A Nurse’s Strange Romance

By Arlene Hale, ©1964

Meredith Michaels, R.N., had three loves in her life: nursing, and two young doctors. Dark-haired, intense Ryan Quinn she had loved since they first began training together. Steve Baxter, big, blond, full of the joy of life, had been the perfect balance for the inseparable threesome. Now they had the chance to open private practice together with Meredith as office nurse—and life seemed complete. Meredith, in fact, was engaged to Ryan. But something happened. Ryan became steeped in gloom, and even Steve’s former gaiety seemed forced. Meredith was distraught. But then, in the middle of the crisis, and with the wisdom she never dreamed she possessed, she grasped on a solution that had been staring her in the face.

GRADE: C- 

BEST QUOTES:
“The hospital frowns upon interns and nurses smooching in the hallways.”

“That blush makes you different from any nurse on the floor. You are the only one that seems to respect some old-fashioned chastity!”

“Long may she walk with her cute little wiggle!”

“What a tasty looking neck!” 

“Maybe it’s not as exciting to diagnose old Mrs. Cleaver’s arthritis as it is to make smears for some important test in a research lab but it is important! At least to Mrs. Cleaver.”

REVIEW:
The author of this very stupid book, Arlene Hale, is something of a thorn in my side. She was ridiculously prolific—I’ve reviewed 27 of her VNRNs so far and she has written at least a dozen more—but her average grade over those 27 books is a pathetic C+. Here we have yet another snoozer—well, it might be a snoozer if the leading man weren’t such an ass, but as it was it just made me mad. Meet Ryan Quinn, a “deep, dark, secretive” driven type who, though the author tries incredibly hard to depict him as a misunderstood soul, is borderline psychotic. As we open the book, Ryan and his best friend Steve Baxter are four months from completing their residencies, at which point they will go into practice and start earning an actual salary. But “payment is being demanded,” Ryan tells Meredith. “I will have to quit and go out and find a job, pay them off.” I am not even going to start on how absurd this situation is, but it’s definitely indicative of how the rest of the book is going to go.

To wit: Nurse Meredith Michaels, who has been dating Ryan Quinn for years now and is all but holding her breath until he drops on one knee and opens the tiny velvet box, has magically inherited a tidy sum from a deceased aunt. Her first inclination is to quit her nursing job and go back to school to become a teacher. Is this her long-denied dream finally coming true? No! Meredith loves nursing! But Steve and Ryan have bizarrely been badgering her to trade her nurse’s cap for blackboard chalk. “You are a pure descendent of Florence Nightingale, no doubt. But they need teachers too. Desperately,” Steve tells her, because nurses are just a dime a dozen! (And the financing of her nurse’s degree remains a secret.)

Ryan’s misfortune turns out to be Meredith’s salvation, as now she can give her money to Ryan and remain in the career she loves best! Ryan, the selfless wonder, hesitates less than ten seconds before accepting. Then he has the balls to tell her that he is “too honorable to make plans to be married until every penny had been paid on his debts,” and furthermore he is accepting a research position that pays very little, so it’s likely to be years before that happens. Of course, if he married Meredith, his debt would be expunged, but that point is overlooked by everyone, even Meredith.

Alas, this is not the end of Ryan Quinn’s perfidy. He leaves for a new job far from Meredith and does not ask her to come work at his new hospital with him, so she remains at City Hospital with Steve, who takes every opportunity to kiss her and make wildly inappropriate remarks to his best friend’s girlfriend. For Ryan’s part, immediately upon arriving at his new hospital, he instantly falls in love with Dr. Carol Simmons and dates her for months, taking her out to restaurants he cannot afford (when he had been too poor to go anywhere with Meredith except to her house, where he had eaten dinners she had cooked for him, and presumably paid for as well). Naturally Ryan does not bother to tell either woman about the other, and it’s nearly Christmas before he fesses up to Carol. He has the nerve to be flabbergasted when she is jealous, but placates her by promising to spend Christmas with her, even though he has already promised the day to Meredith. Then the swell guy is unable to tell Meredith that he won’t be coming home after all—much less that he doesn’t love her and is seeing someone else—until the day before Christmas, when he calls her and lies to her about a patient who he claims needs his attention through the holidays.

As it turns out there is such a patient, Betty Walters, a lonely, pathetic waif with leukemia, and now Ryan drags this poor woman into his miserable clutches as well. He starts to pay “special attention” to her: “At odd moments, he would drop in to see her and say a few words to her, tease her gently and lay the foundation for a relationship that went beyond the normal one of patient and doctor.” Betty, who has only months to live, falls in love with Ryan, and her bullying, equally psychotic brother Bruce blackmails Ryan into marrying Betty: If he refuses, Bruce is going to assault Carol, and if Ryan goes to the police about it, Bruce will have one of his friends do it. Paralyzed with fear, Ryan lets the situation ride for weeks. Eventually Carol hears hospital gossip that Ryan is spending too much time with Betty.  When she confronts him, he insults her: “You’re being female. Jealous! It doesn’t become you.” Just wow. At least Carol has the sense to break up with Ryan—Meredith is still home waiting by the phone.

Steve, clearly pining for Meredith, decides to open a clinic and invites Ryan and Meredith to join him. Bizarrely, Ryan agrees—and when he moves back home, he kisses dopey Meredith, and she’s thinking, “He hadn’t said he loved her. He hadn’t asked her to marry him either. But it was all there in undertones and she could wait. She had already waited this long.” And she is going to wait a lot longer. Because he’s sneaking back to see Carol to tell her what he never told Meredith, that he loves her. Then he heads over to see Betty, kisses her, too, and asks her to wait a little longer to be married to him, thinking, “He did not really want Betty to die and yet her death would mean his own freedom.” I can’t believe author Arlene Hale thinks this guy is a reasonable love interest. 

Ryan flees back to his hotel room, but Bruce follows him and beats him to a pulp. This finally convinces him that Bruce really means business, so Ryan—this guy just never stops—calls Meredith, tells her he’s been in a car accident and asks her to wire him $500, which he then uses to pay for the wedding, which goes off the next day. The cake is not even crumbs before he has fled back home, where he goes straight to Meredith’s apartment and tells her he loves her and wants to marry her! When she says, “I am not sure I believe you anymore, Ryan,” for the first time showing some actual sense, he says “Darling, you must! You have always trusted me, always believed in me. Don’t stop now. Don’t you know I need you, that I’ve always needed you? Don’t doubt me now. I couldn’t endure it! We’ll be married whenever you say.” To which she replies, “Darling, let’s be married on my birthday. Next week!” And now he is back to hoping that Betty dies in the next few days so he won’t become a bigamist. So to atone for the huge mess he’s in, he goes straight to Carol’s house where he kisses her—and then tells her he is being married to Meredith.

Meredith breaks the news to Steve the next day, and now Steve is going to pieces. “His idea was to take the bull by the tail and spin him until he crashed into the wall and broke it down, or a woman by the hair and—” and now he is racing to Meredith’s apartment, bursts in, grabs her and kisses her though she beats at him and protests, “but he would not let her go,” instead telling her that he loves her, too. Guess what—she suddenly realizes that it’s Steve she is in love with.

Honestly, I just can’t go on. Let me just say that Meredith Michaels is a pathetic sap, Ryan Quinn is a self-absorbed psychotic, and Steve is a self-absorbed, domineering bully. Don’t waste your time with this trio. You might take them as an object lesson not to waste your time on any more Arlene Hale books, either, and I wouldn’t fault you in the slightest.

Doctor Chris

by Elizabeth Seifert, © 1946

When the new doctor arrived at Lakeside Hospital, the reaction was lively. Nobody had expected Dr. Chris Metcalf to be a girl. The nurses were not pleased, for another young woman meant keener competition for the attention of the handsome Chief of Staff. The Chief of Staff himself was not pleased, for he believed that medicine was for men alone. So Chris had something to fight against, as well as a lot to learn during her year of hospital life. It was anything but a dull year, however, what with this vigorous opposition, with sabotage in an Army Ordnance plant nearby, and with the personable young lawyer in town who appreciated Chris as a woman rather than as a doctor. In her latest novel Elizabeth Seifert shows the development of Chris Metcalf is a person and as a doctor, and adds a vivid new story to her popular group of novels about doctors and the drama of their work. 

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Just so I’m the biggest something in your life, sweetheart.”

REVIEW:
Poor Dr. Chris Metcalf is a 24-year-old intern, having just graduated from medical school, and is arriving at Lakeside Hospital somewhere in Missouri. Of course, the initial joke is that with the nickname of Chris, everyone thinks from her resume that she is a man. What fun when she arrives wearing a skirt! Well, maybe not fun, as she gets the fisheye from multiple mossbacked and/or jealous nurses and doctors, including her new chief, 40-year-old Dr. Key Edmons. (I know, “Key” is about the worst name ever, but it’s not the first time we have met one, and probably won’t be the last, unfortunately.) But Chris is not intimidated: “I’m not frightened of you, and you don’t shock me,” she tells him. “Another thing you can count on, I won’t bother you by falling in love with you.” That shows him! Except maybe not, as he has an exceptional amount of prejudice to overcome, and she is perennially smacking into that wall. Frankly it gets more than a little tiresome to continually encounter remarks such as, “There is something you’re going to have to learn, Dr. Metcalf, though I’m damned if I think you can learn it. Because you’re a girl!” Or, “You didn’t handle the father, and the reason you didn’t is the same reason we have against your trying to be a doctor. You’re a girl.” Honestly, Chris is never going to experience any gender confusion, she is reminded so frequently of hers, though it seems likely that she has progressed through puberty and actually qualifies as a woman.

She does not have much spare time, being an intern and all, but soon Chris has hooked up with a local playboy, 35-year-old attorney Allan Gifford, who is apparently about to be engaged to one wealthy socialite while also having an affair with the chief OR nurse. If that doesn’t make him enough of a catch, he, too, is ridiculously prejudiced against women doctors. “Why should a pretty little girl like you go into anything so gruesome as the practice of medicine?” he asks her when they first meet. He repeatedly pressures her to marry him, but is very open about his insistence that she quit medicine if she does, so she doesn’t really take him seriously.

The book rolls along and we watch Chris tackle with varying degrees of success various medical situations, always carrying the weight of her entire gender on her back. I will say she is a bit on the wimpy side and does have a tendency to break into tears, but the pressure of one’s intern year combined with the accompanying lack of sleep might do that to anyone. She is fierce in her regular and ongoing battles with Dr. Edmons about her capabilities, I will give her that: “Don’t you dare say that’s why I have no business doctoring,” she snaps at him when he tells her that women can’t be doctors because they have “a tender heart.” “Men have tender hearts, too. Don’t they? Don’t they?” (Dr. Edmons, who is obviously falling in love with Chris, begrudgingly admits she may be right.)

Two of the more interesting cases that Dr. Metcalf encounters involve reproductive rights: a young woman, pregnant by a bounder, who asks for an abortion—Chris refuses because it’s illegal and she is only an intern without the requisite skills; it’s not clear which is the bigger obstacle—and in another case a woman who is having her appendix out asks to have her ovaries removed as well. Dr. Edmons refuses to do it because the ovaries are not diseased, but Chris replies that they would take out healthy ovaries during a hysterectomy. The argument is dropped before it progresses, but it is curious that author Elizabeth Seifert introduces these weighty topics in such an offhanded manner.

Eventually, as you knew there would be, there is a case of serious sabotage at the nearby Army ordnance plant in which a plane crashes into it, and Chris and Dr. Edmons work all night to save the burned men. Chris than deduces who the scurrilous foreign agent is—the only character with a German accent (*eyeroll*)—and plays a large role in bringing the criminal to justice, with the help of Allan Gifford, who turns out to be FBI! Unfortunately, “all the glamour Cooper and Hoover have given to the G-men, the aura of Sherlock Holmes—all glimmered about Allen’s big, homely person” and now she thinks she is in love with him and accepts his ring, “the badge of submission, of subordination.” Well, that sounds lovely! Then he is injured in a shooting accident and she saves his life, proving to everyone that she is a “real” doctor—but also to herself that she is not in love with Allan: “Have I got so hard, so unfeeling that I could have done what I did for Allan, if I really loved him—the way I should love him?”

Overall, this is a low-key, satisfying book by an excellent author. It’s not especially exciting or unique, but it is well-written and has a quiet humor in several instances that unfortunately doesn’t translate to the Best Quotes section. It certainly is a slice of life of a young woman trying to forge her way through a career that is difficult today, much less 75 (!!) years ago, and if the incessant prejudice is trying for us to endure, I imagine it was a great deal more so for the brave women who actually lived through it. If this gentle book isn’t the most memorable, it has a pleasant competence that makes it worth reading about Dr. Chris.

Crystal Manning, Maternity Nurse

By Nan Lowry (pseud. of Ruth MacLeod), ©1964
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti?

As the young head nurse of the busy maternity ward, Crystal Manning often went beyond the call of duty to bring compassion to her patients. Then one of her kind gestures backfired. She was accused of kidnapping a new-born baby. Nurse Manning needed all the help she could get at this crucial time, particularly from the two men who loved her: Lloyd Norris, a successful attorney; and Mike Dorand, the friendly young doctor with whom she worked. As a nurse, she knew that she would have to clear her name or neither man would want her for his wife.

GRADE: D 

BEST QUOTES:
“There is nothing coy or coquettish about you. Sometimes it’s discouraging.”

“She did not want him to think she was the cheap sort of floozie who casually concluded her dates with a bit of heavy necking.”

“A psycho can behave most intelligently at times.” 

REVIEW:
If you were looking for one-stop shopping for all the grotesque stereotypes of the past, you would have to go a long way to find a single book more stocked with insensitivity than Crystal Manning, Maternity Nurse, in which we meet a family with a developmentally delayed son and visit a Chinese restaurant—I will spare you from how the book portrays these situations—meet a couple who refuse to adopt a baby from an agency because “we don’t want some little tramp’s discarded bastard,” and watch the nurse tell a woman whose newborn has died, “That’s no excuse for being such a cry baby.” Of course, I haven’t even started on the usual misogyny: A husband needs to sign consent for his fully alert and competent wife’s surgery, and a wife’s blaming herself for her husband’s walking out on her and their six children.

We are also subjected to a handful of the usual VNRN tropes. Nurse Crystal is dating Lloyd Norris, an attorney ten years her senior who “had an endearing, proprietary manner with her, calling her ‘doll’ and ‘darling’ in a way that made her feel like a cherished child.” Ew. We are not surprised that she does not love him, though he is wild about her and is pressuring her to marry him. She’s actually hot for Dr. Mike Dorand, in his last year of residency, and knows she will never love Lloyd the way she does Mike. But Mike runs hot and cold, so she naturally concludes that he doesn’t have any interest in her, and tries to convince herself that she should accept Lloyd’s proposal. “He was sweet, he was a fine, wonderful man and he loved her. Few women were so fortunate. So why couldn’t she grab her luck while she had the chance? Some day, when it was too late, she might wish in sorrow and desperation that she had.” Because any marriage would be better than none, apparently. “She wondered which sort of marriage brought a woman the greatest happiness and satisfaction. One in which she fulfilled a man’s deepest needs—as it would be if she married Lloyd? Or one in which she was forever striving to fulfill her own emotional needs through love for a man like Mike?” I’m not sure why the latter is apparently being held up as something wrong.

An interesting point in the plot is that when Lloyd and Crystal are kissing, “as the pulsing warmth of his embrace stirred some inner dormant fire, she was lost in a wild urge to respond. For timeless moments her heartbeats rioted as her lips answered the pressure of his.” Lloyd is thrilled by her physical response, insisting that “it’s there, the love and passion to make our marriage wonderful.” The idea that if she has a sexual urge she must be in love is curious; I doubt anyone would make this mistake about a man.

There’s also the question of whether she should give up her career for marriage. Early on, of course, she loudly protests, “Marriage couldn’t make me not be a nurse.” Adding to his charms, Lloyd tells her, “I wouldn’t demand that you give up nursing altogether, or right away. I’d like to hope that gradually you to become so happy and occupied as my wife that it would fill all your needs.” Instead of running, she proves herself a hypocrite by deciding, “If I really loved Lloyd I could give it all up to share his life completely.” This makes no sense, particularly since she’s already pointed out to Lloyd that he wouldn’t ever not want to be an attorney. And when Lloyd continues to present his feelings to her on the subject, asking her, “Honeychild, when are you going to let me take you out of all this and provide the kind of life a doll like you is made for?” she is not repulsed, either by his demeaning choice of endearments or his obvious intent for her to stop working if she marries him.

Beyond all the alarming biases, there is a plot here: Mrs. Perkins, saddled at home with five kids, has just had a sixth, and Mike diagnoses the newborn with phenylketonuria, which will cause the little girl to have brain damage if she’s given food containing excessive phenylalanine. This diet is going to be very expensive for the dirt-poor Mrs. Perkins, whose husband has left her because she refuses to put five-year-old developmentally delayed Joey in an institution, where, we are repeatedly told, “he’ll have the care he needs, and the other children will have a better chance to develop normally, unhampered by his presence.” Eventually, though, she decides she’d rather have her husband than Joey, so when Mr. Perkins finally shows up, they’re a happy couple once more with still just five kids at home.

Meanwhile, Susan Carter has lost her baby and her uterus, possibly because Dr. Leslie Hampton, who even the orderlies think is “scared to do cesarean sections,” stalled performing that surgery until Mrs. Carter’s uterus ruptured. Crystal, attempting to help the grieving, childless woman realize “your adjustment to it will strengthen your character,” tells her about poor Mrs. Perkins’ plight. Susan immediately decides that she will adopt Baby Girl Perkins, and breaks every rule in the book trying to make this happen—and Crystal breaks quite a few herself in acting as intermediary between the two women, even though she feels (and repeatedly says to Mrs. Perkins) the baby should stay with its biological mother, mostly because Mrs. Perkins might change her mind later on.

When Susan Carter finally kidnaps Baby Perkins, which you saw coming a mile away, Crystal’s gross irresponsibility is rightfully made much of by the hospital superintendent, the police, and Susan’s husband Neil. “I should think that one of the first things you would have learned in your hospital training was not ever, under any circumstances, to gossip with one patient about another’s problems!” shouts the superintendent, and suspends her. She spends the next day at the Perkins farm helping take care of the kids and the chores, and when she gets home, a cop is waiting to take her down to the station—the kidnaped baby has turned up in Crystal’s own bed, and she’s under suspicion for the crime. But never mind about that, the superintendent brings her back on the job the following morning, because things have been crazy in obstetrics on her one day of suspension! And it’s probably that crazy Susan who did it, who’s been found nearly psychotic and is refusing to speak!

Suddenly it’s two weeks later, and Mike tells Crystal he’s decided to go back to school to study public health. Crystal is upset because this means he might decide he’s too poor to marry, and in attempting to convince him otherwise, the dime finally drops for Mike, and twenty seconds later they’re engaged. The chief of obstetrics walks in as they are clinching the deal, and tells them to save it for their time off. Unbelievably, Crystal shouts, “You have no right to sneer at our love! It’s perfectly proper and decent—which is more than you can say about your clandestine affair with Marilee Gifford!” Marilee is Crystal’s own roommate, who has been secretly in love with the married Dr. Hartford for many years, and who has repeatedly assured Crystal—who always nags her hypocritically that she shouldn’t chase after a man who shows no interest in her but should go out with men she’s not interested in—that they are not having an affair at all. I tell you, seldom have I been so shocked by a VNRN as when I read Crystal’s complete betrayal of her best friend.

Dr. Hartford responds by suggesting that he could have Crystal fired, and Mike, apparently having acquired a few unfortunate tendencies from his horrid fiancée, tells Dr. Hartford that if he fires Crystal, he will order an investigation into two cases of Dr. Hartford’s that had bad outcomes. Dr. Hartford remarkably manages not to order them both out of the hospital immediately but instead calmly explains the two cases and why he is not to blame for them, and Mike is forced to agree. The whole nasty situation doesn’t end there, but has dark repercussions in Dr. Hartford’s marriage and his relationship with Marilee—and Crystal again decrees that Marilee’s decisions, startlingly like her own (a fact she completely fails to recognize) are “terribly wrong” and “lacked integrity.” So she decides she’s going to set up her now-dumped ex-boyfriend Lloyd and Marilee, believing Marilee will go out with Lloyd for no other reason other than that she has dared Marilee to do just that. Mike sees Crystal with Lloyd in his car when she’s wheedling him to ask Marilee on a date, and Mike speeds off. Now Crystal is frantic that Mike thinks she’s still seeing Lloyd and that it’s over between them, but Mike at least has learned something from all these explosive situations and tells Crystal the next day that he trusts her to make good decisions of her own. He clearly does not know Crystal very well.

Crystal Manning is one of the more alarming heroines I have met in a VNRN. She never learns to stop her own stupid mouth, and she suffers no consequences for any of her many very bad decisions. Marilee never learns of Crystal’s betrayal, so Crystal gets off scot-free with that backstabbing, and a one-day suspension hardly seems a fitting punishment for all her ethics-stomping involvement with the Perkins baby—not to mention that at the time she was under suspicion for kidnaping. Instead she lands the man she wants, who gives her the benefit of the doubt that she never gives anyone else, a point that is utterly lost on her. Finally, we have the copious bigoted attitudes as the cherry on the top of this poison, if you needed any further inducement to stay far away from Crystal Manning, Maternity Nurse.

Alternative cover, from the
second printing in 1966

A Case for Nurse Marian

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1957

When Marian Courtney took the job of head nurse at a secret research center hidden in the wild New Mexican hills, she realized that her responsibility was enormous. But in guarding the health of devoted atomic scientists, she was both doing her professional duty and protecting her country’s future. Then a handsome stranger joined the staff. Craig Garrett was an easy-going young devil, who charmed his way into Marian Courtney’s heart, even though she knew she shouldn’t trust him. Would Marian Courtney’s dedication to her profession stand firm? Or would she be swayed by her woman’s need for love?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“He was a scientist from the top of this thinning gray head to his rubber-soled shoes.”

“He apparently thought he had to go into the wolf act every time he met a member of the opposite sex who was not too ancient or too hard on the eyes.”

“You are much smarter than I can ever hope to be.”

“Having a baby is wonderful, Marian. Every woman should do it.”

“If Craig could see how lovely Marian looked, her face flushed and serious, a frilly apron tied around her slender waist, it would really ‘throw’ him.”

“I was reading an article the other day about the Communist Party. Did you know that they demand such complete obedience that if a member fails in any job to which he has been assigned, he knows it means death? He is pledged to execute himself, rather than weaken the Party, or betray it in any way.”

“Women shouldn’t worry about things they cannot understand or do anything about.”

“She could not give her lips to someone when her heart was so troubled.”

“The English, it seemed, would make tea if the house was on fire.”

“How could you love a man who had betrayed his country?”

REVIEW:

I don’t find anything inherently wrong with a daffy book that defies reason and logic. These books can often be a brilliantly hilarious flight: see Nurse at the Fair. What I can’t stand is hypocrisy and sexism, and unfortunately A Case for Nurse Marian has a lot of both of these. Lunacy in a story line is more tolerable when it’s clear that the author is aware of what she is doing and is letting the reader in on the joke; Adelaide Humphries, though she has given us excellent entertainment in the past with The Nurse Knows Best and Nurse Landon’s Challenge, seems here to be oblivious of her complete lack of acquaintance with reality.

Marian Courtney has accepted an assignment working at a plant in New Mexico near the wall border. Everyone refers to working in this remote location as being “buried alive,” a phrase that gives the otherwise sturdy Marian borderline hysteria. What goes on at the plant is conveniently hush-hush: “All that it is necessary for you to know, is that it has to do with atomic research for the protection of our country,” she is told by the creepy Dr. Edgar Blount, head of personnel, who comes by his title by way of a PhD and not an MD, though it’s not clear why an HR executive needs a PhD, or why a nurse at a plant conducting “atomic research” shouldn’t know any particulars about hazardous materials on site.

Shortly after her arrival, Professor Addison, a man we have never met, goes missing, and everyone is convinced it’s a suicide even though the body is never found, because he left a note! Marian, though, has spent enough time with him—including the day before he disappears—that she is convinced that he was murdered! Maybe even buried alive (insert “Scream” emoji here)! Because “Professor Addison may have held the secret to our country’s future—even its existence,” though then it seems like it would be better to kidnap him and get the secret out of him. Craig Garrett is the young man who shows up to take the professor’s job, and he is a handsome, muscular, tanned, wolfish ass, not at all like a scientist! “It’s a delight just to sit here and look at you,” he tells her at their first meeting. “I expected you—anyone who would bury herself alive—” AAAAH! “B-buried a-alive—” she manages to stutter in her horror! But she pulls herself together enough to decide that he’s “a typical wolf. And a girl had to slap wolves down at the beginning,” so when he begs her to have dinner with him to keep him from “feeling as though I’d been buried ali—Forgive me, I forgot!” she naturally is “persuaded against her will.” I’m not sure how that works, but that’s how things roll in the New Mexico desert.

Off they go to the only diner in the area, which is run by an obese man named Jud who stares so salaciously that Marian is uncomfortable. One date leads to another, and though Craig continues to be unpleasantly condescending—“I didn’t suppose anyone as lovely as your wife could also be such an excellent cook,” he tells the husband of a couple who have invited him and Marian over for dinner—soon they’re kissing. And more sinister events unfold: A Mexican janitor is injured when someone throws acid in his face, but Craig asks Marian to keep it secret, and she does—until the wound won’t heal and Marian tells Dr. Blount that the man needs to see a doctor, so Romez is gunned down in front of his house, the same night Marian sees Jud and Craig driving madly down a back road. Then a friend tells Marian she saw Craig walk into Jud’s establishment, give him a slip of paper, and receive in return a large wad of cash. What else is a gal to believe except that her new boyfriend is passing “a code message revealing secrets connected with the research being done at the plant,” in broad daylight in the middle of a populated restaurant, that “he must be a spy in the employ of another government—working against his own country,” who “had had some part in the mystery surrounding Professor Addison. A part, too, in what had happened to the little Mexican janitor.” Curious that she so firmly believes that the professor and Romez, men she barely knew, are innocent victims but that the man she claims to be in love with is an evil spy and murderer, a fact that Craig points out to her and she cannot answer.

In short order she is lured to Jud’s establishment only to find out that Jud and his bartender were really the bad guys!!! They’re fleeing to Mexico—well, only Jud is, after he shoots the bartender dead. Jud is going to take Marian with him, since he can’t bring himself to pop her, too—and as they exit the building, Craig and several law enforcement officers stop them, assisted by brave Marian, who karate chops the gun out of Jud’s hand. You will be shocked to learn that Dr. Blount is the top man in the scheme, though we never learn the nature of the sinister scheme, and Marian climbs into Craig’s Chevy and the pair rides off into the sunset.

There are so many holes and unexplained dead ends in this book that it’s not even worth trying to list them all. I will say, however, that it’s not clear why Marian is attracted Craig, who is initially presented as arrogant and annoying, and he never manages to overcome this initial impression. It’s not just Craig, though—every male character is overtly sexist, which Marian just takes in stride, and even goes along with. While observing that the husband of a couple they are friends with “was the type of man who thought he had to be the lord and master over the little woman,” she then firmly insists that Craig should not help with the dishes, as he has sincerely offered, because “the kitchen is no place for a big oaf like you.” On the other hand, this is the first VNRN I’ve read that implicitly discusses the freedom that a career offers a young woman: “her years of training to become a nurse had given her an independence which she treasured. This job was the beginning of the independent life she valued and needed.” Of course, months into it she’s getting engaged, so there goes her new-found independence. There’s not enough amusing or hyperbolic writing to overcome the strange flaws in the story—too bad, because the research espionage plot begs on its knees for lampooning (see Nurse to Remember)—and the hiccups in the plot are not so over the top that it’s clear the story is meant to be a farce. In the end this book succeeds neither as a straightforward VNRN or as a joke. 

Dr. Jane Comes Home

Book 5 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1959

 

Woman or doctor? When beautiful, raven-haired Dr. Jane Latham returned to her hometown after her brief, tragic marriage she planned to devote the rest of her life to her profession. She was Jane Latham, doctor, she told herself. She had ceased to be Jane Latham, woman. But when Dave Riley, internationally famous newspaperman, came into her life he had other ideas. He begged Jane to renounce her vows and join him in his own cosmopolitan, easy-going life of fun and travel. Lonely, confused, filled with the ardor of youth, Jane Latham’s effort to deny her woman’s needs now met its sternest test.

 

GRADE: B

 

REVIEW:

I’m not sure what book the person who wrote the back-cover blurb (above) read, but it wasn’t the one I did. Maybe all that is forthcoming in the next (and final) book of the series, Dr. Jane’s Choice. In Dr. Jane Comes Home, it seems to be two years since her husband Bill died—done in by a crocodile in Africa—and one since she returned home to Halesville, Indiana, to resume her general practice. Journalist Dave Riley, whom she met in Africa before she left, has come with her, ostensibly to write an article about her but staying on because he loves this small town that much. Oh, and Jane too, but he’s waiting to spill the beans on that little secret, out of respect for her mourning.

 

Basically this book follows Jane as she manages patients and disasters, sheds an occasional tear over poor dead Bill, and otherwise snoops on minor Halesville characters old and new. A cast of more than 50 named people populate this story, which can be a bit confusing, but otherwise it’s a gentle, meandering story. At the end of the book Dave is in a serious car accident, which of course brings Jane’s latent love for him to the fore with her usual sappy “Oh, Dave, Dave—” which she has sighed again and again for every man who has passed through her heart, much to my increasing exasperation. We’ll see what dilemmas this new relationship brings to her in the final book.

 

It’s a pleasant story, but it doesn’t have much to offer: No offerings for the Best Quotes section; no real growth in Jane’s character; no interesting dilemmas, career or personal, for her to work out. It’s just more of Jane. Which, again, is nice enough—she’s smart, competent, independent, and strong—but unless you’re already this deep into the series and feel compelled to see it through, this book doesn’t really have much to offer.

Doctor’s Choice

By Susan Lennox, ©1960

Dr. Bruce Morrow’s beautiful fiancée laughed when she heard the terms of his uncle’s will. “How utterly absurd,” Nina said. “Of course you are not going to bury yourself in a small Southern town and take over the running of a dinky hospital. Dad will build you one right here, if I ask him to.” Bruce knew Nina was right, of course, but he couldn’t help wondering about the pull he felt toward his late uncle’s home town, the hospital he had left him and Nurse Becky Roberts. He was in love with Nina all right, but he couldn’t help wondering why Becky was constantly on his mind and why his resolve to become a rich, big-city society doctor was weakening day by day.

 

GRADE: B-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“It’s a long road we travel, you know, and we can’t find happiness if we get on the wrong road.”

 

REVIEW:

Another not-a-nurse-novel, Doctor’s Choice nonetheless attracted me for its great cover illustration by Robert Maguire. It’s too bad the story inside doesn’t follow through.

 

Dr. Bruce Morrow is about to marry Nina Neely (say that ten times fast), the spoiled, demanding, and wealthy daughter of his mentor and soon-to-be partner. But out of the blue an uncle, a general practitioner also named Bruce Morrow who works in the quaint Southern town of Maplesville, up and dies. His will leaves Bruce II a large home and captaincy of the local hospital, which Bruce I had endowed. Bruce II is committed to the indolent path he has chosen as society doctor, we are told repeatedly—but we also find out that Bruce holds “a desire long dormant and never fully admitted. Deep within his heart he had always had a desire to be a country doctor.” Furthermore, “he supposed he was in love with Nina,” a supposition that never bodes well for a couple’s long-term success.

 

Bruce decides to go to Maplesville as a courtesy, to sign away in person his rights to the estate, which will now fall to the uncle’s nurse, 24-year-old Becky Reynolds, who conveniently lives next door. He’s only planning to spend a day, but as it happens, he witnesses the car accident in which the perpetrator and victim is the spoiled, demanding, and wealthy daughter of the crooked mayor of Maplesville. Cheryl’s arm is crushed, and all the local doctors are voting for just lopping it off, but Cheryl would rather die than lose an arm. Bruce confesses that he’d assisted Dr. Neely in saving an arm in a similar case back home, so his 24-hour stay is dragged out to a couple of weeks while he doctors Cheryl and the other former patients of his uncle, with his trusty Nurse Becky at his side.

 

And you are not going to guess what happens!!! Bruce falls in love with Becky! But he’s one of those dopey types who thinks that he must go through with an unsatisfying career and marriage, and never mind that “the thought of a lifetime with a girl like Nina was very disturbing.” Though he finds “a richness, a contentment, a feeling of well-being here that he did not think he would find elsewhere,” “his sense of integrity would not let him” back out: “He had promised Dr. Neely; he was engaged to Nina; he couldn’t walk out and say he had changed his mind.” Will he come to his senses before book’s end? The tension about killed me!!!

 

Well, that was a little snarky, but it’s an irritating question to hang a book on. And you’ll never guess how it turns out!!! So OK, you will, and there’s no precipitating event or revelation that brings on Bruce’s complete about-face; he just walks into Dr. Neely’s office and blurts out the truth, and Dr. Neely just says, “If that’s what you want, don’t let anyone change your mind.” So he doesn’t even have to fight for what he wants, and there are no repercussions—apart from a bitter scene with Nina—that keep him from his intended career and bride. While the book isn’t badly written, and I mostly enjoyed the characters (although there is one bizarre detour in which Becky masquerades as someone else for a bit before she is found out, and this is never satisfactorily explained), in the end I was annoyed by both the book’s central “problem” and its resolution. If Bruce makes the right choice in the end by becoming a country practitioner, the choice you should make is to leave this one on the shelf.

City Doctor

By Thomas Stone
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1951

 

Sometimes working with Philip was more than Jane could bear. She admired him as a doctor; she loved him as a man. But Philip preferred women like Cynthia—Sin for short. So Jane worked with him day after day, while his nights belonged to Cynthia, until that night when Jane found herself in desperate trouble, trouble that would smear her over the front page and wreck her career. No one could help but Philip, and to help her she must make him see her as a woman. … Here is a dramatic, behind-the-scenes story of the medical profession—the private lives of some of those men and women in white.

 

GRADE: A

 

BEST QUOTES:

“His patients practically never had the bad manners to die on him.”

 

“I play no favorites,” Phil sometimes said, when a woman asked him if he preferred blondes, or what. “All I demand of my gals is that they know how to hold their liquor, mean that come-hither look in their eye, and that I’m the one man in their life, as long as I’m holding them in my arms.”

 

“San Francisco is my first and truest love. But the old city is really quite a trollop, you know. She was conceived in abandoned sin. The miners came in Forty-Nine, the gals in Fifty-One. And when you think of the lovers she’s had since—show me a two-fisted, hard-drinking man who hasn’t loved San Francisco—she’s really quite the scarlet hussy. And still going strong, after nearly a hundred years.”

 

“Mrs. Lambert does so enjoy being ‘examined’ by you.”

“Too many casual dates leading up to a casual week-end was the most effective way to turn an efficient nurse into a darned nuisance.”

 

“I think women who go in for being reforming influences in other people’s lives should be drowned at birth, don’t you?”

 

“Every attractive woman should take time out for love now and again. It keeps you young, helps the circulation, and it’s very broadening. Don’t you want to be broadened?”

 

“Her hold on him was like the hold liquor gets on a man. The more you had, the more you wanted.”

 

“You’d be surprised how fast a lady can turn into a tramp.”

 

“Haven’t I told you your little iceberg of a nurse could be had, if you put your mind to it?”

 

“I’m not sure you’ll rate so high as a lover, without a few shots of liquor to start you off. Look at you tonight—about as passionate as an ossified oyster.”

 

“The women men respect are usually dull, stolid creatures with low blood pressure.”

 

“That breath of yours is strong enough to wipe out a Nazi division.”

 

“You make a lover sound like these one-a-day vitamin tablets they advertise on the radio. Are you feeling low, depressed, suffering from an energy deficiency; is it hard for you to get started in the morning; are you exhausted when night comes? Then take a lover a day, and you’ll be astonished at the quick pick-ups. Lovers are priced very reasonably and you can find one at your nearest corner drug store.”

 

“Youth tears itself apart over things that were very unimportant. But only age teaches you this. Nothing else can teach it to you.”

 

“Women are all alike, under the skin—all wenches. A man hasn’t got a chance.”

 

“This is a swell drink, baby. There are a lot of things you don’t understand. But how to make drinks isn’t one of them.”

 

“The minute a dame gets a hold on a guy, she figures she’s got to start doing things about his life.”

 

“Oh, it’s love all right, because I’ve lost my appetite. No other man ever did that to me before.”

 

REVIEW:

It is with great joy that I offer you the best nurse novel I have read all year, and once again loudly proclaim Florence Stonebraker’s genius. Not only is this a picture of a relationship that feels profoundly true at its heart even as it dolls itself up in a campy sequined dress and feather boa, but this hard-boiled yet gentle story is as much a romance with the city of San Francisco. So if you think that fabled metropolis is the greatest on earth, as I do, you will be greatly pleased by all the references to local landmarks as well as passages such as: “Phil got up and walked to the window. He lit a cigarette and stood there staring down into the steady drizzle which sprayed the city below, wrapping it in mist. It looked beautiful. Rains, sun, or fog—San Francisco was eternally beautiful. It was forever a dream city.”

 

Jane Walters is a 24-year-old nurse who has worked for two years in the office of Dr. Philip Hastings, located on Sutter Street. (In real life, Florence’s husband William also had an office on Sutter Street, in 1933, just before he left his second wife and ran off to marry Florence. But that’s another story.) Philip has a high-profile and profitable practice of “wealthy idle women whose ailments, in a sense, were one of their sources of amusement.” They summon the good doctor to administer a nightcap when they can’t sleep, wink, wink. Philip is, in other words, a slut.

 

His problem, as the book opens, is that “he was sick of it, to his soul. He was sick of money that he hadn’t really earned. He was sick of the kind of life he’d been living; being a fashionable, high-priced doctor by day, a playboy by night.” Worst of all, he’s been rejected by the Army because he has gastric ulcers, brought on by too much drinking. “It wouldn’t, of course, be some sturdy, he-man disease that could kill a fellow off, something he needn’t be ashamed of, but ulcers,” he says of his diagnosis. This rejection has made him dwell on past failures, such as how he was drummed out of a career in—what else?—surgery, due to a little confusion about his relationship with his mentor’s wife, a situation in which he was, for once, actually innocent.

 

So, maudlin and full of self-pity, he ventures back to the office after a five-day bender that included extended visits to Dizzy Dick’s and several fistfights resulting in a black eye, and tells Jane to tell Mrs. Lambert with the liver condition, who thinks she’s “turning yellow all over,” to “change her brand of whiskey.” Jane, though she recognizes that her boss is not quite right, adds to his misery by telling him that she’s leaving his employ, because “there’s work to be done in the world these days. Real work. I can’t go on any longer playing at work.” Jane’s not cruel, she’s just sees what he really needs: “Pity would be the worst thing in the world for him. What he needed most was to be prodded into standing up to reality and doing a little grappling with it.” So she gives him a few straight facts about himself, and instead of firing her, he asks her to lunch, the first time he has shown any personal interest in her. “You’re the first woman who ever talked to me like that,” he tells her. “You’ve been like a tonic to me.”

 

They go to lunch in Chinatown, he begs her to stay, she accepts. We spend a long afternoon eavesdropping on their conversation, and Phil tries to tell Jane, in a clumsy, honest way, that he’s fallen in love with her. But their new-found romance isn’t going to be so easy. Phil’s most frequent “lovely” is Cynthia Bolton—Sin for short—“a black-chiffon-negligee type of gal,” married to a famous war pilot who was blinded in battle and is now recovering in Palm Springs. She has taken Phil “as a lover,” which is unusual in that these novels very rarely ever give anyone a sex life. And in this case, Cynthia “had more stark physical attraction for him than any woman he’d ever kissed.” But now that he’s found Jane, “there was something flat to it. Somehow, it wasn’t as wonderful as it used to be.” He tries to break it off with Cynthia, but she refuses to go quietly, and tells him that she will tell her husband that she wants a divorce to marry Phil, which will splash his name all over the papers—especially after that incident a few years back with the surgeon’s wife, who named Phil in her suicide note before she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge—and he will never work again. Never! So Phil’s stuck with Cynthia for now, but still seeing Jane—they spend the night together in a rented bungalow in Carmel, a first for any VNRN heroine I’ve met.

 

They have an interesting argument about Phil’s growing jealousy of Jane’s work, which takes her into an aging neighbor’s house in the evenings. Phil hints that Jane is a “tramp,” which the book repeatedly holds up as the worst thing a gal can be, but then he apologizes: “I hate having to share you with other people,” he says. “I hate having to share you with your work. I want you—I want all of you. Men are like that.” Jane responds, “Either your love for me means something, and it includes understanding and friendship and a willingness to share me with the things that are important to my life, including my work—or it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s just another phoney.” Phil is angered by Jane’s response: “If just this once she’d come to him in the meek humility and surrender of love,” he thinks. But she does not! Instead, she quits! Then there’s another little misunderstanding, when Phil finds Jane in the arms of the surgeon who she believes been squelching Phil’s application for a job in surgery at the hospital, which seems like it might be the end of Phil and Jane, but it is Cynthia, oddly, who lets slip a bit of information that puts everything to rights between them. Phil passes his Army physical, and Phil urges Jane to enlist as well, saying, “Between us, the wounded soldiers will be pretty lucky guys. I’ll fix up their busted legs, and you can touch their fevered brows.” Even the ending of this book is cute.

 

I am immensely pleased with this book. It has it all: humor, camp, good writing, and a heartfelt story. I urge everyone out there to dig up a copy, fix yourself a frosty cocktail, and settle down with this siren in your lap for a glorious evening.

Shop this title, now republished
under the title Fog City Nurse, here!