Dr. Garrett’s Girl

By Miriam Lynch, ©1970 

Why did the name of Dr. Kennett Garrett turn every face hostile, and seal all lips? Lovely young nurse Julie Garrett desperately wanted to find out. For she was Dr. Garrett’s daughter, too young to have really known him, when he died, and now back for the first time in the closely knit New England town where he had practiced. Quickly Julie found work in the office of Dr. Robert MacDougall. Soon she had lost her heart to the handsome young physician, and earned the hatred of the beautiful, willful woman who wanted him for her own. But the trials of love paled beside the threat of terror as a shadowy figure tried to force Julie to give up her search for the key that would unlock the doors of mystery that surrounded the past—and free her to find happiness with the man of her dreams.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“He could be impatient with middle-aged women with lives of such paucity that they wasted his time and their money with imaginary ailments. Once Julie heard him snap at one of them to stop reading medical columns in magazines and go home and scrub her kitchen floor and thank God for her good health.” 

“He, like all doctors, never wrote anything that could be deciphered without eyestrain and loss of temper.”

“They tell me it’s not cause for gossip these days if a girl goes to a man’s apartment at dinnertime.”

REVIEW:
Julie Garrett is on vacation when she arrives in Riverford, the town in which she spent her first six years, and where her father, Dr. Kenneth Garrett, was the town doctor. She’d wanted to see her early home, but is startled when the proprietor of the shabby and struggling hotel turns her away after she reveals she’s Dr. Garrett’s daughter: “I don’t have a room in the place for you. Just remembered,” he tells her convincingly. Confused, she stumbles into the current doctor’s office and meets Dr. Robert MacDougall and finds that he is “someone she had fashioned in her hopes and dreams.” He, of course—overworked, over-dedicated small-town GP—is clueless about the mystery that makes door after door close in Julie’s face after she accepts Dr. MacDougall’s desperate plea that she accept a job in his overrun office and looks for an apartment to rent, to find only a room in the house of elderly spinster Charlotte Spencer, who is clearly lying to Julia when she denies any knowledge of Dr. Garrett. 

Of course there is the usual rich, evil woman longing to hook Dr. Robert, and she is Flavia Harrison, a widow with a four-year-old diabetic son and heir to the fortune of the Lawrence family, who founded the hospital, school, and even Dr. Garrett’s education. She literally stomps over Julie at their first meeting, as she pushes her way past a room full of patients for an “urgent” confab with the doctor, who seems unable to tell her to take a number. Julie is not able to say no, either, remaining at her job for only the crumbs of attention of the overworked doctor who never has time to thank her for her overtime: “He was completely absorbed in his work, and he evidently saw no reason for praise or comment on her long hours and hard work.”

Then the calls in the night, a rasping voice croaking, “You’re not wanted here,” the letters adorably composed of cutout newspaper letters stating the same, the slashed tires, all convince her that she’s wasting her time pining after a man who cares not for her and who is so clearly in the sights of a very determined woman. On the verge of packing her bags, she meets Craig Farnsworth, Flavia’s brother, and now Julie is the one being chased—taken out every night for dinners and dancing. Robert, damn him, amiably chats up Craig in the office when the young man pops in to wait for Julie at the end of the day, “did not even seem to notice that she had a suitor,” such a cute word!

You can see the natural disaster peeking over the horizon at mid book, so you will not be surprised when it starts to rain. The river, so close to a community of poor folks too proud to ask for help, begins to rise. Curiously, this also coincides with a  huge surge in disease requiring hospitalization, so Julie is sent to help staff the local hospital, where she works about 30 hours straight without sleep or even meals—and for once, no “note of recognition or hostility. She had simply been one of them, working as hard as she could to keep death at bay.”

While on her hospital tour, she cares for an attorney, Martin Balfour, as well as her landlady, Charlotte Spencer, both of whom cough up more than a little pneumonia-associated phlegm as they reveal that they, along with Julie’s father and Eleanora Lawrence, town darling and original heir to the town founder’s fortune, were a firm foursome as young people—one wonders if Charlotte hadn’t been, along with the two young men, in love with Eleanora. More truth unfolds—though it’s hard to see how this will improve Julie’s standing in town—though it is perplexing why she is held responsible to such a high degree for alleged sins of her father, who had died 20 years previously—not much to think about in small towns, apparently—but so too does the truth between Julie and Robert emerge, so there’s half an unsurprising happy ending for you.

Though the writing is not much more than average, I did appreciate this book for the actual surprise, after 500+ nurse novel reviews, this book offered in the reason for Julie’s ostracism, as well as in its climactic scene, in which the motivations and villains are laid bare. If the repercussions—does the villain get away with it, as it seems they will? Will Julie be accepted by the community at last?—and the problem of the heroine falling in love with a man who barely recognizes her existence and who promises only that “although he left her often, he would always come back to her” are left unanswered, overall this is a book with at least a bit of novelty to it that makes it worth reading.

A Challenge to Nurse Honor

By Pauline Ash, ©1965

A lot of people though Jeziah Selby had been unfair to his four daughters when he left them his fortune only on condition that they first worked for two years in the hospital that had meant  so much to him. Only the eldest girl, Honor, was happy to do as he wished—but were the others necessarily selfish to rebel?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“She scuttled away, remembered she wasn’t supposed to run unless it was fire or haemorrhage, and waited till she got round a corner before she smartened her pace.”

REVIEW:

This Harlequin romance about four sisters named, I am reluctant to tell you, Faith, Hope, Charity and Honor Selby, seemed similar to other Harlequin books I’ve read, including Nurse Willow’s Ward, also about four sisters, and Reluctant Nurse, about a woman who is forced into nursing by a domineering father. Here we follow Honor, who is the one daughter who actually wanted to be a nurse, and her three sisters, who with far less enthusiasm do office work around the hospital. The other three all had budding careers as a musician, model and actress, but had been forced to put them aside when dear old dad died and stipulated that if any of his children were to inherit, all of them had to work for two years in the hospital. If any one of them should cut and run, no one will inherit. You may not be shocked to hear that the non-nurse sisters are not very happy about this. “I just can’t begin to understand what possessed Daddy to make that horrible will,” Charity moans to Honor. Bizarrely, Honor is the only one of the set who does not seem to feel that her father has done anything horrible. “You know very well what Daddy wanted—a son, to carry on the family tradition,” she answers Charity, as if this is going to either excuse Dad’s behavior or make Charity feel that Dad actually did care about her. “He thought the theater was a useless way to spend your life,” she adds, twisting the knife while she has the chance. She should have been a surgeon instead of a nurse.

She persists in torturing her other sisters as well; when Faith says that when the two years are up she is going to resume her music training in Vienna or Milan, Honor tells her, “Daddy didn’t want that sort of life for you.” Again and again we witness Honor’s cruel inability to empathize with her sisters or acknowledge that her father had not treated her sisters well. “He was being very wise,” she decides. “My sisters knew very well how he felt about their chosen careers. He was only enforcing by death what he hadn’t had time to enforce in life. Daddy was fair, he never asked too much of anybody.”

When she’s not acting “all stiff and starchy like the older staff,” Honor is fighting with her boyfriend Lucien Lorimer, a rich cad with whom she has little in common, but who proposes nonetheless. It won’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Lucien actually had a thing with Honor’s sister Faith at one point, and the pair are still fond of each other, but Honor is as dumb about them as she is about her father. For her part, she is nursing a crush on surgeon Elliott “Jake” Falkland, who clearly is fond of her, too. Honor, naturally, is unable to see his affection for her; even after Jake tells her that he’s not interested in other nurses’ troubles, only hers, she decides that he “had given no great indication that he wanted to be specially friendly with her.” So the pair stumbles through much of the book with stupid misunderstandings because neither can see the obvious, much less speak it. The problem with this device is that it becomes increasingly maddening as the book goes on. “The fact that he had taken her in his arms and kissed her didn’t really mean that he loved her,” we hear two-thirds of the way through, and we’re ready to take a number behind all of Honor’s sisters and give her a good smack.

Eventually the tragedy that Charity foretold—“No good will come of keeping any of us here. One day something awful will happen, because we’re honestly no good at the job, and then you’ll be sorry, Honor!”—comes to pass. Faith and Lucien, out for a boat ride with a few drinks on board, crash, and Faith hits her head and lapses into the inevitable coma. The accident brings almost everyone’s feelings out into the open—Lucien and Faith’s, and Hope and the passenger Alan Froy, who happens to be a music talent scout and whom Hope had met a year earlier. It also cracks the ice encasing Honor’s heart, at least as far as her sisters are concerned, and she goes to the attorneys to see if there is a way out of the will—but the attorney hints that dad had yet another trick up his sleeve. But before she can get the whole story from the attorney, she witnesses a man being stabbed in an alley, is conked on the head by the perps, and lapses into a coma of her own. Waking from it, she’s back to her old ways, needling Hope when Hope reveals that she’s leaving the hospital to go to Italy to nurse Alan back to health and, incidentally, marry him. “It will keep, won’t it?” Honor says, suggesting her sister postpone her wedding. “There’s only another twelve months to carry out Daddy’s wishes, and you did say you’d stay the course.” Honor really, truly, has no right to her name.

While she lies listlessly in the hospital thinking that her relationship with Jake is over while all her sisters have chucked the traces at long last and run off with their various beaux, the attorney shows up and tells her that if the sisters can’t last two years, then they get half their share of the inheritance instead of none, but Honor, who has stuck to it, can keep her full share. Not likely to promote sisterly affection, but half an inheritance is better than none. She rouses with this news to read a letter from Jake saying that he thinks she does not love him so he will leave the hospital, and so she manages to stagger out of her hospital room and scream his name before passing out again at the top of the stairs, but the doctor is nearby and hears her, and she hadn’t actually plummeted down the stairs after all, and everything is quickly put to rights between her and Jake.

Overall this story is fairly sweet and well written, but the problem is that Honor as a heroine is just awful. She is selfish, cold, and unfeeling toward her sisters, blind and stupid about the men in her life, and in the end exhibits little character growth except that she’s finally able to make a (ridiculous) attempt to keep Jake from leaving; surely a phone call would have sufficed? It’s very hard to spend so much time with someone you cannot bring yourself to like, so the challenge here is not for Nurse Honor but for us, the reader, to manage to stand her long enough to finish the book.

Casino Nurse

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1974
Cover illustration by G.H. Jones

Lovely Rena Stafford had been taught as a student nurse never to become involved in the private lives of her patients. But she found it impossible not to get caught up in the wealthy Madame Zeigler’s exciting, glamorous existence in Monte Carlo. Rena had never expected this strong bond to grow, nor did she expect the strange reaction of Madame Zeigler’s handsome nephew, Dr. Stephen Montrose, when she summoned him urgently to Monaco. When two of Madame Zeigler’s attractive friends from the casino, Mark Lassiter and Jean Auriol, began to vie for Rena’s affection, she was surprised—and strangely disturbed. But the biggest surprise of all was to discover she had fallen in love—with the very man who could only mean heartbreak.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“These are small and very expensive suites available for purposes other than gambling. I’m sure you know what I mean. They are very private.”

REVIEW:
What the back cover blurb (above) doesn’t tell you is that Madame Anne Zeigler dies on page eight. Rena Stafford had been caring for Madame for the past year, living with her in a luxurious suite in Monte Carlo. Madame had leukemia, so it was just a matter of time. But now the hotel manager is on the phone, telling her that she has to pack her bags and get out in three days, when Madame’s monthly rent payment ends.

All of Rena’s salary had been held by Mrs. Zeigler—and then there’s the matter of a small loan of all her cash on hand that Rena made Mrs. Z three days ago, which had not yet been repaid—so Rena is scrambling for some ready cash and a place to live while she sorts out Mrs. Z’s final affairs. Fortunately, these two guys are hovering around, ready to help. Mark Lassiter is an old friend of Mrs. Z’s who works at the baccarat high tables at the casino, and Jean Auriol is a croupier at the chemin de fer tables. Another fella is on the way, too; Dr. Stephen Montrose, Mrs. Z’s nephew, who is in his last year of residency, is winging his way over from New York.

Fortunately for Rena’s fiscal situation, the job as casino nurse is open, and Mark Lassiter secures it for Rena. Though Jean’s early attempts to befriend Mrs. Z were shrugged off, he finds out about this and “arranges” for Rena to work nights so she will have her days free to go out with him, and then he calls and harasses Rena until she agrees to have lunch with him—though why you would have lunch with someone you find annoying is a mystery to me, particularly since he attempts to entice her by saying, “Please come. There’s nothing … sinister.” Right. Lo and behold, after lunch, though Rena is expected at a meeting with Mrs. Z’s attorney and tells Jean to bring her straight to town, he instead drives her to a secluded spot in the mountains and refuses to take her back until she kisses him. Like a good VNRN heroine, she does, and finds it “long and vaguely disturbing.” He presses her for more—and her hand over his “thudding” heart—until she threatens to walk back to town and actually gets out of the car. She makes the meeting with 15 minutes to spare. Unlike other VNRN heroines, she never goes out with Jean again—but only because he is never seen again for the remaining 50 pages of the book, with no clear explanation of why he was hanging around to being with.

Meanwhile, at a small gathering after Mrs. Z’s funeral, Steve learns of a gaming system that won an Englishman a great deal of money at the casinos: when red comes up on the roulette wheel, you bet $100 on red for the next spin. If you win, you double your money. You continue to bet red for the next five spins, leaving all your winnings on the table. Then repeat the process on black. Steve’s eyes light up when he hears this, and it isn’t long before he’s at the tables, and winning, too! Rena has to literally drag him away from the tables after he’s made $700 to go to the reading of his aunt’s will. It turns out Mrs. Z was worth about $40 million (between $175 million and $375 million in today’s money)! She leaves Rena $20,000 and a diamond and mink stole, Mark Lassiter inherits $50,000, and Steve gets the rest. After this, Steve goes straight back to the tables: “It really is a most exciting way of passing the time,” he says. “It’s not as if I intend to become an addict. Nothing like that at all.” Which is sure to keep him safe, because all those other addicts meant to get hooked.

Curiously, Rena does not even start working as a casino nurse until 35 pages from the end, after the will has been read. We first see her on the job when she’s been there a week. On this night, a countess attempts suicide with an overdose of barbiturates. The house doctor is home with the flu, so she calls Dr. Steve from the gaming tables to help. She politely waits for Steve to finish his game of baccarat, in which he loses a million francs—$100,000—and then “the fight to save the life of the Countess Isabella Galvani began.” As dawn breaks, the Countess is breathing easier and looking less blue, and Steve says, “You did a great job. Really special. I mean … really special.” Then he asks her how long she plans to keep working in the casino, and Rena tells him she’s quitting her job and returning to the States tomorrow. Naturally, he decides to go with her—and proposes out of the blue. Then it’s all over except some smooching. As Charlie Brown used to say, bleah.

Not much at all happens over the course of this book. And what does happen occurs over a glacial pace: The “race” to save the Countess takes 17 pages. The whole situation with Jean is totally “sinister,” to use his own word, more so because Rena can’t seem to say no, despite how much she dislikes him. It’s not out-and-out boring, but the most interesting things about this book are the cover illustration and the ad for Kent cigarettes bound into the middle.

Overseas Nurse

By Jennifer Ames
(pseud. Maysie Greig), ©1951
Cover illustration by ?Lou Marchetti

At the Sydney airport, Nurse June Ray made her first error: she mistook a handsome stranger for her sponsor, Dr. Jed Lawson. Unaware of her mistake, June spent a romantic day and a half swimming in the dazzling sunlight and dancing under the stars. By the time she met the man with whom she had been corresponding and to whom she owed her last chance at a nursing career, her heart was no longer her own …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTE:
“Being young and pretty takes up a girl’s time – too much time.”

REVIEW:
I suppose that we shouldn’t be too surprised that, as the book opens, Nurse June Ray is fleeing the country, heading for Australia. What I did find unusual is her reason for leaving: She fell asleep on night duty and her elderly patient died. The doctor on the case drummed her out of the hospital, saying, “Negligence is a mild way to express it, Nurse. I believe had you not gone to sleep your patient would be alive at this moment.” Ouch.

When she arrives in Sydney, she’s met by a hunky fella who drives a hot sports car. She keeps looking at his “strong and capable” shoulders. But soon she finds out he’s not Dr. Jed Lawson, the kindly doctor who befriended her brother Clive, cared for him in his final hours after a mysterious car crash, and invited her to Australia. He’s Ken Wyman, manager of the Gumbula sheep ranch, where Clive was working. The ranch is now owned by Shelah Wyman, the slinky widow of Ken’s older brother, Roy. Roy was a “semi-invalid,” wounded during the war, and an impeccable driver who nonetheless crashed his car for no apparent reason, killing himself and Clive and leaving the ranch to his not-so-grieving widow. Shelah keeps talking about selling the ranch, mostly to piss off Ken, but also because living out in the bush is too lonely for her. She’d be all right, she says, if only she were married again. “Roy was scarcely a husband to me for some time before he died,” she says, and is she looking at Ken’s strong and capable shoulders when she speaks?

The day Nurse June arrives at Dr. Lawson’s house, Ken’s grandmother, Mrs. Kensey, has another stroke and requires round-the-clock nursing care. So June is packed off to the ranch, where she and Ken can kiss behind closed doors from time to time while she cares for Mrs. Kensey. When she does have a bit of time off, June helps out Dr. Lawson, who soon makes a play for her, telling her how lonely he is and how he’d like to settle down. Um, gosh, how about those Red Sox?

Back at the ranch, June’s patient is always mumbling about another will that Roy made before his death. She tells June that Shelah creeps around the house at night looking for the will, and she is always trying to get out of bed to find it before Shelah does. She also refuses to drink any beverage that Shelah prepares, because “that’s how she murdered him.” Naturally, everyone assumes the stroke has made her dotty. Well, she is a bit dotty, calling June Claire, because June looks like Mrs. Kensey’s deceased daughter, Ken’s mother. To prove the point, Ken drags her into his room to show June a portrait of his dead mums, and then, in a scene that would keep Freud busy for weeks, kisses her repeatedly, stopping only to say, “You are so like she was.”

One night, in an uncharacteristic gesture of friendliness, Shelah brings June a cup of coffee to help her stay awake all night, along with a nice glass of hot milk for Mrs. Wyman. As June struggles to stay awake—curiously, the coffee seems to have made her more sleepy, not less—she remembers the last time she felt like this, the night her elderly patient died, when the patient’s crabby niece had brought her a cup of tea … June had felt so sorry for the gaunt thing, who had just overheard her aunt tell June she was going to change her will and leave her fortune to June …

The next morning, you may not be surprised to learn, Mrs. Wyman is found dead while June is sawing logs in her chair. Everyone is a pretty good sport about June’s role in the death, saying she’d been overworked and had been up for days with Mrs. Wyman, so they’re all willing to let this go. But at the inquest, June pipes up that she feels she was drugged, and mentions that it was Shelah who brought her the coffee. And then there are the cups they had drunk from, which have vanished, and no one seems to have taken them. Shelah responds by pulling out a letter that June had written to her brother, explaining in great detail what had happened with her first dead patient, and says that June is just trying to find excuses for her bad nursing. There’s no proof, so nothing comes of June’s allegations except that she feels compelled to leave the ranch on the next train for Sydney. And the train actually pulls out of the station with June on it, with no farewell whatsoever from Ken, and never mind that speeding sports car that passes the train just before it reaches the next station.

The ending of this book could be foretold by a ten-year-old, including the hiding place of the new will. But even so, it’s not a complete waste of time. It’s not campy or amusing at all, but the writing is decent enough, and some of the characters are fun to watch, most notably Shelah and Mrs. Wyman. It reads more like a modern-day romance story, with the couple in question kissing in one chapter and quarreling in the next, and a big misunderstanding keeping them apart until the very end. Well, not the very end, as the couple is actually married five pages from the last page, and spends a very satisfying (wink, wink) month-long honeymoon in Fiji, another rarity for a VNRN. The “mystery” aspect of it, though not very suspenseful, gives you something else to think about, and overall this is a fairly decent book.