Nurse Laurie’s Cruise

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1956

A nurse-companion on a Caribbean cruise sounded like fun to Laurie Fielding. But to make sure she got the job, Laurie tried to disguise her blonde loveliness before she went for the interview. The first person Laurie met on the Bianca was Jeff Anderson, so much the picture of the man every girl hopes to meet on a cruise that Laurie was instantly put on guard. As they cruised the exotic tropical islands, Laurie found herself paired off with the young professor writing a book on the West Indies and her beautiful employer with the attractive Jeff—with Laurie becoming more and more attracted to Jeff. A delightful and exciting story of a young nurse in search of adventure—with both danger and love lurking for Laurie in the blue waters of the Caribbean.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I always thought most nurses looked like majordomos.” 

“Nurses have a way of managing things—and people.”

“Isn’t every young, single woman who saves up enough money for a cruise on the lookout for husband material?”

“Fear flooded over her, and she wanted to turn and run. But her nurse’s training restrained her.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Laurie Fielding meets all the criteria for a nurse position that she sees advertised—except the ad specifically requests that the applicant be “preferably not too attractive.” Of course, Laurie does not fit that bill, with her “natural blonde hair, big blue eyes, creamy skin, and a figure that more often than not draws wolf whistles.” So she wears a hair net and large tortoiseshell glasses to the interview, where young widow Irma Potts, age 36, hires Laurie even though, she says, “I don’t want someone to outshine me!” Irma is a flighty, vapid heiress with no actual illnesses other than a few days of seasickness, so Laurie needn’t worry that she “wouldn’t like spending all her time shut up in a cabin with her patient, when she was longing to enjoy the sea air, the pleasures of the voyage, and the interesting sights.” In short, Laurie is hoping for what she herself calls “a vacation” while getting paid for not doing any work, and that is exactly what she gets! In fact, Irma soon advises Laurie to quit dressing down, so even the “disguise” Laurie wears to get the job is quickly abandoned—yet another dopey plot device that goes nowhere.

On board, Laurie soon meets Jeff Anderson, and “there was something about him—perhaps because he looked so much like the sort of man a girl might dream about meeting on a cruise—that made Laurie dislike him.” She’s not wrong, actually; he’s not a likable man, aggressive, always pushing himself onto her and attempting to control her. She is frequently furious with him, but alas, we know what that means—she won’t have the sense or the ability to resist him much longer.  Soon he’s kissing her on a regular basis. “If Jeff had wanted to kiss her again, she knew he would have, without asking,” and the thought gives her chills—of pleasure, unfortunately, because have I mentioned that Laurie doesn’t have much sense?

Laurie tries to make it her job to protect Irma from wolves and thieves, but it’s not going well. She suspects Jeff of being a crook in part because he refuses to have his photograph taken. “If he was the adventurer she believed him to be, his past might catch up with him,” she decides, but is unable to keep him away from Irma. And then Irma is travelling with an enormous amount of valuable jewelry and wears it all at once, so everyone is aware of it, and then she won’t keep it in the safe. Laurie has concerns about a few other suspicious people besides Jeff, starting with a man named John Harvey who uses crutches to walk and whom Irma constantly calls “pathetic” due to his disability. Laurie regularly catches Mr. Harvey in the hall outside Irma’s room, though his room is on another floor, but immediately decides not to say anything about it, deciding that it “most likely amounted to nothing.”

Eventually Laurie decides that the best thing is for her to keep the jewels in her own room, and guess what? The  next night they’re stolen, and Laurie is a suspect! Now she’s trying to figure out who stole them and making a poor job of it. When she finds Mr. Harvey arguing with a rich older woman passenger, “it was another riddle that Laurie decided she might as well forget.” The next night, after finding Mr. Harvey in the hall again, she finds the empty jewel case back in her room—and promptly tosses it overboard. Then Laurie stumbles across a crewmember who is dying from a gunshot wound. He tells her, “The jewels—she found out I knew where they—” but she mentions this to exactly no one, and the man promptly dies. Laurie has the common sense of a gnat. Eventually she does something really stupid and almost gets herself shot, too, but almost every strong male on the ship shows up at the same time and she is rescued! And discovers she’s in love, too!

This is a perfunctory story whose plot makes no sense. On one hand, Laurie cannot put two and two together and constantly sabotages herself—until she is deciding she alone can capture the criminal, who she selects essentially out of the blue, and nearly gets herself killed by someone whose presence is unexplainable, too. Her—no surprise, this—love interest is portrayed in unflattering terms at every meeting, but after hating him for most of the story, she falls for him hard, and the sudden conversion makes as little sense as pretty much everything else in the book. To cap it all off, we have the consistently insulting descriptions of Mr. Harvey’s handicap, and, on visits to numerous ports of call, all the typical colonialistic, patronizing attitudes about Caribbean citizens and countries. My White Doctor Foundation is making a dual donation following this review, to the UNCF and the Cabrillo College Accessibility Support Center (a favorite cause of disabled and most beloved VNRN author Bill Neubauer). You can avoid the particularly noxious ick factor I had to wade through by just refusing to get on board Nurse Laurie’s Cruise.

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.

Betsy Moran, R.N.

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1964

“Special duty with a millionaire…” Nurse Betsy Moran’s roommate moaned. “I’ll never know how you managed to turn the heads of the two most eligible bachelors on the staff, to say nothing of the town’s most exciting playboy.” Judy sighed deeply, “What have you got that I haven’t?” “Oh,” said Betsy, laughing at her friend. “Let’s just say it’s a gift.”

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“R.N.s can be so crude at times.”

“She had to arouse the boy and keep him aroused lest he slip away into a coma.”

“You’re a very lovely girl, and any man would be delighted to wear you on his arm.”

“I’m just sick that I lost my temper and shot you!”

“Us nurses look pretty special in our uniforms. Bet the gals he trots around with when he’s up and on his own two feet break their necks getting all dolled up to devastate him. And when we nurses come along, all starchy-white and soothing-looking, the man does a nose-dive!”

“Sure you don’t want to marry me? It might be fun. And any time you got fed up, all you’d have to do would be to say so and you could have a divorce.”

REVIEW:
Twenty-three-year-old Betsy Moran has a way with men. She scores a date with eligible Dr. Paul Elliott, and then one with widowed surgeon Dr. Stevenson—never mind that he’s twice her age! Dr. Stevenson asks her to special wealthy playboy Dr. Ken Hargroves, who has been shot in the back by one of his girlfriends, though he won’t say who it was—and when Betsy finds out, she, too, agrees to shirk professional ethics and the law, and refuses to name the culprit. She’s perfect for the nursing job, Dr. Stevenson decides, because “Ken Hargroves would go out of his mind without a pretty girl to look at. You just be somewhere Ken can look at you when he needs to.” She does her job well, and soon Ken is putty in her hands!

Outside of her dating life, Betsy’s down time is pretty well booked with lunches every Sunday with the aging Miss Emily Wingate, a wheelchair-bound, wealthy spinster near the end of her life, and Miss Emily’s nurse, usually called Maggie by Betsy, but who surprisingly turns out to be Betsy’s mother. The Miss Emily character, angelic but fading, is a Peggy Gaddis staple, and you will not be as shocked as Betsy was to learn that she’s to inherit $100,000 when Miss Emily dies. But her visits to Miss Emily are not so damaging to her social life, after all; she is nearly in a car wreck in Miss E’s driveway, and the young attorney driving the other car, Larry Donovan, insists that she go out with him. Which she does, once, even if the guy is a bit of an ass, becoming angry at Betsy when he runs into her when she’s out on a date with Dr. Paul—but she gets all frosty and refuses to say she won’t go out with Larry again when Paul asks her not to. Curiously, when Larry crashes a lunch at Miss Emily’s house to see Betsy—he tells her, “When I see something I want I go after it, with no holds barred,” forgetting that she might have something to say about it—the dowager asks Betsy not to see Larry, and she insists that she’s not at all interested in the cad, saying that he does not have “the kind of charm that would appeal to me. You don’t have to worry about him. I’ll even promise never to date him again, if it will ease your mind.”

Betsy even has a fair amount of nursing to do, between lying to the suicide victim and telling him he’s going to be fine when everyone knows he’s going to die in about ten minutes, and trying to get the unmarried forty-something career woman Doris Lathrop, hospitalized for atherosclerosis, to stop having temper tantrums, which seem to give her seizures and heart attacks. But not to worry, a man shows up out of the blue with a bouquet of flowers for Doris, so she enthusiastically agrees to give up her career, move to Florida, and marry a man she hasn’t seen in years, and didn’t look twice at when she did know him. Life’s problems solved!

Eventually one of Betsy’s many suitors proposes, on their third date, and then we have two pages of swooning and smooching. And that’s about all there is to this book. It’s not badly written, although on every other page Betsy’s eyes are widening, or she’s staring “round-eyed.” The patients’ story lines are hackneyed and certainly condescending to Doris Lathrop, who isn’t happy until she trades her career for a man. Peggy Gaddis has given us more treacly porridges to choke on in the past, and this isn’t quite as bad as some of her books, but really, that’s not much of reason to spend any time with Betsy Moran, R.N.

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. 

Seaside Hospital

By Pauline Ash, ©1964
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

As a nurse, Lisa Bryant knew the importance of treatment for kleptomania, but when she found that her own sister was suffering from it she didn’t know who to turn to—well, she did know, but she was determined not to drag Doctor Randall Carson into it.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“For a girl with such an innocent face, you certainly manage to get men to run around and do things for you.” 

REVIEW:
The first pages of this book bring Nurse Lisa Bryant’s younger sister Jacky, who has been incommunicado for three years, back into her life with a bang. “Do you know,” Jacky trills, “that’s the first time I’ve seen you in nurse’s uniform! Isn’t it perfectly hideous?” We are not surprised to learn that Jacky “takes, all the time, and has very little to give back”—but Jacky takes literally, and has swiped a solid gold cigarette case that Lisa has to get out of the pawn shop to save Jacky from ruin. And you will not be surprised that Lisa is eventually suspected to be the thief, which is how these klepto stories usually go (see The Case for Nurse Sheridan and Nurse’sDilemma). But here we have a new twist, in that the man Jacky has been stealing from was her boyfriend, who tells Lisa, when she nobly returns the case, that he won’t call the cops if Lisa will “be a hostess, a companion—which she had had to agree to as the price for Jacky’s freedom.” Ew. 

Well, she has some free time, because she’s just been jilted by gadabout Derek Frenton. You have to acknowledge that he has a point when he tells her, “You adore hard work, or else you wouldn’t be so keen on staying at that hospital of yours until you qualify, marriage or no marriage. As for myself, I’ve never done a day’s work in my life, and a working wife would bore me as badly as I should bore her. I know you’ll be sensible about this, so let’s call it quits, shall we?” The knife in the back, though, is that he’s fallen for Jacky, the louse!

She also has a run-in with Dr. Randall Carson, who is “the most important (and the most short-tempered) surgeon at St. Mildred’s,” and wouldn’t you know, the man always seems to be picking on her. “She wished he wouldn’t keep watching her. It almost made her do stupid things. She tried to assess the thoughts going on behind that lean dark face of his, and wondered what he was feeling behind those cold, slate-grey eyes. He was so efficient himself that he just hadn’t patience with anyone who hadn’t achieved the standard of perfection, she supposed.” He is, in a word, horrible—so guess who Lisa develops a crush on?

Unfortunately, Lisa perseveres with her near-suicidal compunction to clean up after Jacky, which means she gets tangled up in all sorts of bad situations, such as when Derek Frenton’s mother’s jeweled brooch is stolen at a house party, and when another cad that Jacky had been dating decides he’d rather go out with fresh, unspoiled Lisa and blackmails her to make her go along with the plan. We know the eventual assault is coming, but alas, Lisa does not.

It’s a fairly convoluted story, with all the secrets and entanglements and coverups, that it’s a little hard to keep track of who knows what, and which lie is being told to whom. Meanwhile, there’s a young boy who’s been run over, and wouldn’t you know it, Jacky’s tangled up in that, too, having attempted to steal a diamond ring from the mother right before the accident, but now the parents are not coming forward to claim their mangled son, and Lisa is playing detective to try to track them down. Of course, through all of this, Lisa tries to keep Randall from thinking the worst of her—with little success, as he is always on hand when she is getting into or out of one man’s car or another. Eventually she takes Randall into her confidence and tells him the truth, so they decide they are going to have Jacky committed, and as Jacky attempts to sneak away before they can capture her, there’s a scene on the beach with the tide coming in, and Lisa and Jacky are trapped in a cave, while the police are closing in on them as well as on the blackmailing beau, who is wanted by the cops (surprise!). Of course, Lisa takes a tumble from the cliff while attempting to go for help, but that’s just the usual clever ploy to snag her man in the end.

I was hopeful from the first sentence: “Casualty was almost empty after a really busy Monday, when they brought in the man who was to play such havoc in Lisa Bryant’s life.” The rest of the book was not as quite as interesting, particularly when they trotted out the klepto relative with the covering nurse storyline, and the plot did get a bit bogged down in the end. But overall it was a quick-paced, lively and pleasant enough book. I could swear I’ve read this trapped-in-a-cave bit, too, but I couldn’t find it – no worries, that will pop up again, I’m sure, along with another kleptomaniac and an aloof, older doctor you can’t imagine anyone would reasonably fall in love with!

Penthouse Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1974
Cover illustration by Allan Kass 

Actually, it was a dream assignment—private duty nurse to wealthy Jim Orr in his lavish penthouse. But to Carrie Linden it meant only a chance to work with Ken Delaney, Jim’s doctor—a chance to be near the man she secretly loved. Perhaps then their friendship might grow into something more. But Ken treated her as just an old friend and a capable, dedicated nurse. But Dr. Michael Carlisle saw her differently, and Carrie, feeling so lonely, found herself accepting his persistent attentions. Soon she became more and more drawn to the suave and handsome doctor, yet the image of Ken still haunted her daydreams. Was she being a romantic fool to think that Ken would ever care for her? Or should she erase him from her life—and her heart?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“If he had known that all nurses aren’t fat and forty, he’d have cooperated long ago, right, Jim?” 

“Believe me, darling, I love you!”

REVIEW:
Nurse Carrie Linden is back in Chicago after two years at home in Bend, Oregon, caring for her terminally ill mother, who had finally succumbed to her disease. Carrie’s first stop, after that seedy hotel where she dumped her bags, is Dr. Ken Delaney’s office, where she hopes to get a glimpse of the heartthrob she left behind. “There was no reason to believe that Ken Delaney repeated her name in his daydreams like Carrie repeated his. Every day, every night—for two interminable and lonely years.” But here she is, cooling her heels in his lavishly decorated reception area, waiting for him to show up so she can beg him to marry her—no, wait, she just wants a job in his office where she can stare adoringly at him every single day. Amazingly, he remembers her with enthusiasm and takes her to dinner—and also invites his partner, Dr. Mike Carlisle, who has a cardiac patient who needs immediate specialized care. Ken warns Carrie, though, that he and the office receptionist “dig each other,” though they’re not engaged or anything, because who wants to get married? (Women do, Carrie replies, and this seems to be news to Ken.) He also tells her, “Be forewarned, naïve little country chick from Oregon. Michael Carlisle is one guy you don’t get serious about. Got that?”

Mike proves to have been accurately drawn, looking Carrie over with appreciation at their introduction, calling her “dear,” and asking her out. He also offers her the job caring for high-flying ad man Jim Orr, who has coronary artery disease, and is about three martinis and a four-hour client meeting from dropping dead of a heart attack. It’s Carrie’s job to make sure that Jim does absolutely nothing interesting, drink absolutely nothing but water, and eat absolutely nothing that tastes good. Reluctantly she signs on—maybe she’ll get to see Ken once in a while!—but it soon proves that she is unable to keep poor Jim from behaving, and frankly she’s starting to see his point that “if I do follow doctor’s orders, I’ll be miserable. In which case I may as well be dead.”

Jim’s wife, Sheila, is an over-the-top glamour puss who flings her minks any old place, quaffs Manhattans like the pro she is, and flits around shouting, “Darling!” She has also risen up through the ranks at the advertising agency and is now doing Jim’s old job, and there’s a bit of discussion about whether that’s proper: “If she was any kind of a woman she wouldn’t be doin’ it herself. One minute fussin’ over him an’ kissin’ him, then the next minute she’s rushin’ off to get herself all gussied up to go to some big, important ‘meeting,’” grumbles the housekeeper, Mrs. Groscuth. “One thing she could do is her own cookin’ and pill-givin’, like any decent woman would.” But Sheila must have some talent for the ad job or she wouldn’t have been promoted, an obvious conclusion we readers quickly reach, and Carrie valiantly points out that it takes a lot of income to support a housekeeper, nurse, penthouse, Ferrari, and yacht, as Sheila is now single-handedly doing. The problem is that Sheila is an unsympathetic, phony character, so it’s not difficult to agree that she should be doing more for her husband—and the fact that Sheila is having an affair with her boss doesn’t win her any points.

Interestingly, the book insists that forcing a capable, intelligent person to sit around the house doing nothing all day is not a good way to “save” their life. “A man’s got pride and wants to do for himself. Makes him feel like a poor cripple,” blunders the well-intentioned Mrs. Groscuth. That same principle, however, does not seem to apply to Sheila, who is belittled because she refuses to quit her job and wait on her husband.

Carrie decides on day two that she wants to quit, but Mike convinces her to stay on a little longer, and takes her out on a few dates and makes her feel wanted and attractive. He’s aware that she’s in love with Ken, and puts little pressure on her outside of roses on a daily basis and one smooch in the car before she sets him straight, after which he is admirably hands-off. Then, while he’s out of town at a “medical conference” that’s to last 17 days, Carrie agrees to let Jim work secretly work on an ad campaign, and it turns out that the only medication he needed was a yellow legal pad and a pencil, because Jim is now a chastened man: He exercises, gives up alcohol, and devours the unsalted food Mrs. Groscuth reluctantly prepares for him.

All the various personal entanglements erupt in one Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? scene in which the characters are gathered in Jim’s living room for a party. Sheila’s affair is trotted out, and her boss slinks out the door and back to his family. Jim learns that the brilliant print advertising campaign he’s concocted is irrelevant because the company has decided to go with TV instead. Mike is revealed to be in Boston settling the alimony on his first wife, and his second wife—to whom he is still married—and ten-year-old child are still hoping he’ll return to them. Sheila fires Carrie for having caught Sheila and her boss going at it in his Lincoln in the garage. And Ken is pulling Carrie out the door when Jim drops of the major coronary he was doomed, from the first day we met him, to suffer in the penultimate chapter.

It mostly plays out as you expect it will, if you don’t have any hopes that Sheila, the most complex character in the book, will be able to keep both her husband and her job. The sudden engagement—and in this case, very hasty wedding—at the end of a VNRN of two characters who have perhaps not even kissed until the last chapter, much less spent months or years building an actual relationship, is a frustrating aspect of the genre, and author Jane Converse has a habit of giving heroines away to men they’ve secretly pined after for years, with the man paying little or no interest until the final three pages. It’s hard to feel happy for Carrie, because her years-long infatuation with a man 2,000 miles away, as Ken was for the two years prior to the story opening, seems pathetic at best and unhinged at worst. That her hopeless devotion is ultimately rewarded is a sick message to give the reader, and my only (admittedly very minor) consolation here is that Carrie never tries to talk herself into a relationship with Mike. It’s not the worst Jane Converse novel I’ve ever read, but if it’s not the basement, it’s not what you’d expect from the penthouse.

Children’s Hospital

By Elizabeth Gilzean, ©1960
Cover illustration by Jack Harmon 

Sandra Lorraine took great pride in her children’s ward at St. Christopher’s and she resented the “new broom” methods of the new consultant, Peter Donaldson. There were many clashes between them before they came to understand each other.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“She got a clean cup out of the cupboard, filled it, sugared it and passed it to Matron. She seemed to be spending a lot of time resuscitating senior hospital staff.” 

“It was one of those wild coincidences that only happen in real life.”

“All the ward Sisters I’ve known have been hatchet-faced women who come around with little books asking you the most intimate questions.”

REVIEW:
Sandra Lorraine is perhaps one the oldest heroines I have met in 10 years of VNRN reviews. She is a shocking 26, and has been ward chief the Westwood Ward of Saint Christopher’s Hospital for years when we meet her. She has no friends, certainly no boyfriends, and she’s estranged from her father, who is off honeymooning with a woman she can’t stand. Her entire life is going to work and her pediatric patients: “They were her world and no one could touch it.” 

Then surgeon Peter Donaldson appears and shakes up her tidy little cocoon. This audacious man wants to do rounds in the afternoon instead of the morning, wants to allow parents on the ward even when it is not visiting hours, and asks her to work through her lunch hour! Furthermore, he has a grand scheme to add adult patients to the mix at Saint Christopher’s with the idea that this will improve the hospital’s chances of survival. Outrageous! He is equally disgusted with her views: “I don’t know whether you realize it, but you’re a dangerous menace to medical progress,” he tells her. And he kind of has a point. “Never in her life had she been so insulted, upset, hauled over the coals, blackmailed, provoked, stimulated, attracted, or repelled by any man.” So it is clear where all this is heading. She is a good nurse, however, and Dr. Donaldson sees potential in her that he attempts to draw out by any means necessary. “I feel that only shock tactics will jolt you out of your smug little rut and make a worthwhile human being out of you,” he tells her when he takes her out for coffee on their first date.

Interestingly, she rises to the challenge. “She did not like change ... she did not even want it. But wasn’t there something exciting about the challenge he had thrown her? The prospect of building up a new unit, the spur of grappling with different problems, of learning more so that she could help her beloved children to better advantage ... she would enjoy it, wouldn’t she?” And gradually she comes to appreciate her new boss’s techniques. There are challenges along the way, however, one of them being a new surgeon who joins the team. Gordon Rainswick is a fellow who leaves Sandra “shaking with terror,” though why that might be is never clearly spelled out to us. He’s a wolfish sort, though, so it’s not hard to guess. Peter, seeing Sandra’s overwrought response to the man, asks if she needs help, but here we have an admirable gesture from writer Elizabeth Gilzean, who has Sandra decide not to cut and run but to stand her ground. “If only she could slip a note of resignation under Matron’s door and quietly disappear, but that could be no way out for her. She could imagine the scorn, and even the disappointment, that would be on Peter Donaldson’s face if she chose the easy way out. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she had been doing that all her life, but he had thrown the challenge at her feet. Having picked it up she could no longer deny its implications. She had to prove she was worthy to be his ward Sister, equal to the increased responsibilities he had been placing on her shoulders, mature enough to cope with the problems, not only of her professional life, but also of her private life.”

And that, unfortunately, is the high point of the book. In reality, Sandra talks a good talk, and even agrees to meet Gordon to have it out with him, but they immediately get into a car crash and she’s saved from having to actually do anything. Nor is it ever clear exactly what the problem is, though it’s insinuated that at some point in the past he’d gotten her into a compromising situation and, even if nothing happened, the trauma of the potential ruin of her reputation leaves her a quivering jelly. The fact that he’s her new stepmother’s cousin seems also to play into the unseen scandal, as does the fact that she resents her father’s new wife, but that’s never explained, either. Instead, Peter’s mother tells a story of how she was coerced into a similar situation decades ago and escaped by throwing a chair and jumping out a window. And from then on Sandra is wreathed in smiles and can finally return the love that Peter has been desperately trying to shower her with from early on in the book (though she maddeningly pretends, “He showed no signs of even approving of her most of the time.” I don’t know what’s wrong with these heroines who appear to be in a completely different book than the one we are reading.).

Compounding my disappointment in Sandra is the fact that she’s also dealing with Annette, a nurse on her ward who’s surly and insubordinate, and though she promises Peter that she is up to handle the challenge, when the nurse (for about the tenth time) lets loose with a long paragraph of invective, it’s one of the hospital doctors—who is bafflingly in love with this woman, who is just as mean to him as she is to Sandra—who swoops in to save the day. Adding to my dismay is the fact that he carries the moment by grabbing Annette’s arm tightly and dragging her forcefully out of the room. “Sandra saw that her staff nurse was gazing at John Carruthers as if he were a stranger, a stranger who had suddenly appeared fascinating. Annette’s eyes widened in startled surprise before following meekly in the wake of a man who appeared to have belatedly discovered how to handle it.”

Another problematic incident occurs when Sandra is asked to give a speech before the hospital’s board of directors about whether the hospital should admit adults. She waffles before her speech about whether she actually thinks it’s the horrible idea she believed it at book’s open, influenced no doubt by the fact that Peter is in favor of it, but he tells her to stick to her guns and give it her all. She delivers a heartfelt speech about caring for children, and the hospital board decides to keep the adults away. Then it’s suggested that Peter might have actually changed his mind for once and now agrees with Sandra, but again, it’s hard to tell if that’s the case, because the story never comes out and tells us.

Peter is an affectionate beau, and it’s not clear why he keeps after cold Sandra, who even when they are engaged cannot tell him she loves him until ten pages later, though he’s altogether soggy with affection. Those last pages become especially excruciating when rainbows and unicorns start turning up everywhere: “Sandra tried to subdue the feeling of excitement which was bubbling up inside her, threatening to overflow like a child’s bowl of soap bubbles, and her happiness was painting the bubbles with fairy colors.” And that’s just one sentence. Overall it’s not a terrible book, one that hints at good intentions, but nevertheless it is regularly disappointing, with bland, trite characters—in particular our heroine, who lives in a shell and never actually comes out of it, for all the suggestions to the contrary. If author Elizabeth Gilzean wrote with more conviction and endowed her characters with it, this would have been a much better book.  

A Prize for Nurse Darci

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1965

Darci Betton loved being a nurse, but at the writers’ conference she discovered a glamorous new world. It almost made her forget Dr. Mark Garrett whose last angry words were branded on her heart. When Jerome Sinclair, the famous writer and Darci’s private idol, showed more than a passing interest, Darci’s new world seemed perfect. Would a new love help her forget the old?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“You wouldn’t want us coming on duty without our coffee, would you doctor? We might give a heart stimulant to that patient who sneaks liquor into his room, and then you’d really have something to complain about.” 

“I’m not even so sure it’s a good thing for the patients to read poetry. Maybe they ought to be resting instead of reading.”

“Being around you makes me want to go out and get myself a job in a munitions factory. I feel as if I’d like to help murder the human race, instead of trying to help it.”

“Look here, I was about to kiss you. And suddenly you’re telling me I ought to have X-rays or something! What kind of a romance is this, for Pete’s sake?”

“Darci almost wished she had fainted. It would have been so nice to be in his arms and be carried to the couch and worried about.”

REVIEW:
I will confess that I’ve had this book on my shelf for some time but have been loath to pick it up, because my experience with Suzanne Roberts has not been particularly enjoyable. Unfortunately, she’s written at least 14 nurse novels, of which I’ve endured only half (every one of them earning a C grade of some sort), and though it’s all right for you to steer clear, it’s my self-appointed job to plow through these bombs—and hopefully my pain will save you some. To that end, let this stand as a warning to avoid drippy Darci Anne Betton, who is a shallow, spineless, insipid patsy. 

She is, though, a very dedicated nurse, and when the new ward resident, Dr. Mark Garrett, shows up, she’s determined to impress him. But he’s a mean, nasty tyrant who has imposed a slate of new rules for the floor—including a three-minute time limit for coffee breaks, even though it takes five minutes to get from the 10th floor ward to the cafeteria. Of course, it’s utterly unrealistic that a doctor could have the authority to insist on these things, and this one’s only a resident, not even an attending! Every nurse on the floor is putting in for transfers except Darci, who thinks, “When he doesn’t look angry—he has the nicest mouth”—the trouble being that he always looks angry.

The good news is that she’s won a story-writing contest, and the prize is free tuition at a writer’s conference, which miraculously falls on exactly the same two weeks as her upcoming vacation. The big draw for the conference is famous but fading writer Jerry Sinclair, who phones Darci at 3:00 a.m. to ask her to pick him up at the airport and have dinner with him. Instead of banging down the receiver on the inconsiderate, selfish ass, “She closed her eyes, joy going through her. ‘I’ll meet your plane, Mr. Sinclair,’ she said eagerly.”

Meeting the man, it is clear that he is a horror show—for starters, he doesn’t let her drive her own car. He’s a slimy type out to use Darci for his own purposes, and it’s certainly not hard to imagine why a writer might be pumping this naïve young woman for details about working in a hospital. Darci, curiously, sees it too—but when he takes her parking, “it might have been pure feminine instinct that made Darci sit very still, not talking, her hand as quiet as a tame bird, there in Jerry’s.” We are not surprised to find, then, that she absolutely cannot say no to the man, and instead foolishly seems to be talking herself into falling in love with him: “Am I falling in love with him? And, she wondered, if this was love. She had even mentioned the possibility that she might be in love. At the time, she had felt a little bit foolish. But now she wasn’t sorry at all she had written to her girlfriend and admitted she might be in love. Because right now, at this very moment, whatever it was she was feeling was either love or hero worship.”

Whatever it was, Jerry quickly proves himself deserving of neither, as he monopolizes her time, manipulates and guilts her into seeing him, and repeatedly insists he’s completely dependent on Darci—and he treats the conference students cruelly and unprofessionally, as well. “I was shook up because I’d phoned you and you didn’t answer my calls. That made me everything seem so—hopeless,” the stalker tells her, jealous of the time she spent writing a letter to her roommate. “Just stay with me. I need you, little girl.” Rather than run to the police department and file for a restraining order, Darci the Dope thinks, “He was probably one of the most intelligent and fascinating men in the world. Wasn’t it true that what she had was the beginning of a very hard crush on this man? And wasn’t it also true that their beloved image of Jerry had begun to fade?” Because Darci always wants to have everything both ways, even fantasizing about grumpy Dr. Garrett, who suddenly “seemed both challenging and exciting.” She has two assholes in her life, and “they were both strangely secretive and moody, and yet, Darci felt an odd tenderness and warmth towards both of them.”

As Jerry pumps her harder for details about the hospital, even Darci starts to edge away—but when the conference ends, Jerry cons her into allowing him to move to her hometown and show him around the hospital. She fears Jerry is writing an expose about the hospital, but nonetheless dutifully trots him around the hospital and introduces him to everyone. Lo and behold, Jerry eventually admits he is writing a scandalous tell-all. “Darci felt an odd sensation of fear go through her. She felt like running from Jerry in that moment and yet, he wasn’t really mean or cruel, or even cunning.” I’m not sure who she’s fooling, because we have seen him be all these things—frankly, seldom is he anything else.

Since she came home lugging Jerry Sinclair with her, Dr. Garrett has been especially frosty. But that never stops Darci—suddenly “she was in love with him. She was in love with that cold, angry man who could be so gentle with a patient but so unbending with the girl who worked side by side with him all day long.” Nurse Darci Betton is a bona fide nut case. But Mark won’t date her, so she keeps going out with her other lunatic. In his room, waiting for Jerry while he showers before another of their dates, she finds his manuscript and reads the lurid tell-all he’s written, which includes a near-miss medication error of her roommate’s, and the suggestion that at a prior job Mark’s negligence had killed a patient. Who saw that coming? Again proving herself psychotic, she wonders, “Could she still go on loving Mark if what Jerry had written was true? […] Darci tried to think more kindly of Jerry.” Really, this woman should just start dating axe murderers and be done with it.

She runs to Mark’s apartment to warn him and he tells her the story Jerry has uncovered—as an intern he had witnessed a car crash, pulled a victim from the wreckage, and the woman had died shortly afterward. This is the sort of “scandal” that frequently befalls people in nurse novels—they can’t in any way be blamed for it, but the hospital turns their actions into a terrible crime, making it a pathetic cop out. The pair end up kissing, and the next day Darci is a wreck, because “the two of them made rounds, attended patients, subbed in Emergency during noon time, and nothing at all was said. No plans were made for the future.” Apparently one kiss means it’s time to start picking out china patterns—not in the coming months, but immediately, and never mind the important work they should be concentrating on. “How can I talk to you about marrying me?” Mark rightfully asks, less than 24 hours after their first kiss—even if “it was a stop-the-world kind of kiss.”

Darci is in love with love, and getting married is her main objective—she’ll talk herself into the first ogre that comes along, and we should not be surprised, because on page three of this book we’re told “Neither girl was in love, but, of course, both of them hoped to be. Falling in love at the Center was something just about every nurse did.” Even her “plump” roommate is planning a wedding, to a patient whose sling she’d changed a couple weeks earlier. This book paints a horrific picture of the lives of young women, not to mention marriage, and I shudder to think of all the kids who’d read this fifty years ago and imagined that this was what they were supposed to be—compliant yet grasping, blind bits of putty whose main objective was to convince a man—any man, no matter how unworthy or even insane—to slip a diamond onto her hand. This book is just depressing.

Nurse Julie of Ward Three

By Joan Callender, ©1964

Julie Doran had been very happy in the busy, peaceful atmosphere of the geriatric ward, caring for her aged patients and on the friendliest of terms with the physician-in-charge, Hal Gardiner. But everything changed for the worse when Annette marsh came on in charge of the ward. Was it Julie’s fault—and if so, what she to do about it?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“If she did not marry, she would undoubtedly reach the heights of her profession.” 

“For one preparing to cope with Dr. Blake, a little trouble with Mrs. Forrester seemed like child’s play. The hazards of life on Ward Three were as nothing compared with the hazards of Life.”

“Having thus made up her mind, in what she in imagined was a perfectly calm and logical manner, to throw away her career and her opportunities to be near the man she loved, she found she had nothing to do for the moment.”

“You look different. Not tired, exactly, but subdued. Has anyone been subduing you?”

“Surely he must have his doubts and fears, like everyone else? Even Matron had her moments of anxiety, which she relieved by talking to her pet cat. Perhaps Doctor Gardiner kept goldfish, or something. Perhaps he sat in an easy chair and watched them swimming round and round in a huge glass bowl. Perhaps he confided in Annette. Personally, she would have preferred the goldfish.”

“She did not expect to be successful in arguing with a man with whom she could not even discuss the weather in a natural manner.”

“You won’t go all cold and haughty again, will you? My nerves wouldn’t stand it.”

“Just in time, she remembered that today she was beautiful. Beautiful people could go anywhere.”

“It’s a pity you have to change into your uniform. That dress would make any patient feel better.”

“You see what I mean, Gill? That’s exactly how you behave when you’re in the throes of a romance. Touchy.”

“The voice of common sense has little hope of being heard above the wild, glad music of love.”

“Weeping solved no problems. It just left ugly marks on the face and a sense of shame on the mind.”

“I must be growing disillusioned in my old age. Each batch of students seems sillier than the last, these days.”

“It was a stare which would have paralyzed a lesser man.”

REVIEW:
When we first meet Julie Doran, she is three months out from graduation and is working on the geriatric ward. Unfortunately, her sweet aged patients have little regard for the niceties of protocol when the doctor is rounding and will insist on singing loudly in the bath, much to Julie’s consternation. But nice Dr. Hal Gardiner has visited the ward more than once and understands the old biddies. “They’ve lived too long to care about our little rules and regulations,” he says. “When you’ve been here for three years, you’ll have discovered what is important, and what is not, in this type of work.” 

Unsurprisingly, life is about to get more complicated for Julie. Motherly head nurse Crompton of the ward is the loser in a bicycle versus car encounter and is sidelined for several months, which means nurse Annette Marsh is sent up from surgery in the interim. Annette is “a remote, glamorous figure” who “made no secret of the fact that she considered most of those with whom she came into contact as being greatly inferior to herself. She could be kind, in a lofty way, and she was certainly efficient, but her manner in general was that of a queen forced among peasants.” When Julie politely remarks that she hopes Annette will enjoy work on the ward, Annette responds, “I don’t expect to.” She does not share Dr. Gardiner’s charitable attitude toward codgers: “Old people are selfish. The care for nothing but their own comfort,” she snaps. Naturally, Julie—and indeed most of the other ward staff—does not appreciate Annette’s gifts.

Another complication is her growing esteem for Dr. Gardiner. It’s a sweet crush that grows organically: First she is over-analyzing a trivial exchange for deep hidden meaning, then briefly tries to talk herself out of it (“she was glad she had discovered this weakness in herself for gray eyes. In future she would be on her guard against it”), but that doesn’t last long. “Having failed, the night before, to be sensible about Hal Gardiner, she had found such joy in not being sensible that she was no longer attempting to reason with herself. She was going to see him again soon, and if that knowledge gave her pleasure, she was doing no wrong, she told herself, in admitting it.” The wrenches in the works are: number one, Dr. Gardiner’s relationship with Annette, as it seems the pair are not complete strangers; “there was certainly an undercurrent of tension between those two. At times, they seemed to be fighting a duel of words. Did they secretly enjoy these encounters, or were they natural antagonists?” You can sense the coming misunderstanding of the relationship a mile away. Number two is Dr. Gavin Blake, who has arrived to work alongside Dr. Gardiner for a few months and thinks Julie is a plump gazelle waiting to be chased, though he leaves her cold. “She would tell him that he was embarrassing her, and that she preferred him to leave her alone. Once she had made her feelings quite clear to him, he would surely not persist.” Oh, think again, honey.

But the obvious idea of putting Gavin together with Annette occurs to Julie: Not only would this solve two of her problems at once, but the pair are perfect for each other. “They belonged together, male and female of the same breed. Physically they complemented each other, but there was something else, something in the nature of each that was partnered by the other.” Perhaps it’s that Gavin “was sometimes strangely lacking in perception of other people’s feelings,” while for her part, Annette “seemed to be incapable of understanding the feelings of other people.” (These two descriptions occur 40 pages apart, and made for a nice echo through the text.)

The crisis comes when Julie is having a bad day on the wards—one of the more senile old ladies accuses her of poisoning the boiled potatoes—and while having a good cry, she runs into Gavin, who mops her face as good friends do, but kisses her as good friends don’t. The next day, when she tells Hal she can’t go with him to the beach because her day off has been cancelled (which is the truth), he tells her he doesn’t want to go out with her any more. She is caught completely off-guard, though we are instantly certain that he witnessed the scene with Gavin. Sad and lonely, she agrees to go on platonic drives with Gavin, until the day he decides to pull the car into a secluded lane and says, “I expected you to be a little more—adult. Let’s find out just how adult you are.” Interestingly, here is one of the few times I have seen an unsolicited kiss described appropriately: “To be in his arms was to be imprisoned, to feel his mouth on hers was to suffer an assault,” Julie thinks. So what does she do? “She remained passive, waiting for him to let her go.” And he does, suggesting, “I could still change your mind. Luckily for both of us, I’ve still got a grain of sense, so I won’t do it. Persuasion is one thing, but to take advantage of someone as inexperienced as you is another,” which to me reads as if he is suggesting he could force himself on her, though I fail to comprehend how this would “change her mind.” There are more mean words after this, and only then does she fling open the car door and climb out.

A few days later she’s clubbed on the head in the dirty utility room by the crazy patient who thinks she’s being poisoned, so you imagine that this will bridge the misunderstanding between her and Hal—and it does, in a very roundabout way. The way things get pulled together in the end is, I am very sorry to say after what had heretofore been a most delightful book, abrupt, ham-handed, way too simplistic, and wildly out of character for the individual who plays the chief role in sorting everything out. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised, as Julie does on occasion behave in ways that surprise, including shouting at a patient (after she’s severely scolded another nurse for doing the same, scant pages earlier) and hurling some pretty insulting language at Annette (when she’s been subdued for most of the book, just quietly absorbing Annette’s verbal blows up to this point). Minor foibles include the fact that some points of plot are dropped (the orderly who is apparently gossiping with the patients about Julie) as are some characters (Julie’s friends Susan and Gillian), and about half the characters are only sketchily identified though they recur throughout the book, drifting in and out like ghosts in the periphery.

But any fault this book may have is more than made up for by the fabulous writing, which is frequently subtly clever and amusing, as evidenced by the lengthy list of great quotes resting atop this review. Many more lovely turns of phrase wouldn’t translate when taken out of context, such as when Julie and two of her friends are lounging by the hospital pool (!!!), and they spot Dr. Gardiner and the head nursing matron approaching. Julie is deliberately looking away, “but after a moment or two she could tell by the way her friends began to gaze blankly into space that the two had moved nearer.” The key characters are quite sharply drawn, and you really feel you know Annette, Gavin, and Hal—and Gavin is especially enjoyable. The real tragedy of the ending is that it is such a copout, and I was disappointed in author Joan Callendar for not putting in the effort to deliver us the truly stellar book that she is clearly capable of. Sadly, this appears to be the only book Ms. Callendar has published, so I cannot hope she will redeem herself in another novel. But if this book is not perfect, it nonetheless should not be overlooked.

Junior Pro

By Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton), ©1959

Before Lindsay Wood took up at nursing, she had been warned that it was hard work. What she hadn’t heard much about was the difficulty of steering one’s personal course. She did find someone to whom she felt she could turn for advice--but he was the resident medical officer, far out of the sphere of a lowly probationer. And she couldn’t quite understand his attitude, sometimes helpful, sometimes very much the reverse. How she coped with all her perplexities is told in a lively story with an authentic hospital atmosphere.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“I wished, while I was about it, that Sister Tutor had taught us a little less about finding our way around the buildings, and a little more about finding it round human situations. It seemed to me that nurses needed a good deal of practice in dealing with people, and I knew I didn’t have it.”

“I could eat you, darling, only I haven’t time.”

“It’s a good sign to be a little scared. Bad nurses never worry—they don’t know how.”

REVIEW:
How lucky for me that after coming out of the first F-grade nurse novel I’ve ever read (if you must be reminded: Jolie Benoit, R.N.), I pick up such an incredible gem as Junior Pro. This book has all the hallmarks of a true great: Lots of girlfriends, witty writing that sparkles on every page, a feisty heroine, and—a rare treat—one of the best endings I’ve ever encountered. Told in the first person, the sixth such VNRN I’ve read (but the third by Olive Norton; it seems to be a favorite trick of hers), here we meet Lindsay Wood, who is just entering her first year of training to be a nurse, making her what they call in this English hospital a “junior pro.” On the eve that the “lambs” are finishing their didactic months and being sent to the wards, though, there’s a ball. Like most VNRN hospital balls, this one is momentous, here because only one man asks her to dance. “When we did get on the floor we found ourselves in the middle of a Paul Jones [a dance in which you change partners], and I lost him after about four strides. He was just tall enough to be comfortable to dance with, and I was annoyed. Nobody came to claim me, and I went back behind my pillar.” He turns up later, though, apologetic, and takes her for a drive. When he finds out she is just a brand-new student, instead of mussing her lipstick, he starts the car. “Home, Madam?” he asks, and she replies, “Home, James,” and when they arrive at the nurses’ home, “he bent his head and kissed my hand very gently, and gave it back to me as though it were something extremely fragile and very precious, instead of just thing I used to hold a tennis racquet with.”

Like many people in their first days on a new job, Lindsay lands on the wards with a splat: There is almost nothing she does right, to such an extent that her first moment of triumph is remembering to take the stairs instead of using the elevator, which is forbidden to first-years. The worst of her crimes, though, is when her chauffeur turns up on the ward dressed as the R.M.O.—that’s resident medical officer, or chief of medicine in the UK. “Good morning, James,” she says without thinking, and it turns out that it is a most serious taboo to speak to a senior medical officer when you’re only a nursing student, made even more scandalous by the fact that Dr. Findon’s first name is indeed James. But he seems to forgive her, because when it turns out that she has scored top marks in several subjects and just barely loses out on a prize given to the top student, he gives her one: a silver pin shaped like Aladdin’s—or Florence Nightingale’s—lamp, engraved “Findon prize—Nurse L. Wood.”

Over the ensuing pages we follow not exactly the most original plot line, but still a very enjoyable one as Lindsay flounders less as the days pass, tangles with Dr. Findon, goes home to visit her family on their farm in Wales, and wallows heavily in a mistake of a relationship with Dr. Jack Beresford, an incorrigible flirt who has claimed the heart of her best friend Catherine, complicating matters. But she really does like kissing Jack! Which makes her agree when he vaguely suggests that they marry, though she comes to her senses a few pages later, thinking it would be better to have Catherine than Jack—but then, dang it, he kisses her again, and she loses her head once more. And again, the next morning, when Jack comes around to plan the wedding, she insists—as she has done throughout the book—that she is going to finish her training and get her nursing degree, which will take three more years. Hearing this news, Jack “sulked.” When Catherine pins Lindsay down later on, Lindsay insists it’s over: “He made it clear, then, that he wouldn’t hear of my finishing my training before I settled down. That changed the whole thing. Because nothing and nobody is going to stop me from getting State Registered. If he isn’t satisfied with that, then it’s no go. And he isn’t.” You go, girl!

Lindsay is a heroine we can adore because she is not perfect, but she honestly works very hard and she has a good heart. She is forced to give up her beloved Findon prize pin when a misunderstanding causes her to be suspected of stealing a brooch that a patient has given her, and when months later the nursing matron says she has earned it back, Lindsay disagrees: “James still doesn’t think I come up to some standard of his own,” she decides to herself. “So I can’t wear his badge because it would burn a resentful hole in my apron. I know whether I’m ready to have it or not, better than anyone. And I’m not.” Toward the end there is the usual catastrophe when the hospital’s old smokestack falls in a storm, landing on an ambulance, and Lindsay, who is on the admitting desk in the ED with Dr. Findon, crawls through the broken window in the ambulance door and gives the trapped patient inside a hypodermic of morphine, talked through the procedure by Dr. Findon—and later she asks to be marked off for having given an injection, the spunky lass! When she is on night duty, she uses the quiet hours to study her butt off, because she is deeply passionate about medicine, much more so than surgery: “The way I saw it, medicine was so much more complicated and important than merely tailoring people’s insides neatly. Medicine took skill, and brains, and patience, and selflessness.” 

The writing here is not so much laugh-out-loud funny but just constantly and quietly sparkling: “I thought our off-duty time was a mad scheme to let us relax,” Lindsay says to a chum who wants to use her time to study; “I spend my life in here, mopping up Sister Badger’s casualties. Better women then you have wept upon this manly bosom, I can assure you,” Jack tells Lindsay after he finds her crying in the linen closet on a particularly bad day; “I expected to pass out, and I didn’t. There was too much competition,” Lindsay says of her first day in the OR, in which the surgeon faints; “Thanks for mopping the fevered brow,” Lindsay says to a friend when she’s recovering from the chimney crash. The ending is a true, rare prize in VNRN literature, in which Dr. Findon tells Lindsay that one of her most attractive qualities for him is her dedication to nursing. He gives her a Gloria Steinem–worthy speech about her rights to be “a person in your own right,” and agrees to wait for her to finish her three years of training before they marry (though in retrospect it’s not clear why they can’t marry while she’s a student). I dropped bona fide tears at multiple points through this book, the ending most of all. This book is not to be missed; if Lindsay Wood is only a junior pro, author Olive Norton is a pro of the most senior sort, and if her many other nurse heroines are even half as perfect as Lindsay, I look forward to meeting them.

Nurse Stacey Comes Aboard

By Rona Randall, ©1958

Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

Janet Stacey could not believe it when Peter Fuller broke their engagement. He told her that it would be unfair of him with so little income to ruin her chances for a “successful” marriage. Only a girl as much in love as Janet could have failed to read between the lines of such an excuse. As it was, she asked her uncle, owner of a shipping line, to employ her as assistant nurse on the luxury liner Regina, on which Peter was taking a business trip to New York. She thought that if she saw him every day she would be bound to win him back. In this innocent hope she reckoned not only without Peter himself, but without the ship’s doctor, Blane Hartley, who despised all girls in general, and Janet, the privileged niece of the shipowner, in particular.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“The best cure for sea-sickness is champagne.”

“No man who wanted to get on in the world could afford pride, these days. Not if he hoped to afford a wife, too.”

“When I was young I could spend a couple of hours choosing between only two frocks!”

“How one man could hope to stand up against two women Maude couldn’t imagine!”

“I’m off to get that dress material. We could cut it out on the surgery table this afternoon. How about it?”

“I’m always rude myself, and enjoy it, so of course I must excuse the fault in others!”

“Every woman is hurt, at some time or another. It’s better for them to experience it when young. They grow into better women because of it.”

REVIEW:
When we first meet Janet Stacey, she is being jilted by ne’er-do-well Peter Fuller, who says that he can’t marry her because he cannot support her in the lifestyle to which she has been accustomed. And also because her father had let his very considerable life insurance policy lapse, “most unfairly,” Peter grouses. Valiantly attempting to change his mind, she reminds him that she can get a job as a nurse. “Nursing for amusement is one thing,” he says, and so, right there on the third page, we’d like to close the door in Peter’s face. Unfortunately, Janet Stacey is not as smart as we are. “He was all she wanted in life and nothing would ever make her stop loving him,” and though we know she will be proven wrong in the end, unfortunately it’s going to be a long and somewhat excruciating journey.

Stacey’s rich Uncle Jim has a fondness for Janet and can see through Peter, realizing that he’s dumped Janet when “he’d learned that her father’s aura of wealth had been but a façade, that she was penniless, that she wasn’t such a catch as he believed when he met her.” So when Janet asks Uncle Jim to give her a job as a nurse on the same ship on which Peter is sailing to New York on business, with the aim of proving to him that she can too hold a job, he agrees to the scheme, thinking that Peter won’t be able to resist being the adventurer he is and that Janet will finally see his true colors.

Unfortunately, the doctor on board the ship, Dr. Blane Hartley, isn’t impressed with Janet at all, because he thinks she’s a rich girl playing at a job, and “a good-time girl out for what she can get.” During their first meeting, “they looked at one another, antagonism leaping between them like an invisible current. … It was open warfare between them,” and they’re snarling insults back and forth across the surgery. Naturally we know—so smart we are!—how that is going to turn out. Dr. Blane, it seems, “was trying to escape from some emotional problem, or a disappointment which went deep—or maybe only from himself.” So many mysteries! So many tropes!

After her verbal fisticuffs with Dr. Hartley, Janet sets about proving herself, and you will not be surprised to find that she is an excellent nurse, though the only job she ever really had was caring for her dying father. Along the way she takes the nasty rich Lady Elvira Travitt in hand, which turns out to be not too difficult because Lady Travitt, too, has a mushy center: “The first thing Janet noticed about her was the guarded expression of her eyes, as if she determined to allow no one a glimpse of her heart, and the second thing was the tightly maintained line of her mouth, as if she were afraid that if permitted to relax it would betray her. What would it do—droop pathetically? Reveal a sadness she was too proud to acknowledge?” Before long the old dragon has asked her to high tea in the first-class lounge and is plotting out her life.

There’s a beautiful young woman named Patsy Davis, whose luxurious wardrobe is described in such great detail that it isn’t long before we suspect something is amiss. Sure enough, Lady Travitt soon learns from a newspaper article that Patsy is a typist who won a beauty contest—”the only competitor actually holding the perfect measurements”—with a $2,500 prize, and now she’s blowing the wad on a round-trip ticket and one taste of the rich life. Her act quickly lures in playboy Peter, who is rushing her off her feet—and soon she’s in love with him, valiantly so, because she doesn’t believe she will ever see him again after the voyage is over, because she is no dope and can see Peter for exactly what he was—“the wrong man, of course. She knew that with the certainty and wisdom acquired in a tough school. Life had taught Patsy Davis to recognize people for what they were worth, for their character and integrity. But somewhere, somehow, Peter’s character had wavered; his sense of values had gone awry. But it didn’t make her love him any less.”

And of course it isn’t long before the hardened MD starts to bend. Though he is nothing but rude and insulting, Janet stands up to him and earns his respect: “She had sprit, at least, if nothing else. She stood up to him without insolence, answered without impertinence, and displayed a dignified sort of courage which he was forced to admire.” We learn that Blane had been engaged to Lady Travitt’s daughter Carol, who had dumped him for a “rich American—twenty years her senior and father of a grown-up family by the time she became his third, and youngest, wife,” because he was an “impresario” and had been impressed with the talent of the ambitious young woman. She’s “a star in her own right now, and didn’t need Wilmot any more,” and is getting a divorce—and she wants Blane back.

Lady Travitt turns out to be a bit Machiavellian, if not kind, when she tells Dr. Hartley that they should team up, keeping Patsy’s secret and “letting Janet find out for herself, slowly and surely, that the man she loves simply isn’t worth loving! That way, at least, her pride will be preserved. You’re not going to get the best work out of your nurse if her heart is broken.” Even more scheming is her recognition that Dr. Hartley is interested in Nurse Stacey. “She saw a lot—and she saw it clearly. To fall in love with someone else, to forget Carol completely, would be Blane’s salvation.”

So when he catches Janet sitting at his desk one evening—“she had wanted to touch his paper, sit in his chair, feel his pen between her fingers”—yes, just his pen – he swoops her up in an irresistible embrace. She tries to slap him, but he grabs her arm and pulls her toward him “until he pinioned her body close to him again. ‘You can’t escape, Nurse, so you can give up the struggle! Be still, you little fool, while I kiss you again.’” Though initially sobbing, naturally in the end she loves it, and “lay quietly in his arms,” until she tears herself loose and runs off to her room. Now there are pages of internal struggle—why, if she loves Peter, did she love being kissed by Bland? Why, if Bland hates her, did he kiss her?

The biggest problem with this book is that Janet is a complete dope. As she witnesses Peter’s first infatuation with Patsy, she nonetheless thinks, “Peter was absolutely trustworthy—she was sure of that. It didn’t matter to him that his fiancée was merely ship’s nurse, or that another girl was beautifully dressed and obviously moneyed, and that glance of his, which had seemed to observe every detail of Patsy’s appearance, had certainly held no hint of calculation.” Every letter of which is a lie. Even as she catches Peter and Patsy mooning at each other time and time again, she just thinks, “What if they were flirting a little? Her own affair with Peter was so different, elevated above all others. It was something much bigger.” Snap out of it, Janet! When the moment finally comes and Janet wonders, “just how stubbornly, and for how long, a girl could blind herself to the obvious,” we know the answer—125 dragging pages. And when Patsy unburdens herself to Janet, asking her if Peter will dump her when he finds out the truth about her, the scales fall from Janet’s eyes and she decides that she does not love Peter because she never saw him for who he really is. “She was disillusioned by his true character. She saw him as a different person, and one who no longer meant anything to her.” But guess who really is honorable, and who really does mean something to her!

The prose is fairly purple as well, with much hand-wringing and excruciating navel-gazing examinations of every possible angle of every interaction, offering moments when you have to reach for the Tums. But wrapped in all the lavender satin are some truly interesting characters, Lady Travitt and Patsy chiefly, and even Peter to some degree. It is surprisingly common that a writer will give all her skill to the supporting cast and leave the main characters flat and vapid. Janet is one such character, and Blane is just mercurial and moody, cut in the Heathcliff mold, without much real depth. So if there are some parts of this book that sparkle, they are sadly just not enough to make this book really worthwhile.