Starring Suzanne Carteret, R.N.

By Diane Frazer
(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1966
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

When, almost by chance, Suzanne Carteret was summoned as a consultant on a television series devoted to nursing, it seemed to her a wildly exciting prospect. The entertainment world was a madly glamorous one and she was eager to penetrate it. But it proved far different from what she had imagined. Soon she found herself sucked into a vortex that threatened to carry her far over her head. Things began happening more quickly than she had ever imagined possible, and for a moment it even began to look as if she might be swept into a whole new career. Would it turn her head? Could she abandon nursing, for which she felt such a genuine vocation? And what about young Doctor Clive, with whom she had thought herself in love? The decision was hers. Or was it? Everything moved with a rapidity that made her feel sometimes that she no longer had any control over her life!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Never buy a sling chair, Ted. I found bones where I never knew I had them before.” 

REVIEW:
Picking up a book written by Dorothy Fletcher, here under her usual pseudonym, gives me a little frisson of excitement. Maybe it’s the Harry Bennett cover illustration—he seems to have done most of her books—a little cutting edge, a little weird. Maybe it’s anticipating the saucy repartee that will inevitably sparkle from the yellowed pages. Maybe it’s meeting another independent, strong woman who knows her mind, most of the time anyway, who will be a treat to spend time with. Here we have all that—and if the plot isn’t Ms. Fletcher’s finest, well, you know it’s still worth the hours. 

Suzanne Carteret, R.N., is our nurse heroine. She works on the neurology floor for a Manhattan hospital, so it’s not clear why she and neurosurgery intern Dr. David Clive care for so few neurology patients. But who cares? She and her feisty roommate Dorcas double date with David and his intern friend Pete, going out for spumoni and beer on Saturday nights, and why not? They’re poor, so they can’t afford Sardi’s. But in the first chapter, Suzanne meets a man who can, Ted Binghamton, an associate producer for a new TV show, “Women in White.” It’s about nurses, and when he and a few of the actors come to the hospital to learn a few things about it on background, Suzanne shows them around. By the end of the hour, Ted is smitten. He calls her up and asks her out, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s caught her at a time when she’s feeling a little disenchanted with her beloved.

David Clive is a kind, compassionate, hard-working young intern, putting in tons of hours and breaking dates at times because he’s offered to scrub a case that’s unexpectedly going to the OR late. But gosh, all he talks about is the hospital, and medicine, and patients! Even on their one big splurge date, when “she wanted to talk idly and dream,” he doesn’t. “Let’s not talk about the hospital, she silently adjured him. Oh, David, forget about the hospital for once. Talk to me. Just to me, please.” But she forgets to speak the words aloud, and when he doesn’t read her mind, she snaps at him, and they have a little fight. Then she starts noticing that he does seem to have a one-track conversation every time they’re out. “There they sat, David and Pete, absorbed in abstractions, oblivious to herself and Dorcas, oblivious to the passing scene. Beyond lay the world, and the world was more than medicine. The world was light and laughter and gaiety and frivolity. When you were twenty-three years old, as she and Dorcas were, laughter and frivolity were things you wanted. Things she wanted, and wanted badly.” Unfortunately she doesn’t get them with David, nice as he is.

So she agrees to go out with Ted, and he takes her to Sardi’s! He invites her to the TV studio, and there she befriends a young actress, Virginia Clegg, who is on her last dime, and if she doesn’t do well with this role, her dream of acting is over! Unfortunately, the aging actress on the show has got it in her head that Suzanne should play the part instead of Virginia. The back cover blurb notwithstanding, Suzanne has almost no interest in becoming an actress, and repeatedly rebuffs the idea. But she does keep saying yes to Ted, who keeps asking her out on fabulous dates. We know that seeing multiple people isn’t really wrong in this era—men who are engaged are constantly kissing and even grabbing other women in vintage nurse romance novels—but she hasn’t told David that she’s dating Ted, and she’s wondering if maybe Ted is more interesting than David.

I think that’s really all I can say about the plot, which as I hinted above is not very complicated, without giving away the story. But it’s still a good story, replete with Fletcher’s trademark witty dialogue, and in addition it is also an homage to being a young woman loose in Manhattan, with lovely passages describing the streets and the passersby in the park and how it all makes you feel alive. It’s clear Dorothy Fletcher did love New York; she lived there from her early 20s until she married in her late 40s and moved to Florida. If we never get to experience life in the city for ourselves firsthand, we’re lucky we have Dorothy to show it to us, and I’m only sorry that of the 16 nurse novels Dorothy wrote, I have only two left.

Nurse Kay’s Conquest

By Willo Davis Roberts, ©1966 

Armed with their shining diplomas, Nurses Kay Regis and Ginny Attison were out to set the California town of Mayerling on its ear. Kay was well aware that her best friend possessed more than enough charms and feminine wiles to capture the hearts of the two bachelor-doctors in town. And she was almost willing to let Ginny have the run of the mill—until her own emotions caught up with her and drew her irresistably into the arms of the one man she was fighting to ignore.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Kay, darling, you aren’t working at it. Smile. Not a perfunctory little smile but seductive. Manage to touch shoulders or hands when you work with him. The electricity will get through to him sooner or later. No man could look like that and be completely impervious to a pretty girl.”

“The only way he’ll ever see me will be if I have my gallbladder removed, and then he’ll only notice my insides.”

“My father always told me never to look a gift horse in the mouth. When I got older, I realized that this also applied to pretty girls in my kitchen at midnight.”

“I may do favors for old ladies, but any kissing I do is strictly on my own.”

REVIEW:
Kay Regis and Ginny Attison, new grads from nursing school, are moving to Ginny’s hometown of Mayerling, in the central valley of California. They’re moving in with Ginny’s 60-year-old grandmother and working at a 60-bed hospital which has at most four nurses on per shift, covering maternity, pediatrics, med/surg and ED, and sometimes no doctors at all in the hospital or ED—clearly a malpractice suit waiting to happen. They being new grads and all, and no MDs in the building, perhaps it’s not surprising that the first thing they do when three patients who had been in a car crash, one of whom is unconscious with a severe head wound and another who may be paralyzed, is clean them up, flirt with the ambulance drivers, and fill out forms.

Fortunately Dr. Ross arrives. “What’s all the yakkety-yak? Is anybody doing anything for these kids?” It’s a valid question, but the doctor doesn’t do much either, apart from x-raying the possibly paralyzed man; the unconscious kid doesn’t seem to have gotten any imaging studies at all. The best news is that there are two single doctors, Dr. Ross and Dr. Hugh Shand, so Kay and Ginny can each can have one. Dr. Hugh Shand is “such a perfectionist it seems no once can please him,” which is demonstrated by the fact that he is chewing out the nursing supervisor when they see him for the first time, and “looked through them as if they were so many posts holding up the ceiling.” But he is also “tall, dark and fabulous,” and “the best doctor in town, no matter what else they say about him”—and he drives a cream-colored Lincoln Continental, so maybe that’s why “something about him sent a tremor through Kay’s body even as she backed out of his way.” That night, “the face of Dr. Hugh Shand floated before her in the darkness for some time before she finally fell asleep.” Nothing is sexier to a nurse novel heroine than an aloof, shouting man who doesn’t notice you. “So much for that seductive smile. He wouldn’t notice me if I batted my eyes six inches from his face,” she thinks.

Meanwhile, the granddaughter of wealthy Rhoda Mayerling, who endows the hospital, is admitted to the hospital in a coma after being hit by a car. Rhoda blames her daughter-in-law Beverlee for the death of her son; they had been driving home drunk and she had thought there was an oncoming car, grabbed the wheel, and the car had driven into a concrete wall, killing Richard—but the other car had been parked by the road, not a danger to them. Beverlee feels she is too stupid to take up a profession, so she is trapped living with Rhoda, who enjoys keeping the woman on a short leash. Now Rhoda blames Beverlee for stealing a $4,000 necklace she had stupidly given the comatose girl to hold, which has gone missing.

Then Ginny’s grandmother sets up Kay on a date with Hugh Shand. Kay is furious at the woman for meddling, and humiliated—a bizarre reaction in this day and age—because Hugh was pushed into dating her and did not ask her himself. They both seem to have a great time, but Kay can’t be content with that: “Had all of it, the laughter, the excitement of their contact, the fun of dancing, been simply that—obedience to the wishes of a rich old lady?” But the old witch wasn’t completely wrong, because by the end of the night they’re in each others’ arms, talking—hypothetically, anyway—about marriage.

This is only about two-thirds through the book, though, so we have a significant page count—and the foreshadowing line, “How wrong a girl could sometimes be”—to predict that trouble is a-brewing. Sure enough, when Beverlee gets a job in a dress shop and moves out of Rhoda’s house to live with Charlotte independently on her own earnings, Hugh becomes outraged, accuses Kay of interfering, though she has done nothing but listen to Beverlee’s plans and bolster the poor abused woman’s confidence, and calls Kay a half-witted idiot and Beverlee “an empty-headed, immature, thirty-year-old teenager who lives for nothing but pleasure. She has never done a useful thing in her life except perhaps give birth to Charlie, and that was probably an accident.” Wow! When Kay points out that Rhoda is cruel to Beverlee, Hugh’s only defense is that Rhoda has terminal cancer and “can’t live without Charlotte.” Kay rightly ends it with Hugh, thinking, “she could never marry a man who expected her to yield to his opinion on everything, no matter what her own conscience dictated.”

There’s a house fire to help put things to rights, sort of, though Hugh never acknowledges that he has been prejudiced and wrong about Beverlee’s character and Rhoda’s treatment of her, and the question of whether he wants a yes-man or a strong woman for a wife remains unanswered. The writing isn’t terrible, though the plot is a bit thin, and the central question of whether Kay and Hugh will work out in the end is not satisfactorily answered at the end of the book. If Nurse Kay has made a conquest of Hugh, author Willo Davis Roberts, who has not been a particular favorite of mine in the past, has not made a conquest of me with yet another mediocre book. I suspect you won’t be impressed, either.

Arms and the Girl

By Marguerite Mooers Marshall, ©1942

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The Lord knows we men are an undecorative species. I hope you can stand looking at me across the table.” 

“Beautiful girls like you should do nothing but exist.”

“People get the poetry they deserve.”

“I am going to have a relapse. You don’t take me seriously any longer.”

“There’s nothing so becoming to a pretty girl as a nurse’s uniform.” 

“Facts are so bald and unimaginative. Facts often annoy. If embroidered or flavored, they are easier to take.”

“You can always get killed in a war if you insist, and frequently if you don’t.”

REVIEW:
This book was a surprise to me because I thought I had read all the VNRNs written my Marguerite Mooers Marshall, who is one of my favorite authors. So now there are five (see also Nurse into Woman, Wilderness Nurse, Her Soul to Keep and Nurse with Wings), and if this one is not her best, well, even Marshall’s mediocre books are still miles better than most. 

Here we find Rosemary Alden (yes, descended from those Aldens of Mayflower fame), who is nursing the mother of an old boyfriend. Mrs. Marianne Sibley is a spoiled, demanding, wealthy woman who wants more of a prop than a nurse, and the only thing that keeps Rosemary on the job is that she has been able to spend time with Philip Sibley, Marianne’s 24-year-old son, who is a sweet young man if utterly lacking seriousness, which is what keeps Rosemary from being, well, serious about him. Soon it comes to light that Philip is being called before the draft board—World War II is about to break loose in Europe—and Marianne is planning to tell them she’s destitute (she’d cleverly moved her money out of the markets and into her mattress a year ago), dependent on her son for maintenance, and furthermore that her health is so fragile that she will drop dead of a heart attack if he is drafted. In truth, Marianne wouldn’t drop dead if she were run over by a dump truck, and as Marianne’s meeting with her health team unfolds, all the doctors fall into line—but Rosemary, disgusted, tells them all off and quits on the spot.

From there she marches over to the Red Cross Nursing Committee to enlist in the Army. But before all the paperwork comes through, Philip is on her door telling her he is in love with her and begging her to marry him. He also mentions that his enlistment has been deferred and his mother is now healthy as a horse and has fired her new  nurse and doctor. She likes him a lot, she tells him, “yet it was all no use. He was a boy unwilling to do a man’s work, a boy who wouldn’t go where even she, a girl, was going. Anything else she might forgive—not refusal to pay a debt of honor, the greatest debt man or woman owes, the debt to country.”

So off she goes to war—well, not exactly, she goes to a training camp located near Winchester, Massachusetts! There she spends many long hours dreaming about Philip: “She remembered the tumbled hair, the tie and the hat never quite straight, the flash of even teeth in the wide irregular mouth when he laughed. She remembered his effortless physical power, his way of making friends with dogs and horses and small grimy children, his sheer boyish charm and decency. So much in him that was winning and fine—yet he flinched at the one hard, disagreeable task ever laid on his twenty-four years! With a frowning shrug, she resolved to put the young man out of her mind. And did not.”

Meanwhile, at the camp’s Officers Club—she’s a second lieutenant—she meets the debonair Captain Gerald Lee, who is Rhett Butler reincarnate, even hailing from a plantation in South Carolina. On their first meeting entices her to go on a date with him in Boston, and soon they are spending much free time together, and everyone is wondering when the engraved invitations will be mailed. But “she did not love him—did not, did not! Something in her so stubbornly resisted. And yet why?” Maybe it’s because she knows that on the very next page she’s going to receive a telegram telling her that Philip has joined the Army and is going to be arriving at her camp tomorrow!

When she meets Philip at the camp, he tells her he wants to prove to her that he has what it takes. “I’m willing to wait,” he tells her—which is a first in VNRNs, the man waiting for the woman! But the bad news here is that she’s an officer and he’s just a private, so they are absolutely forbidden to fraternize. Instead they just write letters to each other, and she continues to date Jerry Lee. And goes home to visit her parents in Belltown, which is a stand-in for the New Hampshire town Marshall grew up in (Kingston) and has appeared in all the other Marshall VNRNs I’ve read. But Philip finds out about Jerry and writes that she’s done him wrong by not letting him know there was someone else, and he’s through!

Two pages later Philip is wheeled into the infirmary, delirious from an infection in his leg, and she offers to special him for 24 hours a day until he is out of danger. So now they can clasp fervent hands and kiss goodnight, and she tells Philip she will stop seeing Jerry. But Jerry has other plans: When Rosemary and Philip secretly meet for a date in Boston, who should spot them strolling the North End but that rascal Jerry? He soon has a chat with Rosemary in which he tells her that it would be such a shame if anyone heard that the two were fraternizing, because it would be terrible for Philip’s career—he’s angling to go to Officer Training School. Unless she continues to date Jerry and stops seeing Philip, he tells her, he will ensure Philip is not accepted into officer training. She decides she will not communicate with Philip any longer—but he stops writing to her, and now she’s hurt that he’s apparently dumped her without a word, and never mind that’s what she was planning to do to him! Her pride keeps her from writing to him, and then she gets a letter from his mother saying that she’s told Philip she will disinherit him if he marries her. She doesn’t want to believe that this is why he is not writing, but can’t quite not believe it. In the meantime she goes out on very chilly dates with Jerry. There are a few twists to the story after this, and another lovely visit to Belltown to visit her father, who immediately names the problem and the obvious solution. Thanks, Dad!

This is another sweet, gentle book from Marshall. I always enjoy visiting Belltown in them, which is painted as an idyllic small town, and Rosemary’s father is a particularly endearing character. There are a few of Rosemary’s friends who are also excellently drawn as well. Ordinarily I might find all the patriotism a little thick, but in this era when our country’s democracy seems to be paper thin, I appreciated Rosemary’s fervent dedication to protecting it. In the end, if I can’t say this is Marshall’s best book, it is certainly one worth reading.

Nurse Craig

By Marcia Ford
(pseud. Ruby L. Radford), ©1953
Also published as Dixie Nurse

When Nancy Craig set her heart on becoming a nurse, she had no idea of the petty intrigues that surround a large hospital, nor did she realize that a pretty young nurse is often at the mercy of a tyrannical and frustrated supervisor. Unjustly fired from the hospital, Nancy returned to her hometown, leaving behind all her dreams—and the man she loved. But a new life opened up for Nancy when she became the private nurse to a wealthy elderly woman who, because of her generosity, enabled Nancy to build a children’s hospital and to make her biggest dream come true.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“You could make a dying man get well with that smile.” 

“Nancy’s heart always ached for a man at a time like this. There was so little that they could do to help, and their emotions were generally so inhibited by a fear of seeming weak that she knew they must suffer even more than a woman.”

REVIEW:
Nancy Craig wants to be a pediatrics nurse, but no positions ever seem to open up. She spent her first year after graduating doing private duty nursing, then accepted a job at Downer Hospital, where she did her training, in the hope of improving her chances if a pediatrics job becomes available. Unfortunately, there she must suffer at the bony hands of Miss Phillips, the bitter spinster head nurse whose unrequited love for Dr. Barrow has transformed her into a crabapple. She especially hates Nancy because Dr. Barrow has taken an avuncular interest in Nancy’s career for years, and when a patient of Nancy’s vomits one morning, Miss Phillips whisks the vomitus off to the lab for analysis (it was not the salmon mousse)—and when the results are in, she declares that Nancy has given the patient the wrong medicine and fires her on the spot!

Nancy believes that she did not make a mistake—which means that Dr. Barrow, who had changed the patient’s medication order that morning—must have goofed his orders, but that “might ruin his reputation as a physician if it became known,” because no doctor has ever made a mistake before. Curiously, Nancy decides that rather than clear her name, or even have a conversation with Dr. Barrow to alert him to his possible error—which, left unaddressed, will only be repeated—she will take the blame for him, and decides to pack her bags and head back to her home town.

That means she is leaving Dr. Terry Fenton, the hard-working but dirt-poor pediatrician she has fallen for. He is one of those dopes who decides, “I can’t even look at a girl, or think of having a home of my own till I’m free of debt.” At least Nancy has the gumption to snap, “No girl would be worth having if she wasn’t willing to take you as you are!” and when he answers that his wife shouldn’t have to work, she bats that away with equal aplomb: “Oh, be your age, Terry! Suppose the girl doesn’t want to give up her career any more than you do? All women want to work and be independent these days.” You do have to admire Nurse Nancy Craig.

Except that she also has some annoying tendencies, such as to be a bit, well, uptight. When Terry comes to dinner at Nancy’s house, she—and her entire family, it must be confessed—is horrified when the maid brings a dishpan to the dinner table to clear the dishes. She also has a tendency to get very snappish at poor Terry at the least provocation, such as when he asks about other young men in her orbit—which she should, of course, take as driven by jealousy and seek to reassure the poor boy, but instead, “she was seething too much inside to trust herself to speak.”

Not long after she’s home, her father drops of a heart attack, and then she and the doctor conspire to finish him off by not allowing him to even sit up in bed for a month—even playing with his stamp collection is deemed too strenuous, and if the man doesn’t throw a major pulmonary embolism, it won’t be her fault. So she stays on for weeks, spoon-feeding Dad and reading him the newspaper. Nursing is hard work! But finally Dr. Barrow steps in to offer her a job nursing wealthy Mrs. Marshall (the poor dear has no first name) back in Summerton, so she can go home to her apartment—and Dr. Terry. There she gives vitamin B-12 shots and makes the woman take naps twice a day. And she dates Mrs. Marshall’s grandson Bert, who is a nice young man but something of an adventurer, and so has no appeal to Nancy—but he’s rich and handsome, and soon insecure Dr. Terry is convinced that Nancy is going to marry Bert, or Dr. Barrow. Nancy, of course, doesn’t help the man at all when he voices his concerns, snapping, “Why should I miss a good dinner or a show, to sit home waiting for the telephone to ring?” before gathering her “seething emotions” around her like a fox fur stole and flouncing out.

It’s not hard to figure out how the book is going to end—even if it weren’t telegraphed on the back cover blurb—and though that’s not a fatal flaw, the final scene lands pretty flat. Nancy herself is an admirable character, but the situations in the book often seem so flimsily contrived, with over-the-top reactions to a mild situation (such as Nancy’s horror that her sister Ellen wrote to Dr. Terry! The slut!). The story unrolls with few details of interest outside of the litigious way they practice medicine (Nancy saves a woman from strychnine poisoning by giving her morphine), and there’s just not much here to keep one’s interest. You could do worse, but if that’s not a great reason to read this book, I don’t have much else to offer you.

House of Hate

By Dorothy Fletcher, ©1967 

The stately mansion of the Thibaults held more than art and music. More than beautiful people … it held vicious undercurrents of fear and frustration. When Nurse Norma Theale came there to live, she was the catalyst. Around her gathered the storm, to burst in shattering fury. Because she was there, someone had to die. Would it be Norma herself Whose side was she on? Who was the enemy? Only Norma could find out—if she could survive the storm!

GRADE: A-

REVIEW:
This book is wicked smart (I can say that because I grew up in New Hampshire using that expression before it started appearing in ad campaigns). When you pick it up, I hope your French is not too rusty, or that you have a good translation app at the ready, though you’ll have to go farther afield to learn that crotte de bique means nanny-goat droppings. You might also need Wikipedia as well, to research Iras (the second lady in waiting in the Shakespeare play Antony and Cleopatra), Rouault (an Expressionist French painter), and Sidney Carton (the hero of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens). (If you understand the reference to Berenson’s theory of intuitional knowledge, let me know, because I could never figure it out.) But if this book was more intelligent than me, it is certainly not too dense to make for a lovely, enjoyable read. 

Norma Theale is a 26-year-old nurse who begins our story by attending a concert at Lincoln Center to hear the Violin Concerto in D by Tchaikovsky played by violin virtuoso and heartthrob Nicholas Thibault. She’s about to interview for a job caring for his mother, Victoire Thibault, who is at death’s door at 68 from some unspecified illness that sporadically gives her fits of stupor. She’s drawn to the job because she is a true music aficionado who can identify and chat very knowledgeably about composers and artists, and would be living “under the same roof as the dark god, the legendary enfant terrible of the musical world. The celebrated, gifted artist, the withdrawn, controversial personality who fascinated music lovers and press with his disinclination to conform to type.” Furthermore, she’s completely fluent in French, which the immigrant family lapses into now and again; how an impoverished orphan came by all this education is never explained.

Norma arrives at the mansion on Fifth Avenue somewhere north of the Met, and the property is lovingly and meticulously described, “a darkly glowing jewel,” so it doesn’t exactly fit with the “House of Hate” title. The other problem with the title is that the people who live there are nice—matriarch Victoire, Victoire’s her 17-year-old niece Simone, her daughter Michelle, and Michelle’s husband Henri, are all very kind to Norma. Only Nicholas is cold and aloof, possibly because the rest of the family does tend to pick on him a lot. It’s revealed that he was an unwanted child, possibly the result of a husband-on-wife rape; Madame, in one of her delirious spells, thinks she’s pregnant with Nicholas and shouts, “I will not have the baby. When I bore him Michelle I loved him. I cannot bring his child into the world now. Conceived in hate, nourished in bitterness and loathing—” And though Nicholas is a world-renowned concert violinist, his family does not appreciate his career; they think that “what they did, the family considered work; what Nicholas did was simply fritter away his time on the violin, giving a concert now and then but hardly earning his keep.” Curiously, despite his fame, he has no money at all, and is dependent upon a stingy allowance from his wealthy but tight-fisted mother. The constant barbs from the family, the lack of love, and his inability to escape have made him a quiet, angry man, “frozen with anger and resentment,” Norma thinks, deciding, “A person could be pushed too far.”

But when Norma demonstrates her knowledge and interest in Nicholas’s music, correcting him that it wasn’t Busoni he was playing when she first entered the house but Mendelssohn, he takes an interest in her. He accompanies her on her daily walks, and they window shop and hunt for baklava. Their relationship warms realistically, particularly during a sweet afternoon in which she, Simone, and Nicholas play music together. But then two paintings go missing from the family’s art gallery, and Nicholas is accused of stealing them. Next Norma sees someone bending over Madame in her bed in the middle of the night, and Norma becomes convinced that Nicholas is trying to kill his mother. The climax comes on the opening night of a show at the gallery, when Norma is drugged and another murder attempt is made—during a lightning storm, of course!

The problem with these Gothic murder mystery nurse romances (and there does seem to be such a genre; see Matravers Hall, Nurse Missing,  Nurse at Mystery Villa, Nurse Incognito, Nurse Jean’s Strange Case, Nurse on Nightmare Island) is that they usually stink (I’ve given out two C’s and two D’s among the six). Happily, here we have a quiet gem. The book is sprinkled with a gentle humor that does not translate well for the Best Quotes section, and if only slightly moody and mysterious, the unfolding of Norma’s feelings is prettily described. Its only real flaw is that the author seems torn between painting a luxurious, elegant building and an eerie backdrop for her tale of mystery and love, making discussions of the house as “a beautiful horror,” “a prison, a cauldron of smoldering passions” with “gloom in the wide corridor” completely unconvincing. But ultimately, this is easily the best of this particular sub-sub-sub genre, another lovely offering from the masterful writer Dorothy Fletcher, who, when she is on, is easily one of the best.

Nurse Incognito

By Fay Chandos

(pseud. Irene Mossop Swatridge), ©1964 

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

When a love affair between a nurse and a doctor goes wrong, the unhappiness of the situation is naturally increased if they have to go on working in the same hospital. That was why Caroline was glad to get away from St. Keverne’s … and Brandon … to a temporary job in the lovely Bahamas. It was disconcerting, though, for her to find herself in the middle of a family feud. Her first loyalty was to the old lady who employed her, but she couldn’t help liking and trusting Roland Dayler and sympathizing with his refusal to give up his children; couldn’t help, either, liking (though she didn’t trust) that “wicked” younger brother whose bad reputation was enough to make any woman look twice at him.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Men are children at heart. Given the opportunity, they all grab at the fairy on the Christmas tree. It’s a wise woman’s job to lead her man firmly in the other direction, not to let him stand under the tree, gawking up at the glitter.” 

“Sparks aren’t a fire, but they can start one.”

“At my age, one rarely cares for advice, however sound.”

“Wouldn’t you like to try your hand at civilizing me?”

“‘Tis better to have loved and lost’ than to be obliged to realize that one has been played for a sucker.”

REVIEW:
Poor Nurse Caroline Whytham has pinned all her hopes on Dr. Brandon Hessare, who has been taking her out for years, and now that she is about to graduate from nursing school, they are going to announce their engagement! Unfortunately, “if she had to look out for herself, she always would be among those stranded at the bus stop. She lacked the assurance and initiative to fight her way on board.” So she misses the first car to the graduation party, which is held at the family mansion of her best friend, Clover Pontock-Pikey, and when she does arrive—could she have been more than 30 minutes behind Clover?—she discovers that Brandon and Clover have, in that narrow window, fallen in love and become engaged. 

The silver lining to her sudden freedom is that Clover’s grandmother decides to take her to the Bahamas with her, ostensibly to serve as her nurse—the battle axe has a heart condition—but also to help Mrs. P-P wrest her great-grandchildren, six-year-old twins Viola and Sebastian, away from their father, Roland Dayler, who owns a large estate. It’s kind of staggering that we’re asked to believe that the claims of a great-grandmother outweigh those of a father, even if he must be a man, but here we are, and we must make the best of it. Roland had been married to Mrs. P-P’s granddaughter Pearl, a beautiful but shallow flirt who had lost interest in her husband almost immediately after marrying him, but who had died in a water-skiing accident—while pregnant, no less, losing the baby as well. An odd detail we’re not quite sure what to do with, but there it is. Clearly the couple weren’t as estranged as all that.

Upon their arrival, sinister things begin to happen! The electricity in both Caroline and Mrs. P-P’s rooms fails, and the candles that are always stocked in the bedrooms vanish! Worse than that, someone lets a kitten loose in Mrs. P-P’s bedroom! Attention turns to the children’s nanny, Annette: “She wants to drive me away from this house. Anyone can see that,” Mrs. P-P concludes after her narrow escape from death. Though there are other possible suspects, including Roland’s brother Ruy (how do you pronounce that?), who with Annette is “allied against me,” Caroline concludes, not wanting to miss getting in on the paranoia.

Further nefarious adventures ensue: Mrs. P-P is drugged into a stupor by the children, who are obeying the orders of a mockingbird outside their window, who sounds like Annette. Caroline falls hard and fast for Roland: At their first meeting, “she was seized by an extraordinary sense of exultation—as though this was the moment she had been waiting for, half her life.” The rub is that she very much resembles Pearl—which is just creepy, though it’s not the first time we’ve encountered this trope. And Ruy, who has been in love with Annette for seven years, she herself chasing Roland, decides to complete the circle by kissing Caroline, who astonishingly decides to go for it without giving a single thought to Roland. “She couldn’t go on mourning over Brandon. That was futile and humiliating. If Ruy was trying to flirt with her, why not let him?” Because, um, Roland?

Here the book becomes part Gothic novel, part mystery, and almost not a nurse novel—as despite the fact that Mrs. P-P seems to be sinking further into a coma, Caroline cannot reveal she’s a nurse, and so leaves Ruy’s secretary Jessamy to babysit the apparently dying woman, and even when the two children also ingest the same poison and the remaining conscious adults “work on” the children all night to bring them around—Caroline, curiously, taking the less dangerously ill child—her occupation remains a secret until the last page.

It’s an odd book, with machinations and suspicions abounding, and the poisoning/attempted murder of four different people, the guilty party still roaming free on the last page, and no discussion of their being taken into custody. Author Irene Swatridge continues her affinity for alliterative names, but also unfortunately displays a tendency toward paragraphs made up entirely of questions: “Had Pearl found him a domestic tyrant? Was that why she had preferred the amenities and social life of Nassau to her home here? Or had she been bored by Roland’s pre-occupation with the estate and its crops? Had she been weighed down by him? Take away his good looks and his old-world courtesy, and what was left? Mightn’t he be singularly heavy and humorless as a husband?” Also I do wish Caroline were less of a wimp. “Roland seeks subconsciously for a gentle, loving wife who will be his complement, and content to be ruled by him. You are such a one, I think,” she is told—and even worse, she answers, “Thank you.” Not surprisingly, her nursing career seems likely as over as the book is on the last page. Still, this book is curiously compelling, as Swatridge’s books have proved to be so far (see Nurse Willow’s Ward and Jubilee Hospital). Also, there are beautiful ball gowns! And a fabulous, snidely witty grande dame in Mrs. P-P! So if it’s not Swatridge’s best, she’s still not done badly by us, her readers, at all. 

The Strange Quest of Nurse Anne

By Mary Burchell
(pseud. Ida Cook), ©1964
Cover illustration by Paul Anna Soik 

To Anne Weston, brought up in an orphanage, the sudden discovery of her American cousins was as astounding as it was wonderful, and when they invited her to stay with them in their Maryland home her cup of happiness was full. But as her visit went on, Anne found herself becoming filled with suspicion—and unease…

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Rumor flourishes more luxuriantly in hospital ground than in any other known soil.”

“Surgeons are the biggest menace in creation to susceptible girls.”

“Only dull dogs are universally loved.”

“It has changed a good deal, New York, in the years I’ve known it, and certainly not always for the better. But there’s something about it, there’s something about it. There’s champagne in the air and adventure just around the corner.”

“If anything is obscure or dreary it’s sure of excellent reviews.”

“There’s no great virtue in refraining from doing something that’s no temptation.”

REVIEW:
What could have been a truly superlative book is slightly dampened by the old trope of a VNRN heroine who is dumber than a beetle, as my grandmother would have said. Time and time again, faced with the obvious, Anne Weston, who had the brains to get through nursing school and emerge a very talented nurse, is unable to recognize it. The interesting thing here is that her character in some ways makes this stupidity feasible: Raised in an orphanage without any knowledge about her parents, Anne has had no support or family to fall back on, and has made her own way in the world, which was essentially to take a path straight from the orphanage to the hospital nursing school, where she has lived for the past three years—from one sheltered environment to another, with little exposure to the world. The unfortunate part is that author Mary Burchell has not been able to prevent us from feeling anything other than contempt for Anne’s stupidity. Though her talent as a writer is clearly evident, I wish Ms. Burchell had tried a little harder to sell us on Anne’s blind spots and make us believe her decisions a little better.

As the book opens, Anne is about to bid farewell forever to the hospital and surgeon Philip Coram, on whom she’s had a slight crush, but of course, “he could hardly have been more impersonal and was sometimes cruelly critical.” But on her way out the door, he stops her and tells her she’s one of the best nurses he’s known, asks her what her plans are—and, curiously, what her name is—and when she says she’s going into private nursing, he says he’ll ask for her for his patients.

He calls her for the job of wrestling wealthy and self-centered widowed dowager Mrs. van Elten across the ocean to New York, and it’s worth reading this book just to meet Mrs. van Elten. She’s a salty, outspoken, smart, hilarious, manipulative, and kindly grande dame, and she is Fabulous! Then, just as she’s to leave for the trip, Anne receives a letter from a long-lost cousin, Paula Weston, who has somehow tracked her down, following up the efforts of Anne’s father Donald, who had moved to Australia and died a year ago without ever locating Anne. Paula and her brother Glen live in Maryland and are eager to meet their new cousin, who now will be not as far from them when she finishes her job with Mrs. van Elten. But Anne’s best friend Karen, who “had what she called hunches,” is uneasy about the whole thing, and Anne herself catches a “deep and ominous chill” as the boat pulls out of the Southampton harbor en route for the New World. She’s warmed to the core a few minutes later, though, when she learns that Dr. Coram is sailing on the same boat, bound for medical conferences in New York!

Needless to say, Mrs. van Elton instantly divines Anne’s interest in Dr. Coram, and starts to work on the pair. “I find people intensely interesting,” she tells Anne. “My daughter says I can’t mind my own business about them. But I like to advise and praise and criticize. Particularly to criticize.” Though Mrs. van Elton warns Anne that Dr. Coram is engaged, she still schools Anne on what color dress to wear and insists that Anne stay at the dances after she herself has turned in, the better to dance with the doctor. Anne’s relationship with Dr. Coram grows organically, and soon they’re on the Lido Deck under the stars, but Anne remembers the fiancée at home and becomes chilly just when things start to heat up. After they land in New York, Dr. Coram goes way beyond the call of duty to drive Anne the five hours from New York to her cousins’ house, which is a decaying former country estate; as it turns out, the cousins’ father had gambled away most of the family fortune and they are barely able to keep the place.

Cousin Glen is a smarmy sort of fellow, and his “almost beautiful smile never touched his handsome eyes, which remained hard and curiously inscrutable.” He’s instantly all over Anne, insisting that she marry him, and tells her that Dr. Coram, who had grown up in the area, had “played fast and loose with one or two girls in Washington, it seems, and he got quite a bad name in a set where it takes really something to make people talk.” This runs completely counter to everything Anne knows about Dr. Coram, but she starts to feel less about him, the dope, when it’s completely clear what’s Glen is really up to. There are many other obvious warnings about the cousins’ ulterior motives: A letter written by Anne’s father has been “accidentally” destroyed, and—curse the postal system!—so has another letter sent to her in care of her cousins from a Sydney attorney who, Karen says, is looking for Anne to give her good news about her father’s estate. Then Anne meets the old, slightly senile man who had been a groom on the estate for 50 years, who tells her that her father was rich and that the cousins are trying to get her money. Does the penny drop? No!

When Dr. Coram arrives to bring her back to New York two days later, Anne is completely rude to him, all but slamming the door in his face, and thanks for the ride, bub. The author suggests that Anne is so enthralled with the idea of having a family at last—“it gives one a sort of confidence and security to find a place and a family where one belongs,” she tells Dr. Coram—and Anne genuinely likes Paula, who deserves it, and Glen, who does not—which sets her up to believe what is an obvious ploy to get Dr. Coram out of the picture. And then she’s deeply flattered to be the object of affection for the first time in her life: “It was so utterly wonderful to feel that someone—perhaps, above all, her big, handsome warm-hearted cousin—thought her all-important.” So it is possible, given Anne’s background, that she could be this stupid—but it’s not well-sold to the readers, who can’t help wanting to give Anne a hard shake.

But then Mrs. van Elten drops a bomb—the fiancée is just a myth she’d created to keep Anne from running after Dr. Coram, thinking that “if he were made to do the running, you were just the right girl for him,” as she explains. Fortunately, Anne has the strength of character to call up the abused doctor and apologize profusely, and the pair are restored to friendly terms. But then Mrs. van Elten goes to Florida, freeing Anne to go back to her cousins’ house, and there our suspicions of them pile up—until finally even Anne can’t deny that something terrible is afoot, and when she sneaks out of the house to visit the old retired groom again, he suggests that the cousins might kill her for the money! Finally coming to her senses, she puts on a happy face, makes a frantic call to Dr. Coram to come get her tomorrow, and goes to her bedroom to lock herself in, but the key to her bedroom door has been taken! She stuffs her money in her dress, jumps out the bathroom window, and runs away—but Glen is coming after her in the car! Oh, no!! What will happen next?!?

Overall, this is a lovely book, with a truly outstanding character in Mrs. van Elten (she reminded me of Lady Travitt in Nurse Stacey Comes Aboard, though that book does not come close to this one) and a relationship between the lovers that grows honestly. Its biggest flaw is the fact that Anne is such a dunce about people, and the tragedy is that I think that an author who has given us a book this good could, with a bit more effort, have made Anne’s gullibility more understandable, so we might have wanted to smack Anne upside the head fewer than the two dozen times I did—especially at the end, when she makes a bizarre decision about the money she’s inherited. The title and the cover illustration are both more than a little perplexing, but we can’t pin those sins on Ida Cook, here writing as Mary Burchell, who likely had nothing to do with either. But overlook the strange envelope, and you will enjoy what you find inside it, if your evil cousins don’t destroy it first.

Redheaded Nurse

Bennie C. Hall, ©1960
Cover illustration by Gilbert Riswold

Jane Hamilton stood on the top deck of the cruise ship Madrigal, watching the twinkling lights that marked the Mediterranean shoreline. It was midnight, and the sound of laughter and music floated up from the Carnival Room on the deck below. She had known so few carefree hours in her young life, and now she longed to become a part of the gaiety surrounding her—but as ship’s nurse, she was here to work, not to enjoy herself. It would be so easy, she thought, to set conscience aside and forget her job—to surrender completely to a world where anything might happen…

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“They’ll dance, drink and make merry till dawn—and tomorrow they’ll die.”

“Nurses are for healing, not feeling.”

“He removed her cape from her shoulders and folded it as carefully as if it were—well, at least squirrel.”

“Never jump to conclusions, Janie, though I’ll admit most of us redheads do. Remember—it’s impossible to look at a cat and tell when and how far it’s going to jump. It’s the same way with people. You can’t assign characters to human beings and expect them to stay put. They’ll fool you every time.”

“The best sedative was an open mind and a clear conscience.”

“Aside from an occasional headache or an upset stomach, the passengers had remained disgracefully well.”

“It was like a man, she reflected, to be excused for an infraction of the rules, whereas she, a woman, had to wear her remorse like a heavy blanket.”

“Peter was a very studious person and innocent of the implications of a gift from the Island of Lesbos.”

“I thought I’d inherited a temperamental redhead who would know more about catching a man than about curing whatever ailed him.”

REVIEW:
At one point, after being sunk by Cruise Ship Nurse and Sea Nurse, I threatened to toss all my cruise ship VNRNs right into the brink if I got one more dud. Redheaded Nurse doesn’t exactly make up for those two duds, but it will stay dry for the time being.

Jane Hamilton has been selected from all the nurses at her Boston charity hospital to fill the position of head nurse aboard the cruise ship Madrigal. The doctor on board, Dr. Jerry Clayton, is usually mean to her. It’s her “copper curls,” you see, that push Dr. Clayton over the edge, and he asks her to pull her cap down over her ears to hide them when she’s on duty. “You’re too young. And too beautiful,” explains Schuyler Dawson, a young man on the ship. “Chances are he wanted someone more mature, less decorative.” Jane is drawn to young Sky, though early on she had decided he must be a paid companion to one of the older passengers, Mrs. Carter-Peterson. “She knew all about those unscrupulous characters known as ‘gigolos,’ but she had never expected to meet one face to face.” Then Mrs. C-P tells Jane that Sky has stolen a diamond locket from her, and Jane is convinced that Sky is a “slick fellow” whom she should avoid. So the next day, when he plays up to her, she naturally agrees to go dancing with him that night and ashore with him in Alexandria, Egypt, the next day.

They have a great time, dancing as one—but then suddenly Jane realizes that all the other ship’s passengers have left the building. They have to fly across town in a pokey old cab while the ship’s horn is sounding insistently in the background, sprinting down the dock and losing Jane’s hat to reach the gangplank in time while all the passengers watch in amusement. This incident leaves Jane totally mortified beyond reason, and she determines never to go ashore again, until the captain scolds her, “It’s gotten so now your hair shirt is showing—and it’s not a bit becoming with those copper curls.” So all is right again in Jane’s simple little world.

In the meantime, Mrs. C-P has decided to throw a party for all the children at some port of call and give them all dolls, because the poor waifs don’t have any. On an expedition into a part of Alexandria that the captain had expressly forbidden passengers to enter, she is exposed to a smallpox epidemic. While helping the dowager sew dresses for the nude dolls, Jane notices a rash on the back of the older woman’s neck … and so the two ladies are quarantined for a week, until it is determined that it’s some other disease and not smallpox that the great lady has contracted. As a reward for her selfless duty, Jane is allowed to pick out one bracelet from Mrs. C-P’s collection, and inadvertently chooses the most expensive one there—the stone is so huge, it couldn’t possibly be anything other than costume jewelry. She wears it to another dance on the ship, where Sky sets her straight about its real value—and then the bauble disappears that night after he smooches her to such effect that “she could only feel as if she did not exist as a person but only as a part of Sky.” Jane begins castigating herself that “she had fallen in love with a playboy and a card shark. … He goes on one cruise after another in order to play poker with the wealthy passengers and fleece them.”

I am sure that I don’t have to tell you that in the end all this misunderstanding is cleared away, and Jane is proved once again to be a silly little girl. Some older VNRNs have this gentle feeling about them, like chiffon floating on air. Redheaded Nurse is one such book, with a soft touch both in the writing, characters, and situations they are put through. Jane’s mortifications and crises are really small molehills, and we can pass through them without a wrinkled brow. In the end, the book is so light that it doesn’t really amount to much, even if it does have a noticeable flavor of camp to liven things up a bit. But it’s enough to make me want to attempt another VNRN cruise.