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.

A Nurse Involved

By Peggy O’More, ©1968 

Also published as Stand By Nurse

The staff of City Core Hospital was faced daily with the problem of saving the lives of would-be suicides and of trying again and again. Nurse Iva Loring had an inner drive that had taken her through school and training at top speed. She gave too much, too rapidly, to her work and was on the verge of a nervous collapse when she took time off to regain her perspective on life. Now she was easing herself back into work as a stand-by nurse. Her special empathy for the depressed and discouraged made her an ideal nurse for the suicide detail. But there was a question of whether or not she was too understanding and too involved to be effective. Iva, herself, had to examine her values and choose between the career to which she was dedicated and marriage to the devoted young hospital pharmacist who had stood by her without making any demands on her emotions. Could Iva make that choice?

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“It is easier to forgive a thousand others than one’s own self.” 

REVIEW:
The silver lining of the dark cloud that is this particular Peggy O’More Blocklinger book—an author who is easily one of the worst—is that it’s the last of her books on my shelves that I hadn’t read. There may be more out there in the world, but I am not planning on looking for them any time soon. 

In this book we have Nurse Iva Luanne Loring, who is given a middle name probably so that the author can engage in her penchant of making everyone’s names alliterate—Woodson Wortman, Henry Hanson, Mark Mansfield and at least four more populate these pages. Iva works at City Core Hospital in California, a medical center that seems to treat only suicide victims—we meet at least six—as well as victims of major car crashes and brutal assaults, including what may be a first in my VNRN reading, a rape (the victim is advised to change her name, join a mission service and move overseas). Iva herself is recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork, requiring that she spend six weeks on the beach—can I get one of those?—so she’s only supposed to be working part-time, though she does seem to work most days anyway. Her own psychological frailty makes her particularly hip to pop psychology and management of the crazier patients, as in typical clunky Bowman phrasing, “trying to adapt emotional feet to shoes of a contour different from those feet.”

Iva’s main problem is that she is engaged to Woody Wortman, a “druggist” at the hospital, who she hardly ever sees and never thinks of with any fondness or even, it must be confessed, at all. “With her, the goal was marriage to Woody, creating a home for him,” she believes, stating,  “Where home is the principal consideration I must forget myself and think of Woody, think of a place for him to come home to,” and doesn’t that sound like a fun life? Woody conveniently shakes her up a bit when he announces that he has purchased a drug store some distance away and plans to install his mother and aunt in one of the apartments on the second floor—a plan that the anal-retentive Woody had not mentioned until it was done. At least Iva has the sense to realize that this is not good: “He must have studied and planned this move for a long time. He would have scanned its possibilities from every angle. Yet not one word had he breathed to her!”

So while Woody is now miles away building up his new business, Iva calls a hiatus to their engagement. Fortunately she has Dr. Ben Dorsey to act as her chauffeur and luncheon companion—though she certainly does not hint at any feelings toward the man any more than she had toward Woody, and Ben himself is one of those who “has an allergy to nurses. Meaning he’s not married, and if and when has no idea of succumbing to the wiles of a white cap.” So it is shocking in a number of ways when he slips a ring on her finger as they are treating yet another suicide attempt in the Emergency Department, the romantic fool!

Here, as in most Peggy O’More Blocklinger books, we are regularly lectured with her patented psychobabble, as in, “If, as some scientists were insisting, thought was a volatile force, what a variety of poisons could be filling the air.” Yet Iva’s own psychological problems—her relentless drive to overwork—are solved on a single introspective afternoon drive in the country, and a page later she has returned whole, with the plan to go back to school to get a PhD in psychiatry. We also get the author’s tendency to use single words as sentences meant to convey pages of meaning, usually indecipherable to us—“‘Cat,’ murmured Iva, and Woodson looked at her, shocked.” Blocklinger’s prose is stilted and clunky, as in, “Food accepted and ingested,” and, “Iva believed bed was indicated.” There’s none of the hilarious stupidity as one would find with Arlene Fitzgerald’s best; this book is just plain stupid—another Peggy O’More Blocklinger novel to avoid. And please, don’t send me any more!

Million Dollar Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1966
Cover illustration by Darrell Greene 

When pretty Dorothy Malloy left Buttrick Hospital to become wealthy Andrew Bossart’s private nurse, her orderly world changed overnight. Young and handsome, Andrew Bossart was recovering from an accidental gunshot wound. His reputation as a dangerous ladies’ man made some people wonder if the shot had been an accident after all … Despite Dorothy’s determination to remain uninvolved, she was too attractive a girl to escape Bossart’s attention—and too good a nurse to ignore the needs of her patient. Before long she found herself entangled in an unexpected mystery, a strange romantic triangle—and a scandal that would rock the city …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“There’s more to conversation than attractive legs.” 

“Even a hospital should be hospitable.”

“Like all career girls, you get flustered when someone behaves like you’re human.”

“I don’t think it helps a man’s innards when a bullet is shot into them.”

“There are proper and improper ways to go about achieving a desired object. You learn that quickly in surgery. You don’t incise down from the shoulder to remove an appendix. Similarly, you don’t club someone in order to reason with him.”

“In our special ways we’re all ill.”

REVIEW:
Author William Neubauer, here writing as Rebecca Marsh, is one of my favorites. His plots are usually more intricate, and his heroines are smart, hard-working, sassy gals who put up with little nonsense. The problems with his books are that the romance part of the book is usually just crammed in around the margins, barely visible; the plots can sometimes get overly confusing; and the boyfriend is sometimes not especially desirable. Here he has done pretty well, as the plot is mostly navigable, but he did stick us with a middling man. At least we scored an amazing cover illustration.

Dorothy Malloy is a surgical nurse at Neubauer’s classic Buttrick Hospital—this noble, California coast–institution has hosted at least three other of his VNRNs (TV Nurse, Pam Green Rehabilitation Nurse, and Recovery Room Nurse) and some peripheral characters in this story (Dr Lee Vaughan, with whom Dorothy lunches one day, for example, is the alleged hero of TV Nurse) are stars in other books, which is a fun bonus for the die-hard Neubauer fan. She is an ambitious lass, hoping to be promoted to assistant chief—and her ambition is viewed with some skepticism around the hospital, because why would a woman want to be promoted?

Anyway, she’s called to special Andrew Mark Bossart, a devilishly handsome playboy who has gotten himself mixed up with Lisa Locatelli, a 17-year-old student nurse at Buttrick, as well as Catherine Cowell, the owner of a large corporation in town. The young gal swears Andy proposed to her, but then dumped her for the wealthy Catherine, so she calls Catherine to give her the down-low about Andy’s sneaky dealings, and then tries to kill herself—but is saved due to fast action on the part of her nursing school roommate. Catherine calls Andy over to her beach house—and the next we see him, he’s on the OR table with a bullet in his gut, and Dorothy is part of the team commissioned to dig it out and repair the damage.

She’s then transferred to the recovery ward unit (unfortunately we didn’t cross paths with Jane Kemp while we were there) to special Andy—but this puts her out of the running for a promotion, because “in the surgical suite she had status, even a type of seniority. Logically, the longer she remained there, the better her chances would be to make the jump to rank as a junior executive. But if she were popped into a recovery-room suite, she’d be the low girl in an area where promotions were few and far between.” The transfer is happening, we learn, because the chief of the surgical unit, Miss Sipsie, is dating Joe Elyot, an orthopedic tech, who is also seeing Dorothy, whom he might possibly prefer.

The head of the recovery room, Clara Dendrock, likewise recommends that Dorothy should be transferred to another department. Clara, it turns out, is upset that Dorothy didn’t sign a petition like all the other nurses opposing the expulsion of Lisa Locatelli, who has been deemed too unstable to go on with a nursing career. Dorothy has been one of Lisa’s chief mentors, so her “betrayal” of Lisa doesn’t sit well with the other nurses, but Dorothy is an astute player, and has already discussed her opinion that Lisa should be allowed to continue with Mrs. Dolezal, the superintendent of nurses, and feels that signing the petition might undercut her chances for promotion and won’t accomplish Lisa’s reinstatement.

Caring for Andy Bossart, Dorothy has a front-row seat to the drama. Though there is no proof that Catherine shot Andy—the gun has not been recovered, without which she apparently cannot be arrested—Andy, who’d been working a high-paying job ($25,000 a year!!!) at Catherine’s company is suing Catherine for a million dollars for loss of his career and, oh yeah, that hole in his gut. When he’s finally out of the hospital, he invites Dorothy to dinner to thank her for her hard work—but has also invited Catherine and the local newspaper columnist, Millicent Haight, to the party, and Catherine beans Dorothy on the head, giving her a black eye. This injury—plus her current political situation at the hospital—leads Mrs. Dolezal to give Dorothy two weeks off to recover, and Catherine, out of gratitude that Dorothy has not pressed charges, offers Catherine use of her beach cottage—the house where Andy was shot—to recover.

There she has lovely meals and walks on the grounds, sails on Catherine’s yacht, and pleasant conversations with Catherine’s housekeeper, who is another of the locals deeply devoted to Catherine—like Dorothy’s boyfriend, Joe Elyot, who was rescued from a life in the slums when Catherine, a high school classmate, offered to pay for his schooling to fit him for the job he currently holds.

Eventually all the threads are neatly tied up—the story of what happened to the gun, the alibi that is going to get Catherine off the hook for the shooting, Lisa’s reinstatement at the hospital, and Dorothy’s career—in a manner that is mostly understandable. We even wrap up Dorothy’s love life when she announces out of the blue—many Neubauer women have this annoying habit—that she is going to marry Joe. While we are certainly happy for almost everyone, and for Dorothy’s clever playing of her career and hospital politics, I wasn’t too please to see her end up with Joe.

Joe is clearly very devoted to Catherine out of gratitude for her help—to the extent that he helps fabricate her alibi and plant false evidence, basically abetting a felony assault—but he starts out the book as something of a cad, telling Dorothy on a date that he’d kissed Catherine once and dates other women, Miss Sipsie in particular. This hurts Dorothy’s feelings, so “he condescended to lean forward quickly and give her left cheek a greasy peck. As she drew back, flushing, he laughed.” It’s so amusing to be a jerk! Later he tells Dorothy that he’s chatted with several nurses who are upset with her about the petition business and that he’d defended her “because I like you,” but then complains that feeling like he wants to defend her can push him into marriage, and he doesn’t want to get married—and somehow Dorothy takes this for a compliment, but then gets mad when he tries to persuade her to sign the petition instead of supporting her decision. Next time we see him, he’s hanging out at the beach house with Dorothy and sighing that he should have tried to marry Catherine. Two pages after that, she decides to marry him while he’s not even present. So you see we don’t have a lot to admire in him.

Another odd thing about the book is that both Catherine and Andy end up getting inpatient psychiatric care—but Lisa, the would-be suicide who clearly needs it way more than anyone, does not. Instead, everyone refers to her suicide attempt as a “goof” that she shouldn’t be punished for. Overall, though, as I have said, this is a brisk, interesting, enjoyable book with an excellent heroine to admire. If William Neubauer here has not given us his best work, it's still better than most VNRNs out there, and easily worth an afternoon of your time.

Dedication Jones

By Kate Norway
(pseud. Olive Norton), ©1969

Staff Nurse Didi Jones was torn between enthusiasm for her interesting new job and the feeling that she ought to be “settling down” as her fiancé wanted. But would there have been any problem, if she had really cared about him?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I don’t know how you dare to argue with that woman. She terrifies me. I go all hemiplegic at the sight of her.” 

“The way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach anymore. It’s through his twin carburetors or his new putter, old dear. You’re not with it.”

“Depression in a young woman of under twenty-five is either a psychosis or it’s reactive to the boy-friend situation.”

“Incompetent people are always terribly bossy, just to try to prove that they can control things.”

“Gossip can be psychotherapy. So can cigarettes, love affairs, fast driving, a good boo-hoo or a nice cup of tea.”

“You’ve had too much vitamin B. You’re getting aggressive.”

REVIEW:
As we meet “dedicated” nurse Delia Jones (she also goes by Didi, unfortunately), she is working at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in England and has fallen victim to the classic romance trope in which her fiancé is not an especially charming individual who is always pestering her to quit her job and get married even though she really loves her work. “Geoff didn’t approve of wives who worked. He didn’t understand, I told myself. Teddy’s wasn’t like a shop, or an office. It was a life.” So you know there’s going to be a lot of tedious back-and-forth about that, when the answer is obvious. Her best friend, Rose—a delightful, flirtatious, sassy type—tells her, “If you marry him, dear girl, you’ll just be a—a chattel.” And worst of all, for you literary folks, “Geoff didn’t approve of Muriel Spark. He had found Miss Brodie unsavoury.” Just leave the bum! 

In the meantime Didi has started working in the Isolation Ward, which for some reason includes a lot of psychiatry cases. This means she is seeing a lot of a certain Dr. Dwyryd Ffestin-Jones (he’s Welsh). He’s kind, firm, but a little distant—in short, the quintessential British nurse novel love interest.

Next comes trope #3, in which Didi has mailed her engagement ring back to Geoff, but he’s been injured and may never walk again, so it’s not clear if she feels free to keep walking out the door. Then suddenly Dr. F-J is not speaking to Didi, and she’s not sure what has happened—so naturally she comes down with flu and is in a coma for a week, but fails to recover because she’s so upset about Dr. F-J’s behavior that she is shipped home to recover for a month or two. Only a chat with a psychiatrist—just not that psychiatrist—helps her get caught up with hospital gossip and figure out what the problem is. She promptly takes action and saves her own day …

Overall the book is very formulaic, but it has pleasant characters—again, per usual, the best are the strong, independent heroine and her feisty roommate, as well as a few other nurses who come across well, while the men are mostly limpid and uninteresting, including Dr. F-J, I’m sorry to report. There is a subtle humor throughout, such as when Didi tells a friend, “If I don’t spill to some neutral observer, I shall burst,” and he replies, “And I’m no surgeon, so we can’t have that. Spill away.” Once again Olive Norton, here writing as Kate Norway, lives up to her solid reputation as a gem of an author, and I can again recommend the tenth book I have read by this excellent writer, and hope that she’s written a lot more nurse romance novels that I can look forward to.

Nurse Jane and Cousin Paul

By Valerie K. Nelson, ©1964

From what her dear friend Jeremy had told her, Nurse Jane Ashley had the worst possible opinion of his cousin Paul. What a hard, managing old man he must be, she thought, to try and force Jeremy to study for a career which did not interest him. “Sometimes you remind me of Paul,” Jeremy told her. “Like him, you’re fifty years behind the times. It’s that hospital and all those Florence Nightingale sentiments. I must get you away from it, double quick.” Then, Nurse Jane met Paul—and began to think that, if he was fifty years behind the times, it was not a bad place to be!

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re not going to faint or anything, are you? But perhaps that’s another of the Victorian fashions which is coming back again.” 

“Oh, you know what men are, my dear. So brief in their explanations that they’re positively maddening.”

“I thought nurses were always hungry.”

“Ordinary-looking people very often have some unsuspected depths.”

REVIEW:
This book has taken all the most overused VNRN tricks and thrown them into one package: Orphaned heroine? Check. Wimpy, shallow boyfriend nobody could possibly like? Check. Angry, domineering man more than a decade older than her? Check. Spunky heroine fighting constantly with the arrogant bastard and suddenly discovering she’s in love? Check! If all of this sounds appealing to you, then this is the story for you!

If at this point you have any interest in learning more about this story, by all means, press on: 19-year-old Nurse Jane Ashley is in love with a shallow cad named Jeremy who is clearly lying to her left and right. She is in her first year of nursing school in London—so she does not even qualify as a nurse—when she is persuaded by Jeremy to get a job “nursing” his aunt, Meriel Darling, an imperious, wealthy hypochondriac who lives in a manor far out into the country. She sets out for the interview that has been arranged by Jeremy, only to find the house empty and a severe rainstorm coming on. Drenched to the bone with a cold coming on—and concerned that the woman she has been told is an invalid might be lying out cold on the bathroom floor—she gets in through a back door. While investigating the premises, the doorbell rings, and she opens it to start her first fight with 31-year-old Paul Rowfield (a creepy 12 years her senior, if math isn’t your bag). He literally drags her around the house with a hard “hurting grasp” on her wrist and accuses her of being the local burglar. Naturally, “he affected her in such a strange way … a different way from which she’d ever been affected before. When he looked at her, her heart began to beat faster, and she seemed to tingle from head to foot.” Sigh.

She lands the job—turns out she herself has weak lungs and needs six months in the country to recuperate—though Meriel doesn’t need any nursing and Jane is really just a maid. She continues to be bossed around by Paul, and Jeremy shows up now and then for clandestine, brief meetings in the garden in which he spoon-feeds her endless lies and she gobbles them up like they’re warm scones with homemade strawberry jam and clotted cream. “A man who wants to meet you on the sly hasn’t really much use for you,” advises Paul, who for once is making sense.

The local doctor, Robert Eccles, who had cared for Jane during her illness, has a sister Nina—a jealous wench with her hopes pinned on Paul, who recognizes a rival when she sees one—as well as a brother Ray, invalided at 26 by a severe heart condition. She also meets an ill woman named Iris Eccles, who suggests she is married to Robert, and a man named Brian Draper who “happens” to be on hand when Iris swoons from illness in a café and helps Jane cart Iris back to her shabby flat. Now there’s a number of mysteries to solve—who are Iris and Brian really? Who is burglarizing the neighborhood? Does Jeremy really love her?—shenanigans of Jeremy’s that Jane attempts to put right with little success, plus a very cold and businesslike proposal of marriage from Paul in which he completely fails to express in the most ardent language the violence of his affections, yet Jane can’t even turn him down flat and agrees to think it over. Toward the end of the book she comes to her senses as far as Jeremy is concerned, but that doesn’t stop her, oddly, from flying to meet him in the garden at every possible moment, never once putting off his tepid assurances.

Ultimately—and I hope you will not be too upset at the spoiler—Paul again insists they marry, telling her, “you must, you know. I announced our engagement an hour ago,” in “the same arrogant voice, but undershot with a world of tenderness.” Which makes it all better, of course, that he has essentially bullied her into marrying him—and has been scheming to do so from the very beginning: “From the moment I’d met you, I’d been quite determined that you were going to stay. I’d got Bob Eccles to see that you were given the post with Mrs. Darling, while I waited to get in touch with your guardian to gain his consent to our marriage. I’d thought we might wait until you were twenty, but now I’d decided that waiting was a waste of time.” Instead of screaming in horror and fleeing the county, Jane meekly agrees. Ugh!

The ultimate climax of the book involves some secret relationships and crimes that I found difficult to follow, leaving Jane locked in a lighthouse, possibly to starve to death or be assaulted (she decides she’d rather leap to her death rather than have the man “put a caressing hand on her,” such a delicate reference to rape)! But in the end, she’s found less than an hour later, and feels “unutterably depressed” by her hysteria upon first being imprisoned. I shared the feeling, actually, to a lesser degree, upon reaching the end of this long, mediocre, insulting book that has little respect for its heroine and less for its readers if it thinks that this is what we all would appreciate in a love interest. And it’s not even really a nurse novel, since Jane has quit nursing school and is not working as one! The last straw! So with that, I can give you no reason whatsoever to spend any time with either not-a-Nurse Jane or Cousin Paul.

Volunteer Nurse

By Arlene Fitzgerald, ©1967
Cover illustration by Mort Rosenfeld 

Why had she really come to Silver Creek? She knew she wanted to help people in distress. Was being a nurse the best way? Was it the way to escape Ron? Now she would have to find the answers for two other people: the man who had stolen her heart and the one who had claimed it.

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:
This book was not bad, but reading a decent novel has seldom left me more disappointed. Author Arlene Fitzgerald has delivered the awesomely dreadful Harbor Nurse, so I had high hopes that I would encounter more fabulously bizarre plot twists like the nurse ziplining out to a fishing boat during a hurricane to help amputate the leg of a fisherman who was attacked by a shark. Alas, no such excitement befalls Nurse Glee Barlow, who has volunteered to spend a few weeks at the JCAHO-certified Silver Creek Clinic in Arizona in a town with a population of 525. Like many VNRN heroines, she has a fiancé she doesn’t think much of, yet cannot bring herself to decide she shouldn’t marry. Ron Snider is a “terribly spoiled” mama’s boy, the apron strings strengthened by the fact that mother is very rich. “Ron had been proposing regularly, and he felt that she would be willing to settle down to a husband and babies.” She, on the other hand, worked hard to become a nurse, and “wanted to be free to do as she pleased as a full-fledged R.N. and as a woman at least, for a while.”

En route to her clinic, Glee’s car is nearly hit by a horse-drawn carriage caroming out of a dude ranch. Slamming on the brakes and not wearing a seatbelt, she takes a blow to her sternum—or rather, “the steering wheel crushed the soft roundness of her breasts,” in typical Fitzgerald fondness for inserting sexual references into irrelevant descriptions. The carriage driver immediately pulls her from her car and starts fumbling with the buttons of her dress, insisting, “I’m not being fresh. I’m a qualified M.D.” Phew! Her relief is enhanced by the fact that Dr. Kirk Tesdal is one of those homely men who is nevertheless “unnervingly handsome,” and she drives off thinking she would like to see him again.

And she does! Because it turns out that he’s in town to interview for a job at the clinic, and though he’s superlatively qualified (his ineptness at unbuttoning blouses notwithstanding), he’s turned down for the job because he’s not married. Hmmm. When Glee arrives at the clinic, she finds that it’s holding a few cases of anthrax. You’ll be intrigued to know that Glee has a photographic memory, and recalls several pages of her medical textbook verbatim, even obligingly turning pages now and then for us, so we can appreciate the intricacies of the disease, which is treated with a lot of scrubbing up and incinerating clothes and bed linens, and injecting Dr. Tesdal with penicillin “into the firmness of his buttocks,” which Glee accomplishes while admiring his tan line and lean waist. 

The medical staff manages several crises including another horse-drawn carriage crash that results in one victim requiring a splenectomy, a car crash in which the driver’s arm is nearly severed and handily sewn back on, and a heart attack. We are treated to some of Fitzgerald’s usual tricks, such as her fondness for “slashing” with a “firm mental scalpel” at any inconvenient thought, and her reliance on “firm nurse’s discipline” to get through difficult tasks like crossing a raging creek (of which there are many in the Arizona desert) on a fallen log. But overall the author’s idiosyncrasies, which have driven me practically insane in some books (see Young Nurse Rayburn), are infrequent here, and the worst sin she commits is the idiotic but unfortunately common trope of giving the heroine an unlikable fiancé yet rendering her completely shocked to discover in the final pages that she doesn’t really love the jerk after all. But there are some plusses as well, such as the fact that the medicine and surgery described in the book is detailed, interesting, and fairly accurate. Arlene Fitzgerald has given us one other B-grade book in Daredevil Nurse, so this completely readable and even entertaining book is not a total anomaly for her. But, paradoxically, I might have enjoyed a worse book more.

Highway Nurse

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1965 

Nurse Jan Lowell loved her fiancé and looked forward to her life with the brilliant young surgeon. Then why was she daydreaming about the young highway patrol officer? And what was there about his blue-eyed, unfriendly face that haunted her nights?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Lucky you! Not every girl stopped for a traffic violation grabs such a gorgeous hunk of man to read her the riot act.”

“You carry a gun, don’t you? Couldn’t you arrange to have it go off sort of by accident, you know?” 

“It’s some distance between the hospital and the altar.”

REVIEW:
It’s so hard being the responsible older sister. There’s just no end of crap you have to take for your little sister, like accept the blame for a hit-and-run when it was madcap Vicki behind the wheel of the light blue convertible roadster when they’d hit five-year-old Davey Barbour, knocking him into a ditch, and Vicki had driven on another few miles down the road. Finally Jan Lowell had convinced Vicki, now hysterical with a not-unreasonable fear that she’d do jail time given her already poor driving record, to turn the car around, but not before Vicki in full hysterics convinces Jan to take the rap: “If you won’t do a simple little favor like that for me, you’re just plain mean,” she pouts, and Jan ultimately agrees, her nursing license and ethics be damned.

But highway cop Bob Creasy, who arrives on the scene to investigate, does not believe Jan’s story that she was in shock after hitting the boy, then blacked out, and this was why she was so long in returning to the scene of the crime. He also doesn’t believe that Jan, who immediately strikes him as an honest, solid character, was driving, particularly since Vicki blabs a bit more than she should. Bob offers to drive Jan to the hospital, but detours past a coffee shop, where he tells her he’s quitting his job because he can’t stand feeling so helpless at car crashes and is planning on becoming a lawyer, as he has just passed the bar exam. He apologizes for snapping at her—and says that there will be no repercussions at all for the accident “even if I don’t accept every single thing you tell me as gospel.” He even asks her for a date, but she declines, since she’s engaged to Dr. Neal Darwin, a brilliant pediatrician. 

The problem with her engagement is that she refuses to name a date because Neal will not allow Vicki to live with them, and Jan doesn’t believe Vicki, at 20, is responsible enough to manage on her own—and given the whole car accident we’ve just witnessed, she has a valid concern. Neal, however, insists that Jan start putting him first: “Dump Vicki and marry me, or else,” he tells her. For her part, Vicki is in love with orderly Jimmy Lester, who is extremely good at his job—could even become a doctor, in Jan’s opinion—but Jimmy was born a ramblin’ man. “The birds have got the right idea: Fly away when you feel like it,” he says. He’s entertaining the idea of moving to Alaska, so Jan asks him to stop seeing Vicki, because she does not think Vicki could handle life there: “You’d have to wear a heavy fur-hooded parka and learn to ski if you wanted to get around any. You may not believe this, honey, but severe weather conditions can have a terrific effect on one’s life. They can even effect the metabolism. Ask any doctor.”

Meanwhile, Davey is recovering in the hospital and bonding strongly with the staff there, as the aunt who had been raising the orphan has split for Texas. All except Dr. Neal, however, because despite his choice of pediatrics as a specialty, he does not care for children much. Jan “couldn’t help wishing at times that Neal could display a little more warmth of heart toward his little patients,” instead of acting “like a man going in to examine a broken typewriter or a cash register that isn’t working.” Davey loves Bob, though, and decides he wants Jan and Bob to be his parents!

The best thing about this book is Bob, who is a kind, easygoing, thoughtful, honest person who never once grabs Jan or orders her around. Instead, he admires her strength, her capability. “The smooth satiny blackness of her hair was lovely to look at. So was the proud lift of her head, and the grace of her movements. She looked tired now. Faint lines of weariness showed in her face, which was without makeup. Her uniform was crumpled. She was certainly no glamour girl at the moment. And yet everything about her looked truly beautiful to him.” He doesn’t believe Jan was driving at the time of the accident and tells her so, but he never badgers her about it, just waits for her to eventually acknowledge the truth. He has a relaxed, warm, sardonic character that is genuinely attractive. The problem is Jan’s bizarre devotion to Dr. Neal that just won’t quit, no matter how awful he gets—even at his absolute worst, when he shoves Davey to the ground and completely loses his cool, even though Jan is “deeply shocked” by his behavior, “she still wanted to hold on to him”—chiefly, it seems, because she cannot tolerate being alone: "What would she do about the emptiness it would leave in her life? She felt like a little boat which had lost its anchor. She felt so lost.”

It's a relief that Florence Stonebraker hasn’t relied too heavily on her usual tricks: Dr. Neal never becomes a certifiable lunatic, no one waves a gun around or attempts murder, no character is named Kitty. And while the relationship between Jan and Bob is one of the nicest I’ve seen in a VNRN, overall the book doesn’t have a great enough zest that would put it into an A category. You can’t go wrong reading this book, but it probably won’t be one you remember in a month, either.

Marry Me Nurse

By Virginia Nielsen, ©1969 

“Funny how when a confirmed bachelor finally decides to get married, he can’t wait to find a minister!” Navy nurse Jo Mellor had to agree with her friend Pixie, but what was even funnier was Jo’s own reaction. She was in love with Lt. Jack Hurley, wasn’t she? She wanted to marry the flyer, didn’t she? Then shy couldn’t she set the date? Because it would mean giving up her career, or because—deep down—she was beginning to wonder if Jack was the right man for her after all …

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“There aren’t many men who really listen to a girl. It’s irresistible.” 

“She’s a born chief nurse—all that starch!”

“’I don’t know why he makes me so nervous,’ she wailed, ‘unless it’s that he’s so wonderful!’”

“The doctor is not permitted to yell at his patient, so he yells at his nurse. This is one of the reasons he has a nurse.”

“You never knew a man until you saw him behind the wheel of a car.”

REVIEW:
This book is made more interesting—but also more confusing—by the fact that heroine Lt. Jo Mellor, R.N. is serving in the U.S. Navy. She’s assigned to a remote clinic on Oahu, thirty miles from Waikiki, where there is also an airstrip, and there she meets—and is quickly rushed—by the sexiest man alive, pilot Lt. Jack Hurley. “No man should have a face so startingly beautiful,” she sighs, and three pages later she’s wondering in italics, “Maybe this man is the one?”  She’s not the first nurse to think this, as he’s already dated and ditched her best friend Pixie and her nurse nemesis Lisa. 

In the meantime, she has to put up with grumpy Dr. Henry Taylor, who is stuck in this godforsaken outpost lancing boils and treating rashes—and numerous plane crash victims—instead of performing surgery, his first love. “Brilliant and conceited, totally immersed in medicine,” Dr. Taylor’s “high-handed, hard-boiled manner is infuriating!” And he’s constantly needling Jo because she cares about her patients—but she’s able to get the five-year-old with Legg-Calve-Perthe’s disease to hold still for the X-ray that proves the diagnosis.

If Dr. Taylor is abrupt and snappish, flyboy Jack isn’t winning any points, either. At a picnic on the beach when it is discovered that someone needs to go across the street to the café for cups, Jack refuses the mission, saying, “My plan-of-the-day is to lie around and be waited on by an adoring slave.” I know, it’s difficult to forgive his misuse of hyphens, but referring to his new girlfriend as a slave also merits our disapproval. Then there’s the fact that he’s peeved when she saves a man who’s been bitten in the leg by a shark. “I have a thing about sharks,” he explains later, and Jo is so relieved by his selfish attitude! And when he proposes within a week of meeting Jo, he insists that she quit her job: “No wife of mine is going to nurse anybody but me.” When she reminds him that he does not outrank her, he denies it: “As your husband, I will always rank you. That’s understood.” I don’t understand it, but I’m not Navy.

She’s understandably a bit depressed on duty the next day, and when she tells Dr. Taylor why, he points out the obvious, that marriage to Jack will not work out. “You are as engrossed in nursing as Hurley is in flying,” he says. Then comes the tedious part of the VNRN classic trope, where Jo tries to convince herself that if she really loved Jack, she would be willing to give up her career, comparing herself to her friend: “Pixie would not hesitate a half second before giving up everything to go anywhere on any terms if Dr. Ernie wanted her. If he were as demanding as Jack, Pixie would love it.” Um, sure. Soon the derogatory adjectives start piling up: Jack is “a little arrogant,” telling her what to wear, and “she wondered what insecurity made him want all her attention, every minute of her time. It was a demanding sort of jealousy.”

Then the next trope is trundled onstage: There’s a terrible storm and flood, and Jack crashes his plane on landing, breaking his leg. Dr. Taylor saves the leg but can’t salvage Jack’s career, so now Jo is tied to a man she doesn’t want, because she can’t break up with him now! “He would never know that she did not love him. No love or desire of her own could be strong enough to break the bonds that Jack’s dependence imposed on her.” Does anyone else think she’s kidding herself to an alarming degree?

Of course, she’s rescued at the end—prompted not by her own honesty or self-preservation but by the realization that Lisa loves Jack more than she does, because Lisa brings Jack a putter, symbolizing his recovery, while Jo brings a cribbage board, symbolizing a prolonged stay in the hospital. Now she’s free to phone in a cancellation of her resignation and arrange a tête-à-tête with Dr. Taylor, which, curiously, is played off-stage, after we’ve closed the book—which, at 222 pages, had plenty of room for less important scenes.

The book is full of Navy jargon, never explained—OOD, BOQ, Captain’s mast (apparently some sort of investigation), personnel called Waves—which makes it bumpy for civilians. There’s also a baby mystery about syringe and penicillin pilfering, and the solution to this question is also anticlimactic, a page-filling device that does nothing for the book’s improvement; if anything, it’s mostly confusing why so many people are involved in such a stupid crime. I never appreciate a heroine falling for a man we’ve been set up to dislike and who shows few, if any, redeeming qualities, or why she would continue dating a man who turns out to be an ass. It’s a perfunctory book with little enthusiasm for anything other than the Navy, so unless you are eager for an occasional armchair glimpse of Hawaii or the Navy, there isn’t much to recommend this over-long, yet simultaneously thin, book.

Recovery Room Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1965 

Successful businessman Stan Livermore delivered his ultimatum to Nurse Jane Kemp: either she abandon her career to become a full-time wife, or they must forget each other. But as a desperately needed nurse, Jane wanted to be a permanent part of her profession. At the same time, she was deeply in love with Stan. It was a hopeless dilemma. Until Arthur Howard, her famous—and very handsome—new patient offered an unexpected solution …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I’m not a kid intent upon storming any woman’s lips. Behave.”

“Some friends you have, Jane! Are they born rude, or do they acquire the knack only after long study?” 

“Jane thought that men were certainly a problem. Yet what a dull world it would be if there were no such problems for women to handle.”

“You’ve come to complain. You disapprove of beginning a subcuticular suture by placing a square knot lateral to the incision. Oh, I know, I know!”

“As a woman ages, she must substitute the charm of thoughtfulness for the charm of beauty.”

“Look, darling, if I didn’t feel good, I’d still put on the act just to keep out of your clutches.”

“The careers of all unmarried women should be smashed. An offense to nature.”

“I’m trained to see facts, recite them, do something about them. Others ought to have the same training.”

REVIEW:
Pop the champagne, because this is my 500th VNRN review! I will admit I have been saving this review for a few weeks for this occasion, because there are few better authors to celebrate an occasion with than Bill Neubauer. 

Reading a book by Bill Neubauer is like walking into your best friend’s house. It’s a welcoming, comfortable place where you feel happy and at home, and you know it’s pretty likely are going to have a good time. Such is Recovery Room Nurse, which is about nurse Jane Kemp and her struggles at work and with her boyfriend, Stan Livermore. Stan is a 32-year-old real estate mogul, worth $800,000—a lot of money in 1966, when top doctors didn’t make $40,000 annually—who met Jane when she nursed him through an episode of appendicitis. The problem is that now he wants her to quit her job and be a full-time wife. Jane also has a roommate, Grace Ohlsen, who is a spunky ecologist. According to Grace, Stan insists that “all you must do to make him happy is quit your profession, renounce your individualism, and drudge for him. I continue to think you’d be an idiot to subordinate your life to his.” I really like Grace Ohlsen.

Jane is more torn, though, and struggles with Stan—even breaks up with him at one point—thinking, “Marriage, darn it, couldn’t be a relationship in which one partner had everything his way and the other partner had no individualism or rights or options to speak of!” But, unfortunately, Jane thinks, “Drat the character, she loved him.”

In the interim, she is sent to special a mega-famous TV writer, Arthur Howard, who has a mortal fear of hospitals and is, in a word, a crybaby. He’s due for a hip surgery, and, anticipating a tough recovery, is seeking “a voluptuous blonde nurse who will distract him from pain,” largely because he has a recurring dream in which a jolly, plump nurse chases away a skeleton that is trying to do him in. Unfortunately the supervisor of nurses, Mrs. Dolezal, has decided that he is going to have Jane Kemp, who claims to be neither voluptuous nor pretty (of course, she’s wrong; “the woman was a stunner” “with twinkling blue eyes,” and “her rippling laughter was music,” to name just a few of her charms), but is in fact the best recovery room nurse at Buttrick Hospital (the same site of Pam Green Rehabilitation Nurse and TV Nurse).

The politics comes in, as it does with Bill Neubauer’s books, when we learn that Howard is planning to create a new TV series profiling a hospital, and the administrators are eager to please the man in the hope that he will choose Buttrick as the subject of his show. Mrs. Dolezal wants Jane to be his nurse in order to impress him with her skill, which she, of course, does. But on the day of Howard’s surgery, just as he is waking, Jane is pulled out of his room by a student nurse whose patient is choking to death. Jane quickly saves the man’s life, but when she returns to Howard’s room, the man has completely panicked, convinced that Jane “abandoned” him—and only his own brute courage and strength pulled him through the episode. Outraged at his mistreatment, he calls the newspaper to give them a front-page story, and Jane is put on leave. But she is a calm, skilled, intelligent woman, and we watch her play the silly man like a champ. Author Bill Neubauer really liked women, I think, because his female characters are always strong, insightful, supportive human beings who always help out their friends.

One anecdote he describes, though, does break my heart—in the story we are told about a young boy, a diabetic amputee, moved to another hospital ward to die. Though the remaining boys on the ward are not told of the death, they nonetheless scatter Lincoln logs (remember those?) on the floor, so that the boy’s ghost will slip on them and fall, rendering the creature unable to attack them. Neubauer, who was raised in the St. Giles Home for Cripples on Long Island, may well have experienced just such as scene when he was growing up. He led a remarkable life (see his biography), and his back story makes his gifts as a writer all the more extraordinary.

Anyway, in this book, Jane is an awesome heroine, the kind of woman who, stuck in the ear with a fishhook, pushes it the rest of the way through, cuts off the barb with pliers, and while stanching the flow of blood heads to her hospital’s ED, where she quips to the intern, “You’d better be good; I’d hate to perish of tetanus.” But the problem with this book is that Jane is in love with the jerk. We see little of Stan except when he is giving Jane ultimatums about leaving her job, so though she tells us many times how wonderful he is, I can’t believe it. In the end, her “win”—and you know she would have one—feels like less than half a victory because of the terms she unfortunately agrees to. Neubauer’s writing is otherwise witty, entertaining, and deeply satisfying, and the relationships he builds between women characters are more honorable than those created by many female VNRN authors. If he liked his male characters as much as he likes the women, this would be a better book. Recovery Room Nurse falls slightly short of his best work, but even if the “romance” central to the story isn’t much of one, this book is certainly a gem worth reading.

Shop this title, now republished
by Nurse Novels Publishing, here!

Doctor Mary

By Jeanne Judson, ©1964

Her fiancé, Henry Clifford, a rising young lawyer, couldn’t understand why Dr. Mary Spencer chose to live in Chinatown. Her best friend, Dr. Edith Silliman, wanted Mary to join her in an expensive practice in an exclusive neighborhood. Both Henry and Edith thought Dr. Mary was a fool. And perhaps, thought Mary, they were right. Who but a fool would alienate her best friend and her sweetheart and the prospect of the successful career, to follow a dream — a dream of helping the poor. But, wise or foolish, Dr. Mary was going to continue in the past she had marked out for herself.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“People who are always right are unbearable.” 

“It’s surprising how many people in New York will go anywhere if there is a prospect of lots of free champagne.”

“In cases of high blood pressure there is almost always some frustration or worry that increases the trouble.”

REVIEW:
Sometimes it’s hard to pick up a book because its cover is so appalling. Eventually, though, you become so sick of looking at this cover that you are forced to read the book just so that you can put it away in the back bedroom with all the other books you’ve already read, saving your delicate sensibilities from further encounters. Such was the case with me and Doctor Mary. The fact that it was written by Jeanne Judson, who has been known to put out some excellent books—though I haven’t met one recently, unfortunately—was not much of a lure. But now the job is done, and I can report that the book is in fact better than its cover, but maybe not so much that you should run out and buy a copy. 

Dr. Mary Spencer is a lonely orphan who, upon graduating from medical school a year earlier, moved to Mott Street in New York City’s Chinatown to practice medicine. She had picked this spot as a launching pad for her medical career because during her internship she had encountered many Chinese patients and found them “so patient and polite.” “I haven’t any family to impress with my brilliance, and I don’t know any Joneses to keep up with, so when I finished at St. Vincent’s that’s where I went,” she explained her decision. She likes the interesting neighborhood and her patient population, even if she’s not getting rich like her med school classmate Dr. Edith Silliman, who at book’s open is pressing her to join a practice with her on E. 71st St. “If only you’ll be sensible, Mary,” chides Edith. “If you’ll get an office uptown and stop all this do-gooding,” she says, Mary might be able to keep her fiancé, up-and-coming attorney Henry Clifford.

Edith has a point: Henry has already told her, “You can see for yourself that it wouldn’t do for a member of one of the leading law firms to have a wife working in the slums. If you stay here, it will be no marriage at all.” But Mary wants to “work with an uplifted heart,” and has found her calling: “For her, it was a vocation; for Edith, it was a profession.” It takes Mary no time at all to refuse Edith, and not much longer to come to her senses after Henry tells her, “You must choose, Mary. I love you, but I have no intention of ruining both our lives by letting you continue in this absurd obsession about helping people who aren’t willing to help themselves.” So when the afternoon mail brings an engraved wedding invitation to Edith and Henry’s upcoming nuptials, “when her head stopped whirling, she thought that nothing could be more suitable.”

Mary spends about ten minutes feeling sorry for herself, but then she starts thinking about this guy she met while taking care of a patient with pneumonia. Jim Tracy is unemployed and living in a seedy residence hotel: “Despite the need of a shave and a haircut, he was well dressed. Also, and more surprising, he looked clean. He had spoken like an educated man. He was young and, though underweight, apparently healthy. But what was he doing in Joe Grimes’s hotel when he was perfectly competent to hold down a good job, routine, perhaps, but respectable?” Between cases she goes out with the man, who is alternatively kind and grouchy, but he is always able to pay for dinner despite his low living conditions. Even more curious, he is able to engage Dr. Grenning, the city’s top cardiologist, to see an impoverished pediatric patient of Mary’s for free. Unfortunately, after a mere three encounters with the man, “the awful truth came to her. She loved him. She loved him. Thief, murderer, whenever he was, she loved him. She wouldn’t marry him because he wouldn’t have her. Still, it was good to love even if the love were never returned.” Ugh.

When the cardiologist shows up, it turns out he’s an old friend of Jim’s, who is—surprise!—Dr. Jim Tracy, “one of the best bacteriologists in the country—a man who could have a big future.” But Jim is done with his career, he says: “I got this way by killing my wife.” It’s only another dozen pages before we find out that his wife was a pretty but shallow debutante whom Jim had married too quickly, only to find out they weren’t compatible. She had wanted to party, and he had wanted to work, which meant they lived essentially separate lives, she with her socializing friends, and even a few gentlemen escorts as well — until one day, coming down the stairs in a beautiful, trailing gown to open the door for another party, she “tripped on some chiffon and fell halfway down the stairs.” She lived “long enough to tell Jim that it was all his fault, that it was his indifference, his coldness, that was killing her.” That or the broken neck, it’s hard to tell for sure. After this revelation, though, all the guilt that has caused Jim to abandon his former life for years is quickly boxed up and put away into storage, never to peek out at us again.

As the closet door is swinging shut, Mary is enlisted by Dr. Grenning to help persuade Jim to sign up for a two-year stint at a brand-new hospital in the wilds of Brazil, though at the dinner party where Jim is won over to the project, she doesn’t do much more than pass the gravy. One thing I do like about Dr. Mary, however, is that she goes after what she wants. Before the dinner with Dr. Grenning, where she had learned the truth of his past, she had written to Jim to say, “Whatever they have to tell me, I’d rather hear it from you. I don’t want to know anything about you that you don’t want to tell me yourself. I love you.” And on the way home from dinner, Jim talks about how the new hospital’s staff (being all male, of course) is not likely to be married because “for the wives it will be insects and heat and snakes and noise.” Undaunted, Mary retorts, “It might be different for a woman if she were a doctor, too.” You go, girl.

Overall this is a fairly straightforward story without exceptional interest, outside of the ad for Newport cigarettes bound into the book, which was printed in the era before cigarette advertising was outlawed. If one or two characters demonstrate bigotry toward the Chinese, Mary does not, seeing only hard-working immigrants pursuing the American dream; her most prominent Chinese patient eventually brings his two grandsons to the country to study at Columbia, aided by Jim Tracy, who had grown up alongside Chinese workers on his family’s pineapple plantation in Hawaii and is completely fluent in multiple dialects of Chinese. Actually, in this book it’s the white family that is stuck with a drunken, abusive, jobless patriarch, and no one is sorry to see him drop of pneumonia in the end; the black and Asian families Mary cares for may be poor, but they won’t be for long, especially when the kids graduate from an Ivy League college. It’s pleasant enough, but a little disappointing for author Judson, who has given us the delightful Small Town Nurse, Visiting Nurse, and City Nurse, three A-grade gems. Those books came out in the 1950s, however, giving more evidence to my belief that the more recently a book was written, the worse it is likely to be. Given the fact that the four reviews of her books published in the ’60s earned a C+ average with no grade higher than a B, it seems that this dread curse is so powerful that not even the talented Jeanne Judson was immune to it.

Desert Nurse

By Jane Arbor, ©1963 

After the break-up of her romance with Greg Ryder, Nurse Martha Shore decided that the best thing to do was to find a new interest, which she did with a vengeance when she accepted Doctor Jude Tarleton’s offer of a past at his tiny hospital east of Aden. She had successfully managed to jump out he the frying-pan. But did her new job, in the burning desert heat, not ominously resemble the proverbial fire? For it was not long before Martha had to admit her love for Greg was forgotten in her new, overwhelming attraction to Jude—an attraction which he made it clear was not returned. How could she hope to appeal to him, anyway, when the experienced and glamorous Naomi was already so firmly in the picture?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“That’s how feeling needed does take one, I think—grateful for the chance and set-teeth determined to be worth it.” 

REVIEW:
I had been dreading reading Desert Nurse, and with good reason, given the VNRN genre’s track record with foreign peoples, and the cover illustration was not very encouraging. But I am happy to report that Jane Arbor has here drawn a portrait of Saudi Arabians as being different from the English, of course, but no less honorable or dignified. Nurse Martha Shore, who in fact has spent some time in the area as a child and speaks some Arabic, returns for a one-year stint at a hospital supporting a rural (can that word be used with a desert?) community and a team of Brits attempting to strike oil under the auspices of Dr. Jude Tarleton—and her reason for doing so is the dissolution of her engagement to Greg Ryder, a pilot who prefers to marry the rich daughter of his intended employer instead of our steady, honest, plucky heroine.

Given that beginning, you can easily deduce the bones of the story that follows, including Greg’s crash landing at the settlement and insistent efforts to take up again with Martha—his fiancée had left him when he’d carelessly let fall to her father that he’d considered his daughter “good company and a looker, and if she was the price of her old man’s backing, that was all right.” Martha is no longer interested, but the big question here is why she would ever have had anything to do with the shallow, conceited ass for a minute, much less be engaged to him for a year. The usual misunderstandings between her and the camp’s doctor, Jude Tarleton, unfold, but there are side stories demonstrating Martha’s strength and pluck to amuse us—even if she does have a tendency to fall (sometimes literally) into scrapes form which Jude must rescue her.

The plot holds no surprises, but the writing is pleasing and we are treated to multiple interesting peripheral characters. I was even actually convinced of Martha’s feeling for Jude, “a secret madness that didn’t show” no matter how intensely she feels when their hands brush. The final conversation reconciliating their misunderstandings went on for far too long and could easily have been cut altogether: As Frank Capra said of the scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart skipped a page of the script in their first and only take of the scene in which they kiss, “with technique like that, who needs dialogue?” A thin plot, though it might keep a book out of A-range grades, is not a big drawback in a VNRN, and the rest of this book is charming enough to make it a welcome oasis in a too-often dry genre.

Nurse Ann in Surgery

By Ruth MacLeod, ©1965
Cover illustration by Bob Schinella 

Ann Phillips returned to Crestridge with a whole new life ahead of her. She was going to start her career as a nurse-anesthetist, and she was going to marry Dr. Frank Parker, whom she had loved for so many years. But when she learned that while she had been away, Frank had decided to marry someone else, Ann buried her hurt by filling her life with her hospital work. Then, Frank came to her saying that he had made a mistake and would she renew their engagement. She asked herself whether Frank really knew his own heart … and besides there were whispering words of an exciting young intern warning her not to make a second mistake.

GRADE: B+ 

BEST QUOTES:
“Tears do have a way of invading the nasopharynx instead of rolling like pearls down a rosy cheek.” 

“You’ll most likely marry before long and find you need your time to rear a family. At least I hope so—for your sake. That’s a woman’s highest calling.”

REVIEW:
Ann Phillips is particularly interesting in that she is a nurse anesthetist. Current-day CRNAs will likely appreciate the description of her job, which includes administering anesthetic as directed by the surgeon, which is curious because nowadays it’s the CRNA or anesthesiologist who makes that call, and also because she’s usually using sodium pentothal. Furthermore, she manually bags the patient—squeezes a bag every six seconds to push air into the lungs, a job today performed by a machine—for the entire surgery, which can last hours, and reports the patient’s condition aloud “every minute or so.” And with administering IV fluids and medications, and blood products when necessary, Ann’s got a lot to do! 

But this pales in comparison to juggling her personal life. She’s returning home to fiancé Dr. Frank Parker, who is a rising would-be surgeon and son of brilliant chief surgeon Dr. Stuart Parker, for her first job since receiving her certification. “We’ve been engaged since he graduated from medical school,” Ann reports to one hopeful young man. “I haven’t seen him much since then,” which is at least two years ago. “Maybe he’ll have become a creep,” says the astute gentleman, who can read the writing on the wall better than Ann. Sure enough, on their first so-called date, Frank tells Ann he’s in love with the new OR nurse, Carisse Moffett, and breaks their engagement. It’s not hard to understand why, as Ann “could never compete with a girl like Carisse whose beauty was matched by her charming poise and grace.” None of which make you a good person, but values were different in the Sixties. In fact, however, Carisse is a lovely person who becomes very interested in Ann’s work and decides that she, too, will become a nurse anesthetist, and the two become friends as Ann takes her under her wing and helps her get started with applying to the training programs.

Frank, on the other hand, quickly proves he deserves neither the charming Charisse or the plucky Ann. He’s constantly bungling the more intricate surgeries, and when Ann expresses her admiration of an appendectomy he’s pulled off without killing the patient, she’s corrected by talented resident Dr. Robin Price. “It was a neat, workman-like performance,” he points out. “Exactly what should be expected of an intern on his first assignment. If a resident surgeon couldn’t perform that well he should be sent back to medical school”—and he concludes with the zinger that what could have been done in seven or eight minutes took Frank over half an hour. 

Worse than that, Frank comes bumbling to Ann, pleading with her to take him back, that “I got off to a bad start—I’ve been all upset inside. That’s why I need you, darling! I’ve been all torn up inside and it affects my work. I need our love! Then I can settle down to the practice it takes to do good work.” Instead of vomiting, Ann, who seems to be driven more by the rush she gets when kissing Frank, succumbs, despite the disapproval of her entire family, and Frank breaks off his engagement with Carisse to take up with Ann again. It becomes clear that this yo-yoing is due in part to pressure from his family, although it’s not obvious why they object to Carisse when they’d objected to Ann as well. Carisse proves again to be the best person in the triangle and bears no grudge at all against Ann, and continues their friendship and works with flawless professionality with both in the OR.

Meanwhile, Ann demonstrates that at least professionally she has a spine. When her anesthesiologist boss suggests that she couldn’t handle open-heart surgery, she interrupts him to insist, “Oh yes I could!” And she suggests to both Frank and his father that he might be better suited for a different specialty, though both are equally outraged at the thought. Never mind that in one emergency surgery “Frank’s incompetence cost the man’s life,” and when her own mother needs a pacemaker, Ann talks her out of having Frank do the job. “He isn’t exactly incompetent,” she explains to her mother in ringing praise, but thinks to herself, “Thank God it was Dr. Stuart in charge—not Frank!”

Eventually Frank is called out for his dithering during a ventral septal defect repair and, finally at the end of his patience, he “snatched off his mask and cap and stomped from the room.” This enormous breach of aseptic protocol should certainly cost a surgeon their hospital privileges on the spot. When the operation is over, Ann rushes to console Frank, only to find Carisse has beaten her to it, so the motion-sick, tempest-toss’d ring goes bouncing back to Carisse, but not before Ann has again tried to set Frank straight. “You’ll ruin your own life and ours too, if you don’t grow up and make your own decisions!” she explodes—not to mention all the other patients he’ll maim or murder. “It’s time for you to quit behaving like a child”—though she could benefit from her own advice, as she’s never been entirely convinced that Frank’s return to her was completely honest. Ann’s scolding, apparently, is what it takes for Frank to tell his father what he really wants in both career and marriage, and “she experienced only a numb sense of relief that his feet, at last, were set on the right path”—and never mind that his finally making the difficult decision obviates her from doing the same.

In the end, she ends up not with a fiancé but with a solid prospect who is an excellent surgeon—illustrating another curious VNRN theme that the heroine never ends up with someone who is not good at his job. Would I love my husband less if he was lousy at his profession? It’s a curious question. Overall I’m slightly bothered that Ann is highly capable at work, and yet cannot demonstrate the same incisiveness when it comes to Frank, instead allowing herself to be buffeted by his storm—not to mention dumped twice! Otherwise, it’s an interesting book worth reading, and not just to admire Ann’s grip strength as she squeezes the ambu-bag 2,400 times in a two-hour surgery.