Navy Nurse

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1954

Ensign Dorothy Phillips was beautiful; life was beautiful; her work was wonderful; and everything was right with her world—until the day, her arms laden with bundles for the Chief Nurse’s surprise birthday party, she was almost run down by a carload of brash young Air Corps officers. An impudent apology, yelled by a handsome lieutenant, was the crowning insult. Then the lieutenant appeared unannounced at the party—revealing himself as Lieutenant Keith Cameron Townsend, and the dour Chief Nurse’s nephew, no less! The fact that Dorothy was engaged didn’t mean a thing to Keith. The more she snubbed him, the more persistent he became. It takes a battle at sea—and all the suffering connected with it—for the ensign to realize that love and hate are often akin.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Oh, you know a kiss or so doesn’t mean anything. At least most people don’t think it does in this progressive age.” 

REVIEW:
Author Adelaide Humphries, who has previously given us two A-grade novels (Nurse Landon’s Challenge and The Nurse Knows Best), here has achieved a truly remarkable feat: She has written a novel in which not a single one of the five leading characters is a likable individual. One might wonder why you might want to write a book about spoiled, selfish, inconsiderate people—and a skilled writer might even craft a thought-provoking, Pulitzer Prize–winning epic from such a cast—but alas, here we are just left to grit our teeth and endure through to the end—or just toss the stupid book aside and move on to something better. I advise the latter. 

Let’s start with leading lady Ensign Dorothy Phillips. She is the most gorgeous woman in the entire world, somehow made even more dazzling by her uniform: “Ensign Phillips had features and skin a poster-girl could never have surpassed,” so “when a beautiful girl like Ensign Phillips donned her Navy nurse’s uniform, wolf whistles were the order of the day.” Oh, boy! When the book opens, she is on the sidewalk, carrying purchases for an upcoming party, when a car overflowing with Air Corpsmen whizzes around the corner. She’s pulled back from stepping into the street, knocking her packages askew and somehow keeping her from getting run over though she was never actually in the street, and one of the men in the car leans his whole torso out the window, shouts something unintelligible and waves his arms above his head—it actually seems as if his life was more at risk in this incident than Dorothy’s. These brief seconds leave her “with an impression of laughing black eyes, a flash of white teeth in a tanned, handsome face—and a burning sensation around her heart.” Yes, she’s in love already, and this is why she is overwhelmed with a relentless, obsessive hatred for the young man.

The fellow who had kept her from stepping into the street, Charles Henry Hale, who unfortunately chooses to be called Skid, is the closest we have to a decent human. As a first-class gunner’s mate, he is outranked by Dorothy, a fact that is made much of, and Dorothy’s condescension to even speak to such a lowly creature is treated with great admiration. Don’t worry, though, she is ultimately extraordinarily cruel to the respectful young man, who kindly and humbly helps Dorothy with her packages and carries them back to the launch for her (she is stationed in a hospital ship off the coast of San Diego). He hopefully suggests they have coffee, though noting the invitation is “entirely too brassy,” but Dorothy condescends to accept, after first having berated him for causing her to drop her packages.

During coffee, Dorothy decides that Skid is a “darned nice boy,” and he, of course, falls immediately in love with her and asks to see her again. “Dorothy despised anything that hinted of snobbery,” we are told, so she immediately wades into it, thinking, “An enlisted man couldn’t get seriously involved with a Navy officer. It would lead to all kinds of gossip, and no telling what it might lead to.” The only reason she decides to agree to see him again is that she spots that darned guy who almost fell out of the car that didn’t hit her, and becomes furious that he seems to be laughing at her, so she “deliberately turned her back on him” and gives Skid an overly enthusiastic wave and shouts that she’ll see the poor dope next week!

The party she is helping to plan is a surprise birthday party for Chief Nurse Capt. Nettie Leonard, the quintessential gray-haired spinster martinet, and who should turn up at it but that darned guy again, who is revealed as Capt. Leonard’s nephew, Lt. Keith Cameron Townsend (the two male leads both absurdly have middle names)! Darn the luck, her entire day is ruined! At the party Dorothy’s flirtatious and backstabbing roommate, Micky, flings herself at Keith, scorching her own boyfriend in the process, but Keith manages to grab Dorothy and tell her that he will win her, “no matter what or how long it takes,” because all women find stalkers irresistible! And when Keith crashes her next date with Skid, Dorothy takes her revenge on Keith by telling him that the pair have known each other since childhood and that they are engaged. “She felt good. She was glad she had told that big fib. She would whiten it by explaining later on to Skid, although she didn’t know just what her explanation would be.” This is the same woman who, “besides believing that the best policy was to stick to the truth,  believed that when a person gave his word to someone else he should do his level best to live up to it.” Let’s see how honest Dorothy is going to play this out.

So having gotten herself into one bad situation, she now plans to make it worse: “It looked more and more as though there was nothing she could do except try to make this trumped-up betrothal authentic,” because the honorable thing to do is to marry a man you’ve just met to spite someone else. Dorothy also promises Micky’s boyfriend, Dr. Tommy Simms, that she will keep Keith away from Micky, though this goes completely contrary to her life’s purpose of never speaking to that horrid man again. It doesn’t exactly work, as Keith presses her and Skid into double dating with him and Micky on a regular basis—though, out one evening celebrating their engagement, Dorothy dances with Keith and discovers “one dance had made all the difference in the world,” because Keith kisses her and tells her that he is in love with her—and that “you’ve got a lot to learn, Dorothy. But you will.” So the next scene finds Dorothy admitting to Skid that she does not love him, but that she’ll agree to get married if he wants to. Ugh!!

When word gets out that Dorothy is engaged to Skid, however, the chief nurse becomes unprofessionally hostile and assigns Dorothy to night duty out of spite, and then calls a staff meeting in which “everyone present agreed that it was a mistake for an ensign in the Navy to become engaged to, or even go with, an enlisted man.” Now nothing can possibly save Dorothy from this horrible situation—except a really big sea battle! So off her ship chugs, following the battleships into war—I’m not exactly certain which war we’re supposed to be fighting—and on the eve of the big battle, Skid sends Dorothy a “beautiful” letter in which he tells her that he loves her because “she was so sincere, the kind of girl a fellow would be proud to take home to show off to the home folks.” Clearly this man barely knows her—and her true character is again revealed by her reaction, which is not remorse or shame, but rather “fatality”—and then she hopes that she’ll get a letter from Keith. But when she hears Keith has survived the battle, she’s remembering “his pride, that masculine ego of which he had more than the average share. His pride would demand that he, an officer, must never give up trying to win a girl away from an ordinary enlisted man.” That jerk!

Soon Skid turns up on the medical ship, one of the worst burn cases in a coma for days, his chances of survival a hundred to one, and “it will take plastic surgery to restore that burned face.” Dorothy tells him with tears and kisses to get well, that they’ll be married as soon as he’s better, but “Skid knows Dottie doesn’t love him. He probably knows she feels sorry for him and so is willing to make the best of a bad bargain.” And so he does the decent thing, committing suicide by willpower and dying in his sleep, because “if a fellow wants to die—well, nothing any doctor, or anyone else, can do will help him,” declares Dr. Tommy Simms. “He had the courage to die—because he wanted you to be happy,” adds Micky. Dorothy replies, “It makes me feel almost as though, instead of helping him, I had caused Skid’s death.” Probably her first honest thought—and her last, as without another thought to her likely role in manslaughter, she steps off the ship to “where she belonged—in a certain handsome young lieutenant’s arms.”

There is not one admirable quality in Dorothy, her manic roommate Micky, or the egotistical and domineering Keith, and not much better in the vindictive chief nurse, or even Skid, who is self-sacrificial to the ultimate degree. Dorothy’s stint in the Navy makes it look like a casual weekend gig, and her commitment is definitely wanting; early on she confesses that she’s not sure why she joined the Navy since she has a deep-seated phobia of water, gets seasick easily, can’t remember all the darned rules and regulations, and after six months she still cannot get the hang of military time! But she gets excellent training in the Navy, and she doesn’t have to work very hard—“a navy Nurse’s duties are much lighter nowadays; they’re mostly supervisory.” Interestingly, it is suggested that if she were to marry, she would just resign her post. I’m not sure how that could ever have been a thing, because my impression of the military is that it’s not an optional sort of arrangement. This book, however, is optional for you, and so I recommend that you forego it, and instead try the much more interesting Navy Nurse penned by one of my favorite authors, Rosie M. Banks—it’ll be much smoother sailing.

Nurse March

By William Neubauer, ©1957

Dawn March had her future all planned—she would marry handsome Dr. Ken Jones and they would settle in the little seacoast community that she loved and build a happy and beautiful life together. But Dawn hadn’t figured on a couple of interferences that became substantial obstacles to the realization of her dream. The first was Ken himself. There was a side of his nature that Dawn was slow to recognize, that shocked her when she did. Ken fancied himself a big-time success, and his impatient ambition was such that it left little room for the kind of life that Dawn had hoped they would share. Another was the entrance of Mrs. Clara Royce, a divorcee of great wealth, considerable beauty and no scruples whatsoever. Clara Royce offered Ken the fulfillment of his dreams—and a short-cut to the success he craved. Dawn began to realize that even the best-made plans of bright young nurses can sometimes get pretty well upset!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Oh, I know you young girls. You simply refuse to eat proper meals and sleep proper hours. Dash here, dash there, hurt this young man, hurt that young man, call the district attorney a liar, call the newspapers liars, and go careering on your way straight to a nervous breakdown.” 

“What you ought to do is marry me while you still have something to offer.”

“I ought to break a leg. That would interest you, wouldn’t it?”

“A girl so lovely, so obviously decent and well-intentioned, ought to have been married long before this. What had happened? What was her problem?”

“Lovely women aren’t often interested in business.”

“I’m told a woman never quite forgets her first husband.”

REVIEW:
Faithful readers will know that I am a big fan of Bill Neubauer, a truly interesting individual (check out his biography) and the author of about 20 nurse novels (this is the 11th book of his I have read). With Nurse March, he again proves he is capable of a meatier book than most authors, imbuing his story with multiple plot threads that, even if they don’t all easily weave together to create a cohesive whole, nonetheless make for a more interesting read than the usual VNRN. 

Nurse Dawn March is a 24-year-old visiting nurse who provides free care to the residents of Port West, a seacoast California town. She has a “sense of duty that had always kept her moving along and had earned her the reputation, at least in certain quarters, of being a girl dedicated wholeheartedly to her career.” As part of her duties, she is sent to the shack of Dan Colby, an artist who lives at the town dump, who is diagnosed with a fractured patella. He is receiving a monthly stipend from a local business magnate who fancies himself a patron of the arts, which allows him to concentrate on his painting without needing to waste all that time earning a living or even selling the paintings he produces.

Dawn does not  agree with this arrangement and has it out with Dan who, for his part, explains that he doesn’t like to sell his work because “the subjects mean a great deal to me. Or perhaps because expression of any kind is too personal a thing to sell.” She argues with him about it, and he tells her he’s not interested in compromise, which would force him “to paint pretty birds that aren’t birds at all, to paint the sea as it never is, but the way some editor thinks it ought to be.” Ultimately he decides, “She had the same sort of mind that his father had. Bend to the storm! Sell your heart’s blood, if necessary, to provide material comforts for the rest of your body! And live, therefore, without dignity, without meaning!”

Unfortunately, when Dawn finds out that Dan has turned down several offers of work—selling his art to a gallery, accepting commissions from magazines to create artwork for a magazine—she feels it’s her job to make him change his ways. She starts by telling him he’s a bum in a rut, but he responds, “It sems to me that I have a pleasant existence, one with considerable point. I paint. I work very hard to learn what I need to know. I grow. Now what precisely is wrong with all that? Perhaps in another society there would be room for people who like to paint.” It’s not a bad point.

Appallingly, she takes it upon herself to meet with Dan’s benefactor, Mr. Patton, and convince him that he’s ruining Dan’s life by supporting him. Though several art critics have stated that Dan has a lot of talent, she declares that Dan is not gifted or even working on improving his art. She tells Mr. Patton that Dan works “only as it suits him to, and when it suits him to. And he does not learn, and he therefore does not progress, because the only work he does is the work he chooses to do in the way he chooses to do it. That isn’t the way to develop.” Which is ironic, because we have witnessed Dan fielding criticism that the feathers of a painting of a seagull were overdone, and he appraises his work and finds that the evaluation was true, and decides to alter his technique.

It seems Dawn’s biggest complaint is that Dan is receiving the charity of the city through her nursing visits while not contributing to society by earning a living. She misses the point that Dan is in fact being paid to paint, whether he offers a canvas in exchange for the money or not, and it’s not her call as to whether the exchange is worthwhile. “I simply think he must learn the same things we all learn—that is, to earn our living while we’re also preparing ourselves to do the sort of work we want to do. He owes it to himself and to the community to accept the commissions he’s offered. He’s had free medical care and nursing care. To that degree he’s certainly obligated to the county and to the community.” When Mr. Patton offers to pay for Dan’s medical care, she turns it down, telling Mr. Patton that his patronage is turning Dan “into a bum.” Unfortunately, she prevails, and Mr. Patton cuts Dan off. She smugly decides, “She’d at last managed to do Dan some real good.” God forbid anyone else she decides to “help”!

In her personal life, Dawn is also on the wrong tack. She’s hopelessly smitten with dentist Ken Jones, who is essentially just a pretty face. He’s been dating Dawn but doesn’t bother to remember the anniversary of their first date; it’s his kind and generous sister Hattie who invites Dawn to dinner at her and Ken’s house to mark the occasion. Curiously, though, when Ken expresses a desire to open a chain of dentistry offices throughout Southern California and in so doing reap large profits, with the investment of Clara Royce to back him, Dawn is outraged. “I think you should work as my father works, for something other than purely personal gain.” She’s convinced that Clara’s attentions have given him too much ambition: “Much of this big talk hadn’t been hatched in the mind of Ken Jones. Just a month ago, he’d been happily talking about the pleasure he found in living and working in Port West. Then, quite suddenly, here he was talking in grandiose terms and dreaming grandiose dreams.” So she dislikes one man’s lack of ambition but also decries what she feels is too much in another. Apparently Ken is not impressed with meddling women either; ultimately he nakedly says to Clara Royce in front of Dawn, “You stop leading me on, and I’ll stop leading her on.” Ouch!

The man who actually loves Dawn, Wes Overton, is a real estate agent with some interesting ideas, and who seems to fall into Dawn’s sweet spot as far as ambition goes. “I think a fellow owes it to himself and to society to do a good hard day’s work every work day of the year. But I don’t think life should be twisted into a mean grubbing for money. I think a life so twisted is a life without dignity.” He believes, he tells Dawn, that “a person has an obligation to himself to do whatever will make himself and his loved ones happy.” But never-happy Dawn sneers at his attitude, telling him, “There you are just plodding along as you’ve done all your life.” 

Toward the end of the book, the now endowmentless Dan is forced to hire an agent and accept commissions to paint particular subjects for wealthy movie moguls. Dawn is elated, but I was not. Dawn’s father hints that “of late you haven’t been yourself,” but it’s not clear what he’s referring to. Her meddling with Dan’s life? Her moping over her ill-fated romance with Ken?

The book has a truly interesting and complex idea at its heart, that everyone must earn a living even if that means doing something they don’t enjoy on their path toward getting to what they really want. But if the person can find support by some other path, even if that means accepting a sponsorship or charity, is that wrong? Is Dawn forcing Dan to be in some respects a whore to do work he does not value? Should an artist be supported by the community on their path toward developing their technique in a way that a doctor or nurse, for example, is not, and may be forced to work, say, as a nurse’s aide or EMT to pay for their training toward a more complex career? The problem with how this issue is handled in Neubauer’s story is that Dawn is a hypocrite, chastising both Ken for his ambition and Dan for his lack of it and ignorning Wes’s happy medium; she believes Ken should be doing more for free and settling for less, while Wes should be working harder to expand his business. And why is it her job to wreck the good life Dan is enjoying for himself, and even Mr. Patton’s enjoyment in helping Dan achieve that?

The end of the book holds some real surprise twists, and Dawn ends up with a man who deserves better. I had hoped that the self-righteous and shallow Dawn, meddling in affairs that didn’t concern her and chasing a pretty boy with no character, would face some sort of come-uppance that would cause her to realize the error of her ways, but she did not, and I can’t feel that Dawn is a better person at the end of the book. But the story did give me a lot to think about, and talk over with other people who hadn’t read the books, so in that respect it was successful. As usual, Neubauer gives us delightful characters and charming writing, so if the heroine was not all I wish she had been, this book still has a lot to offer, and my high opinion of Bill Neubauer remains unchanged, and even fleshes out my ideas of what his character was that he produced a book with this message.  

Dedication Jones

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

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

GRADE: B+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nurse Jane and Cousin Paul

By Valerie K. Nelson, ©1964

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

GRADE: C-

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

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

“I thought nurses were always hungry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nurse Rivers’ Secret

By Anne Durham, ©1965
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Everyone at Ripplegate General Hospital was tremendously excited when the film star Dawn Delaney was admitted as a patient—everyone, that is, except Nurse Nina Rivers, who knew Dawn only too well and dreaded the complications she would inevitably bring with her.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“She’d be a proper corker out of that horrible uniform.” 

“No one looks at a nurse unless she’s doing something to attract attention.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nina Rivers has made a life for herself apart from her family; she comes from a fairly broken home. Her father died when she was very young, and Mother married Alexander Fitchworth, a very nice man who had been a real father to Nina. Of course, he went and died, and Nina became a sort of Cinderella to her temperamental and beautiful stepsister Alexandra, waiting on her hand and foot. Astonishingly, when Mother and Alexandra had decided to move to America, Nina elected to remain in the U.K. to become a nurse, and neither of them has ever forgiven Nina for “abandoning” them and what would have been a life of unappreciated drudgery.

Imagine poor Nina’s surprise when her sister is brought in to her hospital as a pampered private patient—under the name Dawn Delaney, as she is now known, as she is a rising movie star and is making a film in a castle nearby; Dawn had fallen through a rickety balcony when she had been up there outside of working hours with a film mogul who could do things for her career. Nina is immediately sacrificed at Dawn’s altar by none other than Mommie Dearest. Not a hug or word of affection passes from Mommie’s lips after years apart from her first daughter before she is exhorting Nina not to tell anyone of the relationship. “You’ve always said you didn’t care for that sort of life. This is what you prefer, and as soon as Alex has recovered, she will go right out of your life again, and not trouble you,” she says, blaming the victim. “You must come and have tea with us one day,” she adds, finishing the job with a knife to the heart.

But Dawn/Alex is a spoiled brat, always on the call light and sobbing in self-pity, and the only one who can soothe her is Nurse Rivers, who is constantly pressed into duty to pat the limpid hand of her sister. Dawn is also one of those ladies who “always found the men belonging to other girls much more acceptable to her than other men. She didn’t mean any harm; she just couldn’t help it.” Yeah, right. And of course the first man she notices is Dr. Antony Alsford, who is all but engaged to Nina—if only they can settle the thorny issue of whether she will quit working when they get married. “I just want a career of my own,” she tells him repeatedly, but he is having none of it. “He didn’t like his girl-friend to be the one with ideas, the one to want to make plans. He would want a yes-woman, Nina felt.” It’s clear why she wants to marry him and why she is heart-broken when he becomes starry-eyed over the dewy, rose-colored Dawn—and breaks off their engagement with a story about how he is doing her a huge favor by ending it. “I’m standing in your way,” he generously explains. He has no idea how right he is, and unfortunately neither does Nina.

Because there’s nice old Dr. Stephen Cornwell to help her over the rough patches, give her a lift into town and buy her tea and pass over his handkerchief. Though he starts out “much as a kindly uncle,” his charm grows naturally on Nina, and he is clearly in love with her—though she, of course, is the last one to figure this out. She does come to understand something her own feelings early on, however—“a rather special feeling towards Dr. Stephen Cromwell, that had begun deep down in her almost imperceptibly, and was now like a glow of warmth on a cold day, stealing gently yet swiftly all over her. A glow that made her want to be with him all the time.” Unfortunately Dawn, recognizing the attraction between the pair, now decides that, having won Antony for her own, she no longer wants that fickle man and has her heart set on winning poor Dr. Cornwell. “She hadn’t really wanted Antony permanently; she had just wanted to feel that she could take his attention away from another girl, and now she was finished with him.” What a sweet girl!

Now Dawn is making herself sick with longing for the good doctor, and Nina feels she has no choice but to exhort Dr. Cornwell to go along with the charade that he loves her in order to help her recover. “Dawn wanted him, and they must consider her, because she was so ill,” she decides. He flat out refuses, however, proving himself to be a man of principles and character. “She’s behaving like a spoilt child. She wants something. She must have it. It doesn’t matter if it’s some pretty toy or a man’s attention, it’s all one to her. And I, for one, will not pander to it,” he tells her, adding, “I think you’ve let Dawn and her mother make a doormat of you for years, and I’m going to personally stop it.”

But Nina is a clever lass, smart enough to figure out another way to get Dawn off Dr. Cornwell’s leg—even if in enacting her plan she risks losing the doctor for good. Complications and misunderstandings ensue, of course … and in the end we have another fairly typical Harlequin story, sweet and slow, with an admirable, strong heroine—and in this instance, we are lucky to have an attractive love interest as well. Some side characters are well-drawn; Nina’s mother in particular was terrifically horrid in a subtle sort of way. If overall this book is not especially sparkling, it’s still well worth an afternoon.

Nurse in Jeopardy

By Rose Dana
(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1967

Beautiful Nurse Mavis Eaton had come to the quiet seacoast town to develop another talent: painting. But she was soon deeply enmeshed in a strange and terrifying struggle that involved a handsome young doctor and a brilliant mysterious stranger.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I declare that half of my practice is tending to summer incompetents. They come down here and stay out in the sun until they’re boiled lobster red, work in their gardens until they get heart attacks, overeat and get every kind of gastrointestinal complication imaginable! I wonder if they realize how much healthier they’d be if they just stayed at home and took it easy?” 

“I wouldn’t trust her with an undersize lobster.”

“Just because I happen to be neurotic enough for two is no reason I should be in a hurry to share my neurosis with some unfortunate girl.”

“Romance! It louses up everything!”

REVIEW:
Nurse Mavis Eaton is one wildly lucky nurse—her dying patient, Mrs. Maltby, bequeaths her a year’s salary and a house on the Maine seacoast, which she accepts without hesitation, though I think the ethics of that are just a bit sketchy. Her dream is to work on her painting, hopefully to develop enough during her time off from nursing to decide whether she has the talent to pursue painting professionally. Moving into the small town, she meets local GP Dr. Timothy Ryan, who somehow manages to practice medicine though he his blind, and the other medico, Dr. Bill Rutherford. “He’s tall and blond and looks like those men in the shirt ads, a real serious young man,” we learn, and soon Dr. Rutherford has convinced Mavis that working a few days at the understaffed hospital in Bristol will help her paint better when she does have time off. She also is befriended by Stephen Metcalfe, once a lawyer but now a gadabout, living in an outbuilding and renting his family house to a man from California. “I am the modern equivalent of one of those misunderstood holy men—the hermits,” he tells Mavis modestly. He has a propensity to say absurd things like, “I am the lonely ghoul of the Metcalf estate, abhorred by all and sundry in the village.” If he talks like that to them, it’s no wonder.

Other locals include German-born John Ulrich, who moved to Maine before World War II. He is known to have been a Nazi sympathizer and is suspected by the locals of assisting the Nazis. “You know they caught a lot of spies that arrived here on the Maine coast from a submarine. But they had to have someone here to help them; someone they could trust. And I always thought John Ulrich was that man!” her cleaning woman tells her. Upon meeting Mavis, John says that prowlers are sneaking around his house and gives her a tin box with photos of his family and a newspaper in German that he says holds notices of his brother’s death in World War II, and asks her to keep it for him and mail it to his sister in Germany if he dies. Sure, she says, because she takes everything that total strangers give to her. Soon there are footsteps in the snow outside her house … what else could it be except that someone is coming after Ulrich’s box! Maybe it’s Hans Heinke, another local expat German, who was a prisoner in the German concentration camps during the war. Discussing John with Hans, Mavis thinks “his attitude toward John Ulrich remained very strange,” because it’s difficult to understand why a Nazi sympathizer might be disliked by someone who was in a concentration camp. “Hans still has a sort of complex from being in that concentration camp. It leaves a mark on a man. In his case, he takes a pretty downbeat view of life,” Steve tells Mavis. Hmmm, I wonder why?

Soon Steve is dropping unpassionate kisses on Mavis, who is not reported to have much feeling about the matter; she seems to have more response to a kiss from Dr. Rutherford. All that is essentially parenthetical to the story, and halfway through the book John Ulrich is bludgeoned to death. Now the question of who did it takes over the book. Mavis “wouldn’t want to cause trouble” by pointing out to the police that the dead man’s last word was Hans’ name, but Dr. Rutherford prevails upon her to tell the cops this and the fact that John had given her a box, which they promptly come to collect. Everyone falls under Mavis’ suspicion, and for the rest of the book we are either following her around the hospital or casting nervous glances at the neighbors.

Neither the mystery nor the romance held much interest for me. Few of the clues that Mavis considers are ever satisfactorily explained away, and the holes in the story are many and large. Even the mystery about what Mavis is going to do with her life remains unclear; at one point she decides, “She wouldn’t become a great artist overnight. It was going to take long months and perhaps years for her to perfect a technique individual enough to make her mark in the roughly competitive art world,” a realization that should have been obvious from Day One, but even with this idea suddenly dawning on her, she never declares what her ultimate career intentions are. Her final choice for a boyfriend is not satisfying and frankly doesn’t really even make sense to me, since just pages earlier she had been convinced the man was involved in the murder. Dan Ross, here writing as Rose Dana, has never been one of my favorites, and this book did little to change my opinion.

11th Annual VNRN Awards

Hello again, and welcome back to our annual roundup of the best vintage nurse novels of the year! The most significant win goes to Bill Neubauer, whose Best Book award this year gives him the most of anyone in that category, with an amazing seven! (You can now buy a number of the Best Books as ebooks republished by my company Nurse Novels Publishing, which is just celebrating its first anniversary!) My perennial nemesis Peggy Gaddis also captured her seventh award—but for Worst Book, so the distinction is less laudable, but why not pop a champagne cork for her as well?

We are greeted by a number of other familiar names among the Best and Worst Books this year: Dorothy Fletcher claimed two of the top prizes, bringing her total to five Best Books;  Marjorie Moore, Ida Cook (writing as Mary Burchell) and Elizabeth Gilzean (writing as Elizabeth Houghton) captured their third Best Book awards this year, while newbies Violet Finlay Stuart and Betty Neels joined the Best Book list for the first time.

The Worst Books category also yielded little surprise, as perennial losers Peggy O’More Blocklinger (her fourth raspberry), Suzanne Roberts (“win” #3), Richard Wilkes-Hunter (writing as Diana Douglas for #2), Norah Bradley (writing as Sharon Heath for #2) and Adeline McElfresh (#2) appear again. We don’t look forward to more books by first-timers Doris Knight and Margaret McCulloch.

It must be admitted, however, that terrible books can frequently yield glorious quotes, as a number of the worst books provided amusing pearls for our Best Quotes of the year. Why is that, do you wonder?

Fine print: Winners are chosen from the 42 VNRNs I read this past year, which were penned by 31 different authors. The Best and Worst Publishing Houses categories includes all the VNRNs reviewed for this blog (558 to date). As much as I would have loved to include Nurse Novels Publishing, which would have easily bagged the Best Publishers top slot, it just didn't seem fair ...

Enjoy!

Best Books
1.      Hospital Corridors by Mary Burchell (pseud. Ida Cook)
2.      New Yorker Nurse by Dorothy Fletcher
3.      The Fifth Day of Christmas by Betty Neels
4.      The Dilemma of Geraldine Addams by Diane Frazer (pseud. Dorothy Fletcher)
5.      Prison Nurse by William Neubauer
6.      Doctor Sara Comes Home by Elizabeth Houghton (pseud. Elizabeth Gilzean)
7.      Doctor Lucy by Barbara Allen (pseud. Violet Finlay Stuart)
8.      Peter Raynal, Surgeon by Marjorie Moore
9.      To Please the Doctor by Marjorie Moore

Worst Books

1.      Seacliff Nurse by Peggy O’More

2.      The Nurse and the Star by Peggy Gaddis
3.      Hope Farrell Crusading Nurse by Suzanne Roberts
4.      Nurse on Terror Island by Doris Knight
5.      Flight Nurse by Adeline McElfresh
6.      Nurse at Shadow Manor by Sharon Heath (pseud. Norah Bradley)
7.      Second Year Nurse by Margaret McCulloch
8.      Nurse Crane … Emergency by Ann Gilmer (pseud. W.E. Dan Ross)
9.      New Orleans Nurse by Diana Douglas (pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter)

  

Best Quotes

“I never supposed he thought of anything but cutting people up in the neatest and most miraculous way possible.”
Hospital Corridors by Mary Burchell (pseud. Ida Cook)

“How can he tell me how pretty my eyes are in one breath and then start talking about thrombophlebitis?” 
Hope Farrell Crusading Nurse by Suzanne Roberts

“The trouble with you, Gail, is that essentially you’re too honest. You always level with people. I don’t, and life is far more exciting.”
Nurse in Doubt by Isabel Capeto

“The only time I went to the Wayside Inn was with a freshman from the University. Emphasis on fresh. It’s one of those places where you get so mixed up under the table because of lack of space that when you want to go to the john you have to say, ‘Excuse me, may I have my legs back?’”
Nurse Turner Runs Away by Diane Frazer (pseud. Dorothy Fletcher)

“Are you still shaky from the shark episode?” 
Nurse on Terror Island by Doris Knight

“A man of such romantic temperament that he can make love among the white enamel fittings of a hospital kitchen is not to be lightly dismissed.”
Hospital Corridors by Mary Burchell (pseud. Ida Cook)

“Rosemary’s been coming to the beach for the past two weeks. Upton and I were immediately drawn to her superior mind.”
Nurse Audrey’s Mission by Isabel Cabot (pseud. Isabel Capeto)

“You carry a gun, don’t you? Couldn’t you arrange to have it go off sort of by accident, you know?” 
Highway Nurse by Florence Stuart (pseud. Florence Stonebraker)

“This is why nursing is not an overcrowded profession. Word has gotten around that it isn’t all handsome doctors and gay pulse-taking.”
Nurse Crane … Emergency by Ann Gilmer (pseud. W.E. Dan Ross)

“A lot of clear thoughts can come to a man while he’s eating squirrel stew.”
Hope Farrell Crusading Nurse by Suzanne Roberts

 

Best Covers
Nurse on Terror Island
The Dilemma of Geraldine Addams, illustration by Harry Bennett
Visiting Nurse
Prison Nurse, illustration by Robert Maguire
Nurse Craig

Best Publishing Houses
Harlequin
Monarch
Perma Books
Pocket Books

Worst Publishing Houses
Airmont
Popular Library
Dell Candlelight
Belmont
Valentine