Nurse Harlowe

By Jane Arbor, ©1954

Gillian Harlowe, staff nurse at St. Ranulph’s Hospital, had told herself over and over again that it was sheer folly for her to fall in love with that distinguished surgeon, Adrian Pilgrim, whose interest in her was obviously confined to approval of her professional skill. Worse – he seemed almost to welcome the idea that she might marry his charming, reckless young cousin Colin, while he himself was busy squiring the sophisticated (and very determined) Elspeth. Yes, she knew she ought to put him out of her thoughts. But it isn’t always possible to persuade one’s heart to listen to reason.

GRADE: C

REVIEW:
The cover illustration completely sums up this book: Plot devices you’ve seen before, assembled with little skill, and achieving a mediocre result. Those story lines we’ve met numerous times in the past:

1. The heroine, Gillian Harlowe, at 23 is fifteen years younger than the man of her dreams.
2.      Dr. Adrian Pilgrim “had never given any sign that he recognized anything but the trained dexterity of her hands,” but she Gillian falls in love with him anyway.
3.      Gillian had been in love with playboy Colin Fenmore four years ago, but he’d dumped her after a summer of fun—and now he’s turned up in her ward after a serious car accident that may leave him crippled for life.
4.      The only way Colin is going to pull him through his recovery is if Gillian pretends that she’s in love with him.
5.      Dr. Pilgrim believes Gillian is going to marry Colin.
6.      Gillian believes Dr. Pilgrim is going to marry sexy vixen Elspeth Paul.
7.      The Ward Sister, Clarice Hugh, is a bitter, mean shrew because she had lost her fiancé 20 years ago.
8.      Clarice is transformed into a warm, kind human being when her ex-fiancé returns for her.
9.      Dr. Pilgrim kisses Gillian at the Nurse’s Ball, but she thinks he means only to insult her by it.
10.   Despite a recent promotion to charge nurse that she says means a great deal to her, Gillian plans to throw over her career when she is married.

And that, essentially, is all there is to say about this book. The writing is perfectly tolerable, but the story a straight, wide highway through the desert: It’s clear where you’re going, and you’ve seen before what little there is along it. I think the most emotion I felt during this book was when the fiancé quotes Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew to her in the final pages: “‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper; Thy head, thy sov’reign.’ Are you really content, my sweet, to have it so?” And she replies. “It’s all that my life could ask—” It wasn’t a pretty emotion, but it was one. If it’s not an emotion you would care to have yourself, you might want to consider giving Nurse Harlowe the slip.

Princess of White Starch

By Katherine McComb, ©1963 

Nurse Flower Palmer was young, lovely, and in love. Jimmy Scott, her fiancé, was the Prince Charming of any girl’s dream—handsome, fabulously wealthy, and very much in love with her. But there were others who were determined to do something about it. Two women in the Scott mansion hated the young nurse. And there also was the dark-haired, moody, unpredictable young doctor at the hospital, whose anger and contempt and sudden passion had shaken and frightened her. When tragedy struck, all of them pointed accusing fingers at Flower.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“You don’t think much of women anyway, though I suppose your mother was one.” 

“Who did he think he was, anyway, one of the Kennedy boys?”

“If you weren’t my best friend I’d inject air into your veins, or something.”

“All laymen think doctors and nurses have it easy, and go into shock when they get a bill for saving their lives.”

“Are you a native angel?”

REVIEW:
How awkward to have a literal flower child for a heroine. Nurse Flower Palmer, who has been at LA County Hospital since she graduated from nursing school month ago, is “no bigger than a bar of soap after a big wash,” 5 foot 2 and 110 pounds, and “just because she was small and looked sixteen instead of twenty-three nobody ever seemed to take her seriously.” Take, for starters, Dr. Lester Dean. “I was just wondering why they sent a grammar-school babysitter to take Miss Reynold’s place,” he tells her when she shows up to work the emergency department. But he is just a cynical old meanie who wishes the suicide attempt had been successful because the patient will “try it again the next time she starts feeling sorry for herself. And she’ll probably keep on until she succeeds.” He also tells a woman whose throat is slashed her husband, “It’s the inside scars that can never been healed.” Super helpful! Even better, before the shift is halfway through, he grabs her and kisses her, “hard, bruising, demanding.” She is outraged, so much so that when he asks her out to dinner she “almost said yes before she thought. Then she remembered his rudeness and shook her head.” That’ll show him! Of course, we know how this is going to go: “She had never met such an arrogant, pick-headed person, and just when she might have started liking him.” Which she will, after a lot of sparring. 

This book, like many other VNRNs, includes a natural disaster, but here the twist is that it’s on page 25, not the penultimate chapter. During the earthquake she meets a man whose legs have been broken, but good news! His nephew, Jimmy Scott, is hunky and drives a robin’s egg blue sports car. She helps get Jimmy’s uncle home, which is an ocean-front mansion in Santa Monica, and then agrees to do some part-time nursing for the man around the edges of her regular daytime job. Of course, it takes Jimmy about ten minutes to propose, though she points out the only known each other two days and it might be a good idea to get to know each other first.

All of a sudden, Flower takes a sharp U-turn away from her usual sensible and smart attitude. “She thought again, as she had many times, about leaving the hospital.” After only a month on the job? “Of course there was one way out—she could marry Jimmy Scott.” Um, yes, that’s one way out, but aren’t there may be other, less permanent options? Two months pass in a few short pages, and she’s said yes to Jimmy and given notice at the hospital. Three years of training, and she quits in three months. “You belong to me,” Jimmy tells her, “and that’s all you need to belong to.” He gives her a huge diamond ring which she refuses to take off at work, though I expected this is a little problematic when managing a Code Brown.

The only person who isn’t happy for her is that stinker Dr. Dean. “You don’t honestly believe that Jimmy Scott will allow his wife to bathe, give enemas and carried bedpans for male patients, do you?” Which was the point, of course, so it’s not exactly the zinger he might have liked. And then he kisses her again, the cad. Six more weeks quickly pass, during which Flower moves into the family manse and wedding planning proceeds apace. Suddenly Mr. Scott has a stroke, and now the wedding is off, and Flower can keep nursing, right in the comfort of her fiancé’s own home. Conveniently, Mr. Scott’s doctor goes on vacation and turns the case over to Dr. Dean, who can come over and glare at Flower on a daily basis. Unfortunately, Mr. Scott has a few more strokes, and, one day when Flower is home alone with him, he sends her off to get lunch, and when she comes back, he’s at the bottom of the pool. Almost everyone seems to think Flower has given the old man a push—everyone except Dr. Dean, of course. How will she clear her name?

Well, that’s not really important. She does, of course, and gets a man, after a stupid little misunderstanding that we really didn’t need. Overall, this is book is somewhat mixed. Flower is delightfully spicy, and tough, to boot. One irritating visitor suggests he should have the procedure so he can have her for a nurse as well. “What do you think I could have cut out, Nurse?” Flower snaps, “Your ego,” and promptly tosses the joker out of her patient’s room. But she quits nursing at the drop of a hat, so it’s hard to have a lot of respect for her after that. (Yes, it seems she’s going back to it in the end, but still, how fickle can you be?) Some parts of the story, particularly the evil plot to frame Flower, seem quite thin—but then the description of Mr. Scott’s strokes, each one whittling away a little bit more of his vitality, seemed painfully real. There are things in this book that make it worth reading—quotations from the poet Shelley among them—but it won’t be the most delicious meal you’ve ever tasted. If it’s landed in your lap, I give you permission to have at it, but you needn’t go chasing it down.

Sisters in White

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1965 

Seeing Vicki and Nicki Evans striding down hospital corridors together in their crisp, white uniforms and perky caps, people always did a double take. The nurses looked exactly alike—they were identical twins. Which made for a certain amount of fun around Community Hospital. Fun for everybody but Vicki. For Vicki was the dedicated and hard-working one, whereas her carefree and vivacious sister had never failed to capture the heart of any man she wanted. And now she had set her cap for Vicki’s special man. This meant trouble—in this case, double trouble.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Any girl who would wear a red satin bouffant dress with three sequined petticoats just wasn’t the kind of girl who’d be happy emptying bed pans.” 

“I’m not supposed to be safe. I’m a nurse—remember?”

REVIEW:
If you are unlucky enough to remember those horrible Wrigley’s Doublemint gum commercials with the vapid blonde twins masticating in unison, the cover illustration and back cover blurb of this book may revive some nauseating memories. Certainly author Suzanne Roberts, who has until now earned only C grades, doesn’t make a reader feel confident that anything other than a saccharine, stereotypical blandness awaits. But while I won’t promise you double your pleasure or double your fun with the Evans twins, I can say it’s not half bad. 

Vicki Evans is the dedicated one, Assistant to the Ward Supervisor at Chicago Community Hospital. She’s so serious that little student nurses tremble when she approaches—but worse than that, she never gets any dates! “I worry about you, Vicki,” her spinster boss declares. “It’s one thing to be a dedicated nurse, but quite another to make nursing your entire life. You need to get out more!” But there’s only one man for Vicki, and that’s similarly serious Dr. Keith Bryan. So serious is he, in fact, that “the only time Keith really seemed deeply interested in people was when they were sick.” She asks herself that age-old question, “Why can’t he ever see me as anything but an efficient machine?”

The trouble really begins when Vicki’s sister, who had to be named Nicki (go ahead and roll your eyes, you’ll feel better), shows up. She’d managed, somehow, to become a registered nurse too, but had quit upon graduation to be a flight attendant—maybe because she’s so, well, flighty. “‘Go ahead and get all the A’s,’ Nicki had once said good-naturedly. ‘I’ll settle for the B’s, honey. As long as B stands for boyfriend!’” Nicki is running away from a man who’d lost interest and has decided to go back to nursing. Well, maybe. “They surely wouldn’t put me on a ward that was—terribly depressing, would they?” she asks. And because she’s cute and blonde and vivacious, and because she bats her eyes at Dr. Keith, they don’t; she ends up working under Vicki, and never mind how inappropriate that may be. Immediately Nicki shows her true colors by never showing up on time, by dropping a pair of sterile gloves on the floor and then handing them to a doctor to be used in surgery, by taking two-hour breaks, by lying to everyone about that time she saved all those people when her plane crashed. And she starts chasing Dr. Keith.

This is where we’re supposed to hate Nicki for stealing the only man her sister could ever love, but in truth we can’t blame her—because Vicki, the dope, never tells Nicki how she feels about Keith. “She was determined not to let Nicole know that she had a crush on Keith. Because once a man decided to fall in love with Nicole, there was usually no stopping him.” It seems clear that Nicki and Keith are not right for each other, even if Nicki knows better than to wear her red dress and her jazzy jewelry on a date with him, because the goal is to just land a man, not to get one you might actually be happy with. But as he dates Nicki, he and Vicki keep exchanging these long, meaningful glances, when “that quick, electric, breathtaking spark seemed to flow between them,” until Nicki interrupts the moment.

And here’s another instance where we can’t hate Nicki: When Vicki, finally sick of Nicki’s ineptitude, tells her she shouldn’t be a nurse, Nicki flings herself at her sister’s feet. “‘I’m going to change,’ she said, her voice firm. ‘It’s more than just wanting to prove to you that I can be a good nurse. It’s trying hard to do what’s best for the patients. I want that to be my big reason for being a good nurse.’” And though she does continue to make stupid mistakes, she seems to be genuinely trying, reading a few medical journals (though two is all she can manage) and fretting, “Maybe you won’t believe this, Vicki, but it’s terribly important to me. Nursing, I mean. I know you and maybe a lot of other people think I’m an addle-brained somebody and only fit to serve coffee on jet planes, but now that I’m here at Community, I want to be the kind of nurse that you are.” And, when she’s transferred to work in surgery, the toughest ward in the hospital, and after three weeks, she is improving so much that even Vicki has to admit that Nicki is doing well: “I watched you when you assisted the resident in brain surgery today. You were just great. Time was when you’d have fainted dead away.” Retaining consciousness is a low bar, but Nicki is finally accomplishing something!

The problem is that Nicki is a slow learner, though when you think about it, it’s a lot more realistic that she isn’t immediately able to change her personality overnight. And when she “goofs,” as she calls it, she begs Vicki to bail her out. Initially Vicki resists, refusing to cover for Nicki when she’s late for work, but then she takes responsibility when Nicki drops a tray full of medication and doesn’t tell anyone, so the med count is off at the end of the shift. And in a fateful scene we are amply warned is coming (“neither of them had the slightest hint of the horror that was going to come”), Nicki leaves a postop patient for five minutes to freshen her lipstick because she knows Dr. Keith will be coming up to see the patient soon, and Vicki walks in to find the man hemorrhaging from a “gaping wound” unbelievably left after a lung surgery. Nicki again pleads with her sister to save her: “They’ll probably fire me. Please don’t let them do that to me! I was just beginning to be a really good nurse; you said that yourself. I don’t want to lose everything and if you just cover for me,” she cries. “Tell them you told me I could leave. Please help me! I swear to you I’ve learned my lesson, Vicki! I know now how much nursing really means to me.” Vicki, stupidly, agrees, saying, “I won’t cover for you again, Nicki. Not ever.” Which is what she said after the dropped medication incident, but never mind about that.

So she lies to Keith—and believing her capable of this gross error of conduct, he cancels what would have been their first date. Interestingly, no one else in the hospital thinks it’s true—a student nurse stops her in the hall to says she doesn’t believe it, and Vicki’s friend Dr. Bixby also immediately sees the truth and interviews the patient, who identifies Nicki by her perfume and her singing—neither of which Vicki would ever bring into a patient’s room. Vicki tries to cheer up Nicki, saying, “You’ve got to go on believing that you’re a good nurse. You’ve got to hang onto that dream, because nursing could be the most beautiful and important thing in your life,” and adds that they’ll go to Keith in the morning to tell him the truth. In the morning, though, Nicki has packed her bags and run, nobly first stopping at the hospital to leave a note for Keith confessing all. Discovering this when she wakes, Vicki puts in a full day at the hospital, and then she decides to try to find Nicki at O’Hare. The airport was not as busy in 1965 as it is now—well, before Covid, anyway; adorably, it takes her ten minutes to search every ladies’ bathroom in the airport, and more than eight hours after leaving Vicki’s apartment, Nicki’s plane still has not taken off, so when Vicki finally catches up with her, they have time to argue in a coffee shop—until that plane crashes just outside them on the tarmac.

It's an interesting book because at least Nicki shows real growth as a character, even if she remains a flawed individual despite her apparently sincere efforts to improve, which make it a more complex story than most. Vicki, unfortunately, is interesting only in that she seems to diminish as her sister grows—she makes only one small effort to be friendly to Keith, and despite what everyone believes about her character, she still lies for her sister on two occasions. There is real humor in the book, such as when a resident tells Vicki as they sit down for dinner at the diner, “Don’t order any cream pie. I pumped out three stomachs last night and they all—” Suzanne Roberts, in the eighth book of hers we’ve read, has finally served us a cream pie we might actually want to eat.

Nurse Adele

By Hilda Pressley Nickson, ©1966
Also published as Season of Mists

Staff Nurse Adele Palmer had always brushed aside Sister Margaret Bowen’s bitter comments on her romance with Norman Wayne as the jealousy of a frustrated woman—until it began to dawn on her that Margaret might be right after all …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I’ve known many an otherwise fine and intelligent woman be attracted to the dopiest man.” 

“No wonder women surgeons and doctors were not popular. In the main, they were over-conscientious and inclined to interfere with matters out of their province. They seemed naturally to have an eye for detail and for domestic matters, traits which the wise professional woman used to advantage, traits which could be valuable but which were so often misused.”

“Men? I guess some of us will put up with anything to get the woman we want. Rent, rates, mortgages—even children.”

REVIEW:
Every nurse heroine I’ve met lately seems to be working happily on the night shift, and Nurse Adele Palmer is such a one. “She always found night duty so immensely satisfying. A night nurse had a much deeper, closer relationship with her patients, could help them in a way which often contributed to their recovery far more than drugs or even the surgeon’s knife. The murmured confidences, the heart-to-heart talks in the small hours when the rest of the ward were wrapped in their own dreams. Then, a nurse became friend, physician, priest and councilor, the problems of another human halved by being shared.” When I worked nights, there were a few hardy nurses who did actually prefer it, but most seemed to be forced into it by the demands of their family life. 

Adele, the youngest of three children, lives at home with her parents. Her father is a cold, aloof man who barely speaks to his daughter and discourages her from bringing anyone home. Her mother aids and abets the old goat, but fortunately the couple are travelling a lot, he on business and she going with him because “her parents were still so much in love that they could not bear to be parted for long.” She won’t be lonely, though, because she is going out with Dr. Norman Wayne, with whom she has quickly fallen in love and is planning to marry. Though one might be forgiven for thinking that what she is really in love with is the idea of moving out of her father’s cold house. “How wonderful it would be to have a place of one’s own where once could really be free. Adele was beginning to what that more than anything else, and dreamed of the home she and Norman would one day set up together. Their children would feel absolutely and completely free to bring anyone home at any time. She must talk to Norman about this.”

Fortunately, Norman is dragging his heels about getting married—she seems to want to have it over and done within months of their starting to date, so anxious is she to move out—ironically because he loves her parents’ home so much that no rinky-dink flat, all they would be able to afford, will do. What he really wants to do is move in with Adele’s parents, not at all comprehending that Adele would rather live under a bridge than with her parents.

Three other people round out the list of dramatis personae: Nurse Margaret Bowen, a thirtysomething angry woman who “was a good nurse in many ways, but was inclined to adhere too much by the book,” who has an “intimidating, dominating personality” and a “pessimistic, soul-destroying view of life.” Standing up to Margaret one night on the floor when the older nurse is convinced that there is hanky-panky going on in the kitchen (the junior nurse was making tea), Adele does what anyone would do when forced to work with such a monster: She invited her to come stay with her for a week while her parents are out of town yet again. While visiting, the two have minimal chilly conversations in which Margaret strongly disapproves of not just Norman but every male on the planet. The stuff of great friendships.

Two other doctors round out the cast: Dr. Susan Kent, a cool, unfriendly surgeon who insists on flicking on all the lights and flinging back the covers on the sleeping patients on Adele’s ward. (Adele, admirably, resists this unnecessary treatment, but in the end she is forced to apologize for her insubordination, and never mind that she’s right.) The other is Dr. Ian Patterson, who was once engaged to Susan; he’s a kind but shadowy figure with whom Adele has maybe three conversations with until the day they start making out in the woods.

And that’s really about all there is to say about this book. Adele and Norman spend a lot of time looking at flats, none of them proving suitable for Norman. Adele, out of the blue, decides she’s really in love with Ian—while she’s still engaged to Norman—but happily catches Norman smooching Dr. Kent, so that makes everything easy there. And Margaret is given a personality transplant, her incessant, angry sniping about men, so tiresome to the reader, melts away into wreaths of smiles when she meets a nice man who likes her. Even Adele’s unhappiness with her father is smoothed away with a single honest conversation. Pretty much every character in the book is a shallow, self-deluded fool whose fundamental psychoses melt into rainbows at the lightest touch. Adele often demonstrates confidence and backbone as a nurse, but she has none of these traits as a human being, and her successes at work are minimized while her successes in her personal life are essentially accidental—“Adele had too much pride to do the chasing,” we are reminded again and again, so she makes little effort to get what she wants. Her relationship with Margaret cannot be called a friendship, but she certainly chases after this unpleasant, bitter woman, and though it pays off in the end, it’s impossible to understand why she pursues that relationship so determinedly. A perplexing, uninteresting character, it’s ultimately not rewarding to spend any time with Nurse Adele.

Surgeon of Distinction

By Mary Burchell

(pseud. Ida Cook), ©1959

Maxwell Perring was a surgeon with a special distinction about him; “star quality” it might have been called in another profession. Nurse Alma Miles admired his work, but had never thought about him as a man. All her thinking of that sort was centred on Jeremy Truscott—and he was presenting quite a problem.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“You can’t address anyone as ‘sir’ when he’s proposing to you.” 

“Few people, she found, can resist the exquisite temptation of talking about themselves, if a sympathetic audience seems available.”

“She wondered if anyone else had ever been so silly as to indulge in romantic nostalgia over an appendectomy.”

“Don’t praise him too affectionately. It puts a frightful strain on my regard for him.”

REVIEW:
Some nurse novels have plots so intricate that it takes many paragraphs to convey the story. This charming story of Mary Burchell’s is not such a one, but she has the talent to execute a simple story that is nonetheless layered and emotionally complex that the lack of story line is no hindrance at all.. 

The plot, such as it is, is that Nurse Alma Miles has been seeing Jeremy Truscott, and has been hoping they would become engaged, when he starts blowing her off—and eventually she sees him going out with Nurse Geraldine Grayce, who had “a withdrawn, almost enigmatic quality which was not entirely friendly.” “She was quite courteous when spoken to, but no actual warmth emanated from her.” To escape from her heartbreak, Alma accepts a job at another hospital working with distinguished Dr. Maxwell Perring. Initially one might be concerned that he is one of those love interests: He has “a quiet assurance which bordered on arrogance, and the faintly sardonic curve to his mouth showed that he was not a man who suffered fools gladly.” He’s a brilliantly gifted surgeon, but he also remembers to tip the waitress: “It’s nice to have someone really knowledgeable at one’s elbow,” he tells Alma after her first day working alongside him. He’s warm, friendly, and respectful gently humorous, and “very good-looking,” of course!

As one of many quite astonishing coincidences in this book, Jeremy is run over right outside Alma’s new hospital, and Dr. Perring and Alma perform the life-saving brain surgery. But when Jeremy wakes up, he does not remember Geraldine, only Alma—and is convinced they are engaged. Sent to his flat, Alma finds a ring with Geraldine’s name on it, and bringing it to Jeremy, he proposes to her. She accepts, in true VNRN trope, because “he must not have his recovery jeopardized by the faintest hint of the situation”—but she is an honorable, honest person with no intention of holding to the lie, and so tells Dr. Perring the whole awkward story, and gives him the ring to hold, because “it isn’t mine. I can’t bear the sight of it. I can’t go on living a lie like this!”

But gossip gets out, as it is wont to do in a hospital, that Alma and Jeremy are engaged. Fortunately, it only takes 15 pages before Jeremy remembers all, and Alma honorably gives him up. Miserable to lose Jeremy a second time, Alma goes out for a walk and wanders into a ballet—and amazingly, Dr. Perring is there alone as well, in the seat next to hers! He takes her to dinner afterward and suggests that she can escape the hit to her reputation by becoming engaged to him, though he is fully aware that she is in love with Jeremy.

She agrees, because she has a deep esteem for Dr. Perring and thinks that marriage to him could be a moderate success—and then we slowly watch the unfolding as an upstanding, honorable woman dumped by a shallow cad but now allied with a like-minded, dependable man evolves in her feelings. There’s a silly misunderstanding in the end in which the hitherto strong and outspoken Alma is inexplicably unable to correct a stupid situation, but this is the only black mark on this otherwise fine, subtle book.

Alma is a worthy heroine: She is an accomplished scrub nurse with a strong sense of humor and (most of the time, anyway) a dignity and backbone that allow her to insist on and command respect. Max could have been one of those older, colder men who are forced on us as a love interest but who are in fact frightening and creepy, but he is finely drawn as a dignified surgeon with a real personality outside the OR. The writing can sparkle quietly, such as when dawn breaks on a heartbroken Alma who had cried all night: “Monday morning came and Alma was still alive.” The only other flaw this book has, outside of the ubiquitous misunderstanding, is the large number of stunning coincidences on which it hinges, but this is such a minor problem in what is after all a work of fiction, particularly in view of the many lovely moments this book offers the reader. How satisfying to find not just a surgeon of distinction, but a book of distinction as well.

Behind Hospital Walls

By Ruth Dorset
(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1970 

Also published as Head Nurse

Lena Mitchell’s life changed when her younger sister Jan came to work for her at Middleboro General. Jan was blonde, lovely, vivacious—but also, Lena knew, lacking the dedication she expected from her staff. When a patient of Jan’s died, Lena could find reason to excuse her—for the responsibility may well have belonged to an older doctor kept at Middleboro by political intrigue. Lena had vowed to aid young Dr. Jim Porter in his efforts to save the hospital from such corruption. To the last, she hoped for Jan’s help. Until Jan turned on her—and made a play for the man she loved.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Lena made a quick check of his condition and confirmed the fact that he was in a coma.” 

REVIEW:
Nurse Lena Mitchell works the night shift at Middleboro General, which is located in Massachusetts, 90 miles north of Boston—and never mind distance actually puts you well into New Hampshire. She has a problem in her younger sister Jan, who also went to nursing school, and who is “giddy and anything but a dedicated nurse. ‘I don’t intend to be one of those self-sacrificing nurses who wear their flat heels out on a hospital floor for fifty years. I’m going to marry me a rich doctor or patient, whoever offers first, and retire just as soon as I can,’” the lovely blonde had confessed on the day of her graduation from nursing school. So when Jan calls Lena, who is the charge nurse of her floor, and asks for a job, these qualities—even more than the minor issue of nepotism—should keep Lena from agreeing. “She really hadn’t had much choice,” we’re told, so Jan gets a job—and upon moving to Middleboro persuades Lena to move into a bungalow with her. Can you say bad idea? 

Premonitions prove accurate when, upon arriving in Middleboro, Jan immediately puts the moves on Dr. Jim Porter, a “young” man with graying hair who had just lost “a beloved wife” to cancer. Jim, who had been dating Lena, is soon paying Jan a great deal of attention, which does make you think a lot less of him, both for preferring looks to character and for moving on so quickly. And a third of the way into the book he’s proven himself to be even more fickle, dumping Jan to go back to Lena, just days after he’d asked Jan to marry him.

Jan doesn’t exactly help her cause; when she has skipped work to date a former patient who owns a club that is rumored to be “a rendezvous for underworld characters,” instead of firing her, Lena flat-out lies to Jim about Jan’s new boyfriend and tries to convince him to stay with Jan—but the next minute she’s kissing him. When Jan walks in on them, he tells her, “I make no apologies,” but then adds, “you should be wise enough not to enlarge on the meaning of what you saw,” suggesting that Lena means nothing to him. What a guy! Can he have one sister and kiss the other? Jan, anyway, knows a liar when she sees one and promptly moves out of the bungalow, leaving Lena in a lurch with now twice the living expenses to cover. Who saw that coming?

Elsewhere in the plot, Jim has been trying to convince the mayor to allocate funds to improve the hospital, but he is convinced that the mayor is so deeply embedded in corrupt schemes that there is no city money left over for the hospital. Then Lena, on her way to work, comes across a car crash at which the young female passenger flings a suitcase at Lena and runs away, and Lena finds the driver dead. Turns out the man is the assistant mayor, and the suitcase is full of cash—which is promptly stolen out of Lena’s locker at the hospital. How can she and Jim prove the graft that was not really evidenced by the now-missing money? Oh, and narcotics have been going missing for the past few months—could that be tied in? Only marginally, and there’s another bald spot on the tires of this bus.

It’s a fairly predictable storyline that wraps up unsatisfactorily. There’s the unsuccessful attempt on Lena’s life, but she’s had years of professional training to keep cool during emergencies, so she responds by screaming a lot. Then Jan turns out to be even more of an evil louse, but in the end she’s really sorry, because “I didn’t dream it would lead to this; that they’d try to kill you,” she says; she’d just been intending for her generous big sister to eat her heart out as a lonely spinster her whole life. “Can you forgive me?” Lena “smiled up at the pretty sister. ‘Of course,’ she said,” and that might be the worst, except that Jim implies Lena will be giving up nursing, as he tells her, “From now on I have other duties in mind for you.” I’m no fan of William “Dan” Ross, who has a habit of creating shallow, unlikeable heroines (see Five Nurses and Resort Nurse, for two egregious examples). This isn’t his worst book ever, but unfortunately that’s the best I can say about it.

This book was also published under
the provocative title Head Nurse
but with an equally hideous cover 

Stop-Over Nurse

By Fern Shepard
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1968 

Brenda Gregory, a nurse, was driving a drugged woman patient to the hospital when their car crashed over a cliff, the patient died in flames which burned her beyond recognition, and Brenda, surviving, suffered injuries which required plastic surgery to her face and wiped out all memory of the past. Gradually she recovered in the confines of Stop-Over House, a convalescent home in a California beach town, and even began nursing again there. Then suddenly her memory returned, and she found she had mistakenly been identified as the dead woman and was unable to prove her true identity. Furthermore, a certain quack psychiatrist who was interested in keeping her dead so she could not reveal what she knew about him was willing to swear to the lie and declare her a mental case. 

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Six miles all told! She could never walk it. She’d fall dead in her tracks.” 

REVIEW:
For the first few chapters of this book, I would have bet hefty sums that I had read it before. After a thorough search of my blog, I found a couple of books that could have been sisters to this one (the pretty good Masquerade Nurse and the god-awful Jane Arden’s Home-Coming), but no identical twins. So it was a mistaken identity, which as it happens is exactly what this book is about. Nurse Brenda Gregory had caught her awful boyfriend, psychiatrist Dr. Nelson Ludlow, injecting STP, a hallucinogenic that had its debut in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, into Brenda’s friend Kitty Carter. Stuffing Kitty into the car, Brenda heads for the hospital, but is hit by another car and knocked over a cliff. The resulting crash and fire kills Kitty and leave her body burned beyond recognition, while Brenda suffers amnesia and terrible facial trauma that requires the best efforts of a plastic surgeon, who has given her a different appearance. When the book begins, it’s more than a year later, Brenda is waking up at Stop-Over House, a convalescent home for people with psychiatric illness, and slowly realizes she’s an employee there, formerly a patient, and is known to all as Kitty Carter—seems Dr. Ludlow and her sister Eve had at the time of the accident both identified her as Kitty, and since she had amnesia she had been thinking she was Kitty. The trick is, how is she going to prove that she is actually Brenda if her ex-fiancé and sister say she’s not? I dunno, fingerprints? Dental records? Birth marks? Blood type? Consult a lawyer? Nah. 

Nonetheless, Brenda finds an ally in Kitty’s brother Tom Scott, who is a famous foreign correspondent and who does believe that she’s not Kitty. Tom hatches a plan to catch Dr. Ludlow in the lie: He will tell the press that he has become engaged to her, thereby getting her story into the papers—because her story on its own wouldn’t be at all interesting. The crazy ploy actually works: Ludlow takes the bait and turns up at Brenda’s house to murder her, but it seems that Tom has not bothered to take any precautions once he got the story out. Ludlow nearly succeeds, aided and abetted at every turn by Brenda herself, who first lets the psychopath in—he’s taken so many psychedelics that he thinks he’s the Roman emperor Nero—then fails to telephone the cops or shout for help, sits beside him, and takes the drink he offers her, even though she was “feeling ill with alarm,” all because “she did not want him causing a disturbance.” How considerate! Fortunately, though, two friends of Brenda’s drop by before she’s had more than a small sip of the poisoned cocktail, so she survives.

Next Ludlow tries to kill Brenda’s sister Eve, since Eve was in on the original scheme to misidentify Brenda, and then there’s another hare-brained scheme to get Dr. Ludlow to admit that “Kitty” is really Brenda, and this one succeeds, so everyone lives happily ever after. First, though, we have to a bit of dancing around, with Brenda saying that she thinks Tom doesn’t love her and Tom insisting that he really does. But I will acknowledge that the ending was actually a little sweet.

It’s not the most original of novels, and seems to be not much more than a heaping handful of Florence Stonebraker’s usual tricks—psychedelic drugs, car crashes, amnesia, crazy psychiatrists, and characters named Kitty (see her heroines in Night Nurse, Nurse Kitty’s Secret, and The New Nurse). The writing is fairly perfunctory, with no real amusing quotes to offer you, certainly not what Stonebraker is capable of (Doctor by Day, City Doctor). This is one of four books I’ve read of hers that were published in 1968; an author that busy can’t always knock it out of the park.  William Faulkner churned out what he called “potboilers”—books written largely to earn money—but some of those also earned Pulitzer prizes. Stonebraker will win no awards with this attempt to pay the rent, and more is the pity, since I know she can do so much better.