Nurse Missing

By Elizabeth Kellier, ©1961
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

When Anne Leatherington, a young R.N., accepted a private case at Craigash, an isolated ancient estate in the Scottish Highlands, she found herself confronted by one mystery after another. Suddenly, a torrent of questions overwhelmed her as she became a victim of her own curiosity. Why was her patient, the seemingly harmless, senile Mrs. McGray, terrified of her own stepson, Charles, the brooding owner of Craigash? And why was his past such a grim secret? But the darkest mystery of all was what had become of Anne’s predecessor, the previous nurse who had disappeared in curious circumstances. As Anne glimpsed the terrifying answers she would realize that the truth could destroy her and the man she had come to love.

GRADE: C

REVIEW:

Some novels are overly contrived, and this, I am sorry to report, is one of them. Anne Leatherington (speaking of contrived, how about that last name?) is a bit of a cipher as far as characters go, just sort of drifting along from one situation to another. Though she demonstrates an avid interest in interrogating everyone, she takes little actual initiative beyond that, right up until the end, when a frenzy of uncharacteristic action brings the whole mystery to a tidy close, only about 100 pages later than she should have.

Anne’s been hired to care for the elderly Mrs. McGray, who is a withered creature residing at a manor in the wilds of Scotland. En route to her new post, she’s thrust into mystery by the taxi driver, who tells Anne that the woman who previously held her position disappeared about two years ago, and hints that someone at Craigash manor “had something to do wi’ it.” Our strong, intrepid heroine is immediately overcome by the sensation that “some heavy, unseen door over at Craigash swung back reluctantly and waited for me to enter a fear-infested room that I might otherwise have escaped. Then, however, I was unaware of Fate’s stealthy hand shifting the course of my life, except perhaps as an icy finger pressed swiftly against my cheek, leaving me with a sense of uneasy anticipation and a tremor of fear which swept down my spine like a flame.” This, dear readers, is what we call over-reaction.

When Anne arrives at the manor, Martha Perryman the housekeeper perfectly channels Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca, displaying a cold and solicitous manner, severe bun, thin mouth, cold gray eyes, and monosyllabic sentences. She’s ridiculously devoted to Charles McGray, the owner of the manor, who is 30, arrogant, and rude to Anne at their first meeting. He’s involved with Stella Cunningham, a beautiful young woman with a fondness for horses and a well-shaped head—but we know that’s not going to last!

We find out the missing nurse was a friendless orphan named Gerda with a difficult German last name, but the more we learn, the more mysteries bloom: If Gerda had left the manor that cold and stormy Friday night, how did she get away from the remote spot? If someone drove her, who was it? Why did she not come for her last paycheck? What’s so difficult about the name Schwarzenberg? And then the housemaid reveals that Gerda was going to have a baby … and a photo of the missing nurse is found in Mrs. McGray’s drawer … and it’s exactly like a half-finished painting that Anne came across in an unused  room down the hall … and Mrs. McGray seems so frightened of her stepson that she tries to jump out her bedroom window one evening just to get away from him …

Suddenly, in the book’s greatest mystery, it is revealed that Anne is in love with Charles; since he has been nothing but cold, remote, and all but nonexistent in her life to date, the reason why is completely unfathomable. And shortly after that, we learn that “he was a man like the country which had nurtured and surrounded him, strong, stark, yet with sudden unexpected touches of sensitive gentleness that could catch at a woman’s heart”—touches that have not at all been evident to us. Though he does smile at Anne once; I guess that’s what she meant. Soon he’s kissing her, but through a very oblique slip so mild that only the leading actors in a VNRN would pick up on it, she reveals that she knows that he painted the missing nurse’s portrait, and now he avoids her altogether, because this is clearly dangerous and offensive information.

To fill the hours Anne goes out with local playboy Paul Harrison, who is cash-strapped and makes no bones about it. In her usual ham-handed way, Anne attempts to pump Paul for information and ends up revealing more than she learns, that she thinks Charles murdered the nurse because she was pregnant with his child. A gleam springs to Paul’s eye and he begins to speak of blackmail—and soon he’s paid off his car, which he had been on the brink of losing to the repo man!

Her career as an interrogator in shambles, Anne turns detective. She departs from Craigash on the convenient excuse that her patient has died, and heads for the nursing agency, obtaining the address they had on file for nurse Gerda. The folks at that address, it turns out, had bought the house from a Miss Schwarzenberg—but the sale occurred after Gerda had left Craigash! So Anne heads for the realtor’s office and begs for a copy of the bill of sale, which has another address for Miss Schwarzenberg. This clue is too much for our delicate Anne, and she instantly faints dead away. As soon as she recovers, however, she sets off for this new address, where she is led to Miss Schwarzenberg’s room and finds the alleged murder victim in a dressing gown reading magazines!!!

Their conversation is held off-stage, but the next scene opens with Gerda and Anne heading back to Craigash for a happy reunion between all the relevant parties. Well, maybe not so happy for some, as the guilty party snaps, “You’re more successful at amateur sleuthing than keeping your patients alive, Nurse Leatherington!” It’s a valid point. A lot of tidying up has to be done between quite a few of the characters, so as to straighten out all the loose ends and red herrings, but eventually it’s done, and all that’s left is for Anne’s man to claim her and we can close the book.

At 190 pages, this story is much too long. The slooooow revelation of the various clues in the first half makes for fairly dull reading, as the author tries to build a suspense about an issue that it’s really difficult to care about. There’s little life to the characters or the writing, almost no humor to speak of, no camp, and nothing, even with this many pages, to pin up under the Best Quotes section. Too many of Anne’s musing (but not amusing) questions pepper the story: “Was the gossip true?” “What about that portrait, anyway?” “How long would she go on?” “Had Charles ever loved any woman properly?” “Had Paul’s nonchalant remarks touched a spring that had unlocked the hidden door of truth or was I simply being rash and imaginative?” By the time I finished this book, I never wanted to see another question mark again. If it had been shorter and a little less forced, and endowed with a heroine with a bit more spine and a love interest who had at least some minor charm about him, it might have been a relatively pleasant book. But that’s a long list of ifs, so perhaps it would be best if we just acknowledge that this book doesn’t have much to recommend it.

Nurse in Crisis

By Jane Converse
(pseud. Adela Maritano), ©1966
Cover illustration by Marilyn Conover

Sherry Allen’s roommate, Nurse Melinda Collins, spent her nights sobbing and her days drinking—pursued by a shameful secret, by the inescapable consequences of a moment of heedless passion. It was only when the unhappy girl attempted a desperate way out of her trouble that Sherry learned the cause of her friend’s anguish was a man. It was then that Sherry realized that she, too, must face up to a crisis of the heart. Before it was too late, the young nurse had to choose: settle for security … or, like Melinda, take a reckless gamble on love.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Maybe it would be a breach of ethics if hospital food was palatable.” 

“I’m trying to become habit-forming, darling. A drug instead of a drag.”

REVIEW:
Sherry is 23 and single, and, therefore, getting pretty desperate to find a husband. She’s been going out with Brent Driscoll, who is 39 and has everything you could ask for in a guy: gracious manners, good breeding, wealth, numerous wide-ranging interests. Naturally she has no interest in him.

Her roommate, Melinda Collins, is the perfect nurse, and very cute, too. But something is bothering her, and she won’t say what. Melinda spends a lot of time holed up in her room sobbing, and resists Sherry’s efforts to get her to say what’s wrong. Soon Sherry starts finding empty whisky bottles in the bottom of the trash and bottles of Benzedrine on the bathroom sink.

The head nurse on her floor, Lois Lawford, is the typical single older nurse. An unattractive, graceless widow with severely combed sandy-red hair, Lois looks older than her 46 years, “perhaps because her usually ice-tinged green eyes were focused only in one direction; her job, her income, her plans for her son.” That would be three directions, but who’s counting? Through sheer hard work and determination, she has gotten her son Neil through medical school, and has plotted and planned a brilliant career for him—nothing less than brain surgery for her boy. Neil, however, has other plans. He spills them to Sherry one day at the cafeteria, shortly after he starts working at Ridgeworth Hospital: He wants to be a general practitioner working in a poor, rural neighborhood. Not exactly the stuff of his mother’s dreams. Sherry is instantly smitten, however, and though Neil pretty much ignores her, she pines for the next time they’ll pass in the halls or he’ll ask her to give the lady in room 306 a pill.

Poor Brent; unaware of her pangs for Neil, he asks Sherry to marry him. One night, when Melinda doesn’t come home after Neil chews her out for making a bad mistake that could have killed her patient, Brent is supremely kind and helpful when Sherry is sick with worry. In the heat of the crisis, Sherry agrees to be his wife. Melinda comes home all right, but when she tosses back some pills with a shot of gin the next morning, Sherry forces her to call in sick. Melinda attempts suicide, but is found at the last minute by Sherry and Brent, who again comes through in a pinch. She’s admitted to the hospital—and found to be two months pregnant!!!

Jane Converse is in high form with Nurse in Crisis. The writing is better than you usually find in a VNRN, and a pregnant near-heroine is quite a surprise—the eponymous nurse applies more to Melinda than to our heroine. The response to Melinda’s suicide attempt is a little dated—Sherry crumples up the note, as “no one needed to know that she had tried to take her own life,” and though everyone suspects the overdose was not accidental, it’s not discussed. However, when Melinda is clearly beginning to spiral out of control, Sherry attempts to talk Melinda into seeking counseling (Melinda refuses, saying, “It isn’t going to change matters one iota if I sob it out on some doctor’s couch at twenty dollars an hour.” My, how times and hourly rates have changed!) Most VNRNs have the star-crossed couple hook up in the final pages without a flutter of the heart until that point, but Jane does the best job I have seen so far in describing a severe crush: “The tight sensation in her throat when Neil came into view; her breathlessness when his arm had accidentally brushed hers that afternoon in the coffee shop!” Though the ending includes one slightly creepy angle, with Brent winding up with a 19-year-old girl who is less than half his age—and I can’t believe that’s any spoiler—on the whole Nurse in Crisis is a pretty good book.

District Nurse

By Faith Baldwin, ©1932

Ellen Adams had good reason to distrust romantic love. Part of her job as a district nurse was to take care of girls who had been betrayed by men they had loved too deeply. She had seen things most girls never saw—marriages wrecked, love lost, and passion mocked by men. But Ellen was blond, blue-eyed and beautiful. Men fell in love with her easily. In spite of what she knew and what she saw, she dreamed of marriage. As a matter of fact she dreamed a good deal about Frank Bartlett, a young and very attractive lawyer. They were in love. Their future together was understood. Ellen’s love for Frank was a glorious dream until one day a girl named Gladys said two fatal words. Gladys, bewildered and tearful, had been betrayed by a man she loved. Ellen asked her to name the man. It was then that Gladys said the words that woke Ellen from a dangerous dream.

GRADE: A

REVIEW:
The great thing about the nurse romance novels written in the ’30s and ’40s is that they don’t know they’re supposed to be formulaic, and they end up being, first and foremost, a good story. Such is the case with District Nurse, which is a fantastic, very well-written novel with a couple of small mysteries to solve and a social(ist) message—oh, yeah, and there’s a romance in there, too.

It’s the Depression, back in the day when last names conferred an actual nationality. Ellen Adams is 24, her sister Nancy is 20. (So they’re English, about the only ones in the book.) Ellen is a nurse for the Visiting Nurses Association. As such, she knows everyone in the neighborhood: immigrant Ike, who sells fruit from a pushcart; Italian Joe, who fixes her shoes; German Herman, “the small round son of the man known to the neighborhood as Accordion Al.” Mrs. Lenz speaks German (“Gott behüte! Ganz verrückt!”) and Mrs. Lippinsky is Jewish (“I’m telling you, I vonder. Meshugge, that one…”). They may be of foreign origin, but the book never looks down on them for it; Ellen is frustrated with Mrs. Lenz for giving her son a bellyache with hotdogs and ice cream, but she’s never disgusted.

Ellen meets her true love while chatting with the neighborhood truant, eight-year-old Bill, about his new-found puppy. The dog escapes into the street and is almost run over by Frank Bartlett. “ ‘Why, God damn youse,’ Bill was shrieking at the top of his small leather lungs, ‘you lousy bastard—’ ” When a third-grader is using language I have yet to see in any other vintage nurse romance novel—and this only on page 17—you know you are in for a treat.

Vying for Ellen’s affections is Jim O’Connor, who has grown up with Ellen. Jim is up to something shady, but we are only given tiny, offhand hints (“a sedate traffic officer … saluted him, grinning, but … afterward looked after the car, its newness, and its expensive lines with a frown of speculation on his Irish brow”). It’s a pleasure to find a book that doesn’t beat you over the head with its plotting.

We’re tipped off to the socialist bent of the novel with its dedication: “Dedicated, in admiration, to the VNA and welfare nurses everywhere.” Ellen’s patients by a rule always live in squalid tenements: “Dim gas jets flickered on the dirty landing casting eerie shadows. In each hallway, as she passed, was the disgrace of an open toilet. … It was not astonishing that so many women connected with work of this type turned almost fiercely radical, seeing what they must see, realizing how little they could do, important though their work was.” And so we are frequently treated to Ellen’s feelings about the poor, how horrific their lives are, and how a little assistance goes a long way—but not so much that it becomes annoying.

This book is far more frank about the baser aspects of human life than books 30 years its junior, in which the protagonist does not even kiss her beloved until they are engaged (e.g. Society Nurse, for starters). On page 2, as we are being given a tour of the neighborhood, we pass a doctor’s practice. “What kind of a doctor is he? He has an uptown practice. They come here to him. A clever hideaway. All women, who come.” One minor figure in the book is kidnapped and raped, then forced to marry her abductor. Unmarried women sometimes get pregnant, and their moral character is an ongoing concern. At one point Ellen argues with doctor and old friend Pete after he implies that he is not a virgin: “ ‘A man,’ said Ellen, ‘can regard his chastity as something to be disposed of as quickly and as lightly as possible. A man can, of course, do as he pleases—deny himself nothing. Not, I suppose, a woman. A woman can—you call it sin in a woman, don’t you?—sin once, because she is foolish, because she is in love, because promises are made her—and that’s her finish, I suppose. It’s a swell world.’ ”

The writing is incredibly snappy; by page 6 I had such a long list of great quotes that I quit taking notes. (Just one example: “ ‘It’s Ellen Adams,’ she called; and then, the sesame that had opened so many closed doors ‘…the visiting nurse.’ ”) We live Ellen’s family’s daily life: their dates, their budgetary concerns, their neighborhood and its inhabitants. We really care about these people. Ellen’s rapprochement with Frank in the final pages actually means something, and the only letdown is that her engagement is understood to mean she will have to give up nursing. “ ‘When she puts me before the work, then I know she really loves me. And you have,’ he triumphed.” Frank may find it a victory, but I thought it was a tragedy. Nonetheless, this was the only letdown in the entire book, which is an overwhelmingly great read.