fallen in love with her or even shown the slightest willingness to flirt with her. It had been a very dull visit, after all.”

REVIEW:
This book was originally published under the title Sisters in Nursing, and it’s too bad they changed it because the original is much more fitting, as this is the story of three sisters named, I’m sorry to have to tell you, Faith, Hope and Charity Connell. They are triplets, orphaned shortly after birth and raised by the matron of St. Bede’s  hospital. Each one of them—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead (what are the odds!)—are beautiful and intelligent and charming. And as we open the book, we find its ending is foretold in its first seven words: “The arrival of three new medical men …”

Honestly, I’m not sure what more there is to say about this book. I can tell you that Faith is a junior pathologist, and that one of the new men, Dr. Charles Wilstack, is the new pathologist. Faith was “shy, reserved, sensitive. It might take him quite a time, he thought, to break down those barriers, but he would do it in the end.” Hope is a nurse on the surgical floor, and on page 19, “just like that, it happened. With no clash of cymbals, no roll of drums. Right at that moment, she fell in love” with Dr. Phillip Trent, the new surgeon, who is intimidating and stiff with nurses, but Hope immediately sees that his actual problem is that “he has never learned to laugh!” and so it not cowed by him. He’s originally from this town and has moved back in with his older unmarried sister Agatha, and is immediately taken up by his old flame, the wealthy and divinely evil Felicity Drake (even she has a noun for a first name), who had spurned Phillip in their youth but is now divorced from the man she’d chosen instead. Felicity is “an elegant young woman. She wore a beautifully cut suit of moss green, with a lavish mink stole and a chic little moss green hat trimmed with mink tails.” I, for one, swooned—nothing makes me tumble harder than a gorgeous, well-tailored suit ornamented with fur, a weakness that dates back to the excellent Graduate Nurse, reviewed in 2011, in which the vixen had a similar outfit but, even better, was stepping from a smart blue “roadster” when we met her. But I digress: Last of the trio is Charity, who is a physical therapist, and who is blind—although so adept that when the new internist Dr. Michael Shearling meets her and holds out his hand to her, he is insulted that she does not shake it, only later learning that it wasn’t rudeness that caused her to miss his gesture. Michael is “tall and dark, with a strong face and a bitter mouth,” which Charity of course cannot see, but oh yes, she can: “At some time in his life something has happened to Dr. Shearing that hurt him,” she tells her sisters. “And he is still hitting out against it.”

And so we have the dramatis personae of this book, but it is nicely padded with some lovely extra characters: Dr. Phillip’s sister Agatha Trent is a joy, as are Matron and Dr. Shearling’s mother. There’s even a happy little dog, Charity’s pseudo seeing eye companion, and a silver gown to wear to the ball. Not much really happens—with a  triple-threaded braid of a plot, each of the strands is fairly thin—but it’s smooth and pleasant and sweet, not at all challenging but mildly comforting, like chamomile tea when you have a slight cold. It’s a story worth reading, maybe best after you’ve had a lousy day and you need a light soothing stroke on your hair. As long as you are not expecting more than mild pleasantries, Lab Nurse will take perfectly good care of you.

Nurse by Night

By Doris Knight, ©1965 

Dr. Tony Warren and Nurse Norma Ferris; how could a love so beautiful go so wrong? That was the question everyone asked—the hospital staff, Norma’s parents, even her patients. What they didn’t know was Norma’s very own secret and it took a heartbreaking experience and Dr. Rick Stanton before people could truly understand their romance. And then Norma understood herself …

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Norma forgot that he might be a murder and hurried to him.” 

“Now, Inspector, I am a busy man. I have lives to save. So this interview is at an end.”

REVIEW:
I’m never quite sure what to do with a book like Nurse by Night. It is an absolute gem, a rare masterpiece—but of the sort that it is brilliant in its daffy stupidity, like the classic Nurse at the Fair or almost anything by Arlene Fitzgerald. So is a stupid book that makes you repeatedly laugh out loud at its idiocy a bad book or a good one? These are nurse romance novels, after all, not capital-L Literature, so I must decide that if a book is amusing and makes you want to read passages out loud or recommend to a friend as “so bad it’s amazing”—in short, the perfect beach read—then it must be good. And so this book earns an A- (maybe one with an asterisk?) instead of a D. 

Nurse Norma Ferris, who it seems has only gotten three hours of sleep in the several days spanned by this book, is a ubiquitous orphan from New York who moved to London to surprise the obstetrician she’d been in love with, Dr. Tony Warren, when he’d abruptly taken a job there. Though actually, Norma found out about the job when Tony’s friend handed him a plane ticket and told him he had five hours to pack and get to the airport, so why she thought it would be a smart move to majorly disrupt her life and chase this guy across the ocean is the first of many mysteries we will encounter here. 

He’s unexpectedly ecstatic to see her again, though he had not written her during their separation, and now, two years later, he is pressing her to get married—in secret, because he plans to take a two-year job in the Bahamas that requires the physician be unmarried—can you imagine such a thing?—and it becomes increasingly apparent from Tony’s hot murmurings while in the throes of passion stolen in the hospital shrubbery what he really wants: “I can’t take any more of this. We must have this weekend together, Norma,” he whispers, and then he’ll go off for two years without seeing her after they’re married. You’d think there would be an easier way.

Then one evening at 11:00 pm, Norma decides to go for a walk when a thunderstorm is threatening, stays out too late after the storm starts even though lightening scares her silly, and takes a shortcut through Porter’s Alley, forbidden because a  nurse was strangled to death there a year ago, the murderer never caught. In the alley she sees two men in white raincoats fighting for possession of a knife. She hears one of the men scream “a cry of mortal agony” and runs off. When she reaches the hospital she calls the police from a phone booth outside, but hangs up before giving any more information other than that there’s been a murder in the alley because “she didn’t intend to get mixed up in this.”

But outside the phone booth door is a “good-looking” man in (gasp) a white raincoat who grabs her wrist and asks her if she’s American and if she heard a man scream. She pulls away and ducks into into the nurse’s dorm just in time for curfew. “Old Mike,” who is usually on duty at the door monitoring the residents, is absent, so she steals one of the wooden figurines he is always carving—but suddenly there’s a massive multi-car crash outside the dorm doors, so she does the obvious thing and runs up to her room to hide, then decides to put the figurine back, but cuts herself on something sharp as she tries to pull the object from her pocket. Returning the now-bloody object without bothering to figure out how she got cut, she heads back to her room, but notices some potted fir trees in the hallway have been re-arranged, and someone behind them sneezes! Now she bolts back upstairs, hides her muddy shoes and wet and bloody uniform in a locked drawer, then figures out that someone had hidden a bloody scalpel in her cape!

So she washes off the knife and has just added that to her collection of Suspicious Objects when someone knocks on her door! “Was it the murderer out there, come to collect the knife?” Because that’s what a murderer would be wanting of a witness, but if he knew how fervently Norma intends to aid and abet the crime, he wouldn’t bother. But no, it’s her roommate—did she forget her key?—telling her that it’s all hands on deck for the car crash, so down to the Emergency Department Norma goes, where she finds that not only a murder and a car crash but a lightning strike in Potter’s Alley has ignited a farm building and burned a couple hiding there, and the farm truck that decided to go for a drive hit a pedestrian and then was found to have a body in the back, a man who’s been stabbed to death! “Norma sighed. If she did marry Tony secretly, she was going to miss being a part of St. Christopher’s Hospital,” and if this much zany activity is occurring in less than one hour, I have to agree it would be a tragic loss—though it might be pointed out that her job there is caring for the same people she had just run from at the first opportunity.

When the immediate traumas are cleared away, Norma is sent to special Dr. Stanton, a new addition to the staff who decided to show up for his first day at midnight and was, if you can believe it, the pedestrian struck by the farm truck. He’s literally bandaged head to toe, for a single rib fracture and a sprained ankle, but Norma knows it’s not really Dr. Stanton because she knew Hugh Stanton in high school in Manhattan, and his eyes were gray, but this man’s are blue! So she passes out on the spot! When she comes to, the patient insists she not leave his side, but sleep three hours in the chair next to his bed, and when she wakes up all his bandages have been removed and he’s better! But he’s still going to stay in the hospital for another two days because he’s the long-lost brother of Dr. Hugh Stanton, Dr. Rick Stanton! And she’s going to stay on duty 24 hours a day nursing a completely well man while they figure out who the murderer is!

Oh, and for her to break up with Tony—several times, in case he didn’t get the picture after the twice she’s told him to his face and the message she sent via her roommate, because “I hate secrets,” she says, bringing up Tony’s not-so-secret other girlfriend. But despite being such a champion of truth, she lies to the police several times about what happened That Fateful Evening, and she does end up falling on top of her patient and kissing him until “she began to fear for his cracked and bruised ribs” (there’s only one), which required a full-torso cast, but only for 12 hours.

We’re only about halfway through the book at this point, and there are so many mysteries to wonder about, not least being how Norma is able to even walk most of the time as her legs are always going weak with fear—but also, how did the scalpel end up on top of the electric meter in Norma’s room? Who got her muddy clothes out of the locked drawer and how, and why did they just throw them on the floor for her roommate to clean up? How does Tony know so much about what’s going on in Norma’s room when he’s not supposed to even be in her dorm? What was the deal with the sneezing man behind the fir trees? How can a woman so constantly paralyzed with fear be an effective nurse, much less set herself up as bait to trap a murderer? And why isn’t there a quota on the number of exclamation points an author can use? The contradictions of plot and prose are nonstop and regularly hilarious, making for one highly entertaining book. If author Doris Knight (and you do have to admire the pun of the title Nurse by Night) tied for fourth in the Worst Author category in this year’s annual VNRN Awards, this book ironically proves the point while simultaneously vaulting her out of the running with its spectacularly fabulous flameout.