Arms and the Girl

By Marguerite Mooers Marshall, ©1942

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The Lord knows we men are an undecorative species. I hope you can stand looking at me across the table.” 

“Beautiful girls like you should do nothing but exist.”

“People get the poetry they deserve.”

“I am going to have a relapse. You don’t take me seriously any longer.”

“There’s nothing so becoming to a pretty girl as a nurse’s uniform.” 

“Facts are so bald and unimaginative. Facts often annoy. If embroidered or flavored, they are easier to take.”

“You can always get killed in a war if you insist, and frequently if you don’t.”

REVIEW:
This book was a surprise to me because I thought I had read all the VNRNs written my Marguerite Mooers Marshall, who is one of my favorite authors. So now there are five (see also Nurse into Woman, Wilderness Nurse, Her Soul to Keep and Nurse with Wings), and if this one is not her best, well, even Marshall’s mediocre books are still miles better than most. 

Here we find Rosemary Alden (yes, descended from those Aldens of Mayflower fame), who is nursing the mother of an old boyfriend. Mrs. Marianne Sibley is a spoiled, demanding, wealthy woman who wants more of a prop than a nurse, and the only thing that keeps Rosemary on the job is that she has been able to spend time with Philip Sibley, Marianne’s 24-year-old son, who is a sweet young man if utterly lacking seriousness, which is what keeps Rosemary from being, well, serious about him. Soon it comes to light that Philip is being called before the draft board—World War II is about to break loose in Europe—and Marianne is planning to tell them she’s destitute (she’d cleverly moved her money out of the markets and into her mattress a year ago), dependent on her son for maintenance, and furthermore that her health is so fragile that she will drop dead of a heart attack if he is drafted. In truth, Marianne wouldn’t drop dead if she were run over by a dump truck, and as Marianne’s meeting with her health team unfolds, all the doctors fall into line—but Rosemary, disgusted, tells them all off and quits on the spot.

From there she marches over to the Red Cross Nursing Committee to enlist in the Army. But before all the paperwork comes through, Philip is on her door telling her he is in love with her and begging her to marry him. He also mentions that his enlistment has been deferred and his mother is now healthy as a horse and has fired her new  nurse and doctor. She likes him a lot, she tells him, “yet it was all no use. He was a boy unwilling to do a man’s work, a boy who wouldn’t go where even she, a girl, was going. Anything else she might forgive—not refusal to pay a debt of honor, the greatest debt man or woman owes, the debt to country.”

So off she goes to war—well, not exactly, she goes to a training camp located near Winchester, Massachusetts! There she spends many long hours dreaming about Philip: “She remembered the tumbled hair, the tie and the hat never quite straight, the flash of even teeth in the wide irregular mouth when he laughed. She remembered his effortless physical power, his way of making friends with dogs and horses and small grimy children, his sheer boyish charm and decency. So much in him that was winning and fine—yet he flinched at the one hard, disagreeable task ever laid on his twenty-four years! With a frowning shrug, she resolved to put the young man out of her mind. And did not.”

Meanwhile, at the camp’s Officers Club—she’s a second lieutenant—she meets the debonair Captain Gerald Lee, who is Rhett Butler reincarnate, even hailing from a plantation in South Carolina. On their first meeting entices her to go on a date with him in Boston, and soon they are spending much free time together, and everyone is wondering when the engraved invitations will be mailed. But “she did not love him—did not, did not! Something in her so stubbornly resisted. And yet why?” Maybe it’s because she knows that on the very next page she’s going to receive a telegram telling her that Philip has joined the Army and is going to be arriving at her camp tomorrow!

When she meets Philip at the camp, he tells her he wants to prove to her that he has what it takes. “I’m willing to wait,” he tells her—which is a first in VNRNs, the man waiting for the woman! But the bad news here is that she’s an officer and he’s just a private, so they are absolutely forbidden to fraternize. Instead they just write letters to each other, and she continues to date Jerry Lee. And goes home to visit her parents in Belltown, which is a stand-in for the New Hampshire town Marshall grew up in (Kingston) and has appeared in all the other Marshall VNRNs I’ve read. But Philip finds out about Jerry and writes that she’s done him wrong by not letting him know there was someone else, and he’s through!

Two pages later Philip is wheeled into the infirmary, delirious from an infection in his leg, and she offers to special him for 24 hours a day until he is out of danger. So now they can clasp fervent hands and kiss goodnight, and she tells Philip she will stop seeing Jerry. But Jerry has other plans: When Rosemary and Philip secretly meet for a date in Boston, who should spot them strolling the North End but that rascal Jerry? He soon has a chat with Rosemary in which he tells her that it would be such a shame if anyone heard that the two were fraternizing, because it would be terrible for Philip’s career—he’s angling to go to Officer Training School. Unless she continues to date Jerry and stops seeing Philip, he tells her, he will ensure Philip is not accepted into officer training. She decides she will not communicate with Philip any longer—but he stops writing to her, and now she’s hurt that he’s apparently dumped her without a word, and never mind that’s what she was planning to do to him! Her pride keeps her from writing to him, and then she gets a letter from his mother saying that she’s told Philip she will disinherit him if he marries her. She doesn’t want to believe that this is why he is not writing, but can’t quite not believe it. In the meantime she goes out on very chilly dates with Jerry. There are a few twists to the story after this, and another lovely visit to Belltown to visit her father, who immediately names the problem and the obvious solution. Thanks, Dad!

This is another sweet, gentle book from Marshall. I always enjoy visiting Belltown in them, which is painted as an idyllic small town, and Rosemary’s father is a particularly endearing character. There are a few of Rosemary’s friends who are also excellently drawn as well. Ordinarily I might find all the patriotism a little thick, but in this era when our country’s democracy seems to be paper thin, I appreciated Rosemary’s fervent dedication to protecting it. In the end, if I can’t say this is Marshall’s best book, it is certainly one worth reading.

Cynthia Doyle, Nurse in Love

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1953
Cover illustration by Tom Miller 

What did it take to make Dr. Sellars notice her? wondered Nurse Cynthia Doyle. Oh, he was aware of her professionally. But it was discouraging to work by his side, to loo at him, her heart thumping wildly, and get no recognition from him that she was a WOMAN as well as a NURSE. Couldn’t he see that she was pretty? Couldn’t he see that she was flesh and blood and not an automaton? Cynthia decided it was high time she did something about the situation. But what—short of being brazen and forward—could a girl do to make Dr. Sellars see that he was the man for her, she the woman for him?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“She wished Walt would stop referring to Norman as a man who had committed manslaughter.” 

“I must be getting on in years, she thought wryly, remembering that soon she would have a birthday and be all of twenty-four.”

REVIEW:
Cynthia Doyle is yet another VNRN heroine who is in love with a doctor who does not know she is alive. Dr. Walt Sellars is a handsome but dedicated man who is head of physical therapy at a clinic that seems to do nothing else except PT, in a poor part of their Virigina town. She’s beginning to see her life slipping away—at age 23, it must be confessed— because she has worked with him for two years and he’s never asked her for a date, though she gets a little frisson of excitement when their hands touch accidentally, and her heart pounds when he’s near. 

Then one day as she is walking home, she sees a car speed through the neighborhood and hit a young boy, then speed off. As the locals and cops gather, a man shows up and states he was the driver—but Cynthia knows it was a woman driving. Still she pipes up as the local “Nurse Lady” everyone knows and says that the car wasn’t speeding and that the accident couldn’t be avoided. The reason for her lie is that she’s worried that the crowd will get unruly: “She knew mob violence. It had to be snuffed out before it began to simmer.” The man, Norman Brandt, is ready to pay for all the child’s medical bills—and make a date with Cynthia. She snubs him mightily because he lied about being the driver, and never mind that she did, too, but guess who turns up at her apartment to take out her roommate that night? The roommate, Roz Effinger, is a gorgeous woman on the lookout for a rich husband—but has decided that Norman is the man she finally wants to commit to! The little problem is that Norman, having seen Cynthia cradling the stricken boy’s head on her lap in the middle of the street, has decided he’s in love with her.

This is about where the plot gets really peculiar. Norman, we are told, is some sort of former spy for the government who is now being recalled to Washington and doesn’t have to do any top secret missions anymore, so he’s free to tell everyone that he doesn’t do top secret work anymore ... because that makes so much sense. Cynthia tells Norman she won’t date him because Roz likes him, so he tells Roz that he’s in love with Cynthia, and Roz says, “I had hoped it might be me. But since it’s Cyn, and she’s quite something too, I wish you both luck.” It was hard for me to believe that a woman who cares about nothing except marrying a wealthy man would be so gracious when losing the “man of her dreams.” Then Walt, seeing that Norman has become interested in Cynthia, suddenly decides out of nowhere that he’s got to stop her from getting involved with Norman. “How he would hate to see Cynthia leave. Why, the clinic simply would not be the same place without her!” So he decides to employ “devious means” to find out how serious Norman is and to interfere. He orders Cynthia to take a month’s vacation in the hope that she will go back home to Indiana to see her family, but they’re on a long driving trip out West and aren’t home, so she just stays in town and dates Norman. Frustrated, Walt calls her up all the time, quizzes her about her activities, and gets pissy when she tells him honestly what she’s been doing.

Before too long, Norman kisses Cynthia and then proposes, because what else comes next? She reasonably says she’d like to take more time to get to know him, but then comes up with the idea that she’s going to try to get Walt to kiss her, to see if she likes it more than she liked kissing Norman. Walt then sort of goes off his rocker and drags Cynthia off from a date she’s on with Norman, telling her, “I won’t let you marry that Brandt fellow,” adding that the way he’s going to accomplish this is to marry her himself. Then he kisses her, and Cynthia is left “wide-eyed and unbelieving,” but “it had not left her weak and shaken.” Nonetheless, she then spends the next few days upset with Walt that he’s not making more of an effort to be nice to her at work, to have lunch with her, to walk her home from work, since they’re engaged—all the while angry that “he had not said that he loved her,” or even, for that matter, asked her to marry him, just assumed they were engaged. During the five pages she’s acting like they are engaged, she’s telling herself that she has to go out and buy him a hot sandwich when he refuses to eat a cold one because “he was the man she probably would have to look after for the rest of her life,” and that when he is too busy to spend time with her, “she would have to get used to his time not being his own” and that she’s not his top priority.

Then Norman proposes a huge television fund-raiser for Walt’s clinic, hosted by the up-and-coming TV starlet who was driving the car who hit the boy, and Norman’s mother also decides to create a huge philanthropic campaign that will provide huge funds for the clinic. I mean, what? Walt really gets loopy then, grabbing Cynthia by the arms and hurting her, telling her she can’t see Norman anymore, and then driving very erratically when they have an argument in the car. He seems, frankly, like a significantly unhinged individual.

There’s a big crisis in the end that helps Cynthia figure out what to do, but neither man seems like a great choice. Norman, though he seems slightly more rational than Walt, pursues her relentlessly from the first time he sees her, and Walt just seems like a lunatic, which makes Cynthia’s devotion to him and semi-acceptance of his decision that she will marry him seem absurd. The clinic, which serves poor children crippled by polio or cerebral palsy, is barely mentioned, when it seems like it should be an important backbone to the story, since Cynthia makes it clear to everyone that she wants to continue working there for the rest of her career. The many unanswered questions about Norman’s career, the woman driving the hit-and-run car, Roz’s easy acceptance that she’s losing the man of her dreams to her roommate, and even a police officer who seems like he might turn into a potential love interest and doesn’t, just leave me wondering what the hell author Adelaide Humphries was thinking when she wrote this book. It comes off like a one-draft wonder written without any advance planning over a long weekend before the mortgage payment was due—and so I can’t recommend you give it any more consideration than she seems to have done.

Tangled Autumn

By Betty Neels ©1971 

When her romance with Andrew went wrong, Sappha had jumped at the chance of a job in Scotland to make a complete break. The change of background, not to mention the “Demon King,” in the person of the Dutch doctor, Rolf van Duyren, soon began to take her mind off the past—but then Andrew came back.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I do believe you would feel compelled to offer any burglar foolish enough to enter a cup of tea before you laid him out with a poker.” 

“Don’t bother to think of anything to say—I’m sure it’ll come to you later. You can always write it down and commit it to memory and shoot it at me when next we meet.”

REVIEW
This is the third Betty Neels book I’ve read (I forgot to write the review of the second one, so I’ll have to re-read it before I write its review) and so far her books are proving fairly formulaic: Strong, capable woman meets enormous, dark, masterful Dutch man, travels to Holland and tames him. From what I have read of Betty Neels, I am not the first person to make this observation, but if you are unfamiliar with Betty Neels as I was, it’s news to you. She does pretty well with it in my limited experience—perhaps not surprising, as she is one of the Grandes Dames of romance writing. 

Anyway, here we have Nurse Sappha Devenish, who has left her London hospital after catching her fiancé several times—she’s a trusting gal—in the arms of another nurse, “a lush, blonde beauty.” She’s taken a post in Scotland, caring for a Dutch baroness—I’m suddenly realizing I don’t think we ever learned the patient’s first name—who is recovering from surgery for parathyroid osteodystrophy and also a broken arm and hip after she fell (I guess that’s the “osteodystrophy” part of her disease at work there) during a trip to visit old friends in Scotland.

En route to the house in Scotland where the baroness is recuperating, Sappha runs out of “petrol” and stalls her Mini in the middle of the road. She’s finally saved by “a very tall man with broad shoulders, a dark fierce face, haughty and hawk-nosed above a straight mouth; dark hair brushed back from a wide forehead.” He’s condescending, and she’s insulted, and she tells her patient, “he looked like the Demon King. You never saw such eyebrows.” The door opens, and guess who comes in? Dr. Rolf van Duyren, her patient’s son! Naturally they start off like oil and water, as he is always teasing her, she is always convinced that he is mocking her and so is constantly insulted by every little gesture or burp out of him. Soon she decides, on page 24, to tell him, “Some people don’t get on very well—I think perhaps we are like that.”

Naturally, on page 39, guess who turns up in the village? It’s Andrew! He proceeds to tell Sappha how he misses having her around and wants her back—though he never bothers to tell her he loves her. He takes her out for tea, aided and abetted by Rolf, who runs into the two coincidentally and paves the way for her to have the rest of the day off to spend with Andrew. The pair heads out for a long drive through a terrible rainstorm to see a view obscured by clouds and fog, and he talks about his plans for his bright, lucrative future in a posh city practice while disparaging Rolf’s work (he mistakenly thinks Rolf is “just” a country doctor, when in fact he is an important chief physician in a major teaching hospital back in Holland). Sappha is, much to my relief, left totally cold—even icy when a local woman requires an urgent C-section for a breech birth, and Rolf calls on the pair during their supper at the town inn to ask for their help, and Andrew urges Sappha not to go and refuses to go himself. (Naturally Rolf and Sappha save both woman and baby!)

Andrew leaves a letter for Sappha at the house, and she mails it back to him unopened, realizing suddenly that she is in fact in love with Rolf! And this is just on page 54! Now for 130 pages of a plot I’m not overly fond of—the hero frequently asking her about her boyfriend but she never tells him that she’d dumped him. This makes for a lot of tension and arguing and hostilities that admittedly can make for spicy scenes but just feels so unnecessary. I keep asking myself, Why doesn’t she just tell him the truth?

Rolf is actually kind of hot, attentive and caring—and he washes dishes! Though it is the 1970s, so he buttons her coat and buckles her seatbelt and literally picks her up and gets bossy from time to time, she even “meekly” obeying fairly often but also more often arguing back, which, it is hinted, is part of his attraction to her. “You’ll be the first woman under ninety who hasn’t been bowled over” by his stunning good looks, Sappha is told, and Rolf’s sister tells him, “You’re an old bear, and the trouble is no one ever tells you so or answers you back.” (She then goes on to point out that “Sappha does,” in case we hadn’t noticed.

The writing is pretty good, with occasional gems such as “She swallowed her heart back to where it belonged,” and the scene in which Sappha runs into Andrew and Rolf is particularly cute—she had just popped a large toffee into her mouth and then must manage it and the two young men to humorous effect. The story is smooth but not especially exciting, and the final scene a little confusing—she runs off and he waits about five minutes for no reason that is explained before going after her—but overall it is a decent book worth reading. And so my opinion of Betty Neels neatly aligns with the general consensus: She’s pretty good!a

Nurse Laurie’s Cruise

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1956

A nurse-companion on a Caribbean cruise sounded like fun to Laurie Fielding. But to make sure she got the job, Laurie tried to disguise her blonde loveliness before she went for the interview. The first person Laurie met on the Bianca was Jeff Anderson, so much the picture of the man every girl hopes to meet on a cruise that Laurie was instantly put on guard. As they cruised the exotic tropical islands, Laurie found herself paired off with the young professor writing a book on the West Indies and her beautiful employer with the attractive Jeff—with Laurie becoming more and more attracted to Jeff. A delightful and exciting story of a young nurse in search of adventure—with both danger and love lurking for Laurie in the blue waters of the Caribbean.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I always thought most nurses looked like majordomos.” 

“Nurses have a way of managing things—and people.”

“Isn’t every young, single woman who saves up enough money for a cruise on the lookout for husband material?”

“Fear flooded over her, and she wanted to turn and run. But her nurse’s training restrained her.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Laurie Fielding meets all the criteria for a nurse position that she sees advertised—except the ad specifically requests that the applicant be “preferably not too attractive.” Of course, Laurie does not fit that bill, with her “natural blonde hair, big blue eyes, creamy skin, and a figure that more often than not draws wolf whistles.” So she wears a hair net and large tortoiseshell glasses to the interview, where young widow Irma Potts, age 36, hires Laurie even though, she says, “I don’t want someone to outshine me!” Irma is a flighty, vapid heiress with no actual illnesses other than a few days of seasickness, so Laurie needn’t worry that she “wouldn’t like spending all her time shut up in a cabin with her patient, when she was longing to enjoy the sea air, the pleasures of the voyage, and the interesting sights.” In short, Laurie is hoping for what she herself calls “a vacation” while getting paid for not doing any work, and that is exactly what she gets! In fact, Irma soon advises Laurie to quit dressing down, so even the “disguise” Laurie wears to get the job is quickly abandoned—yet another dopey plot device that goes nowhere.

On board, Laurie soon meets Jeff Anderson, and “there was something about him—perhaps because he looked so much like the sort of man a girl might dream about meeting on a cruise—that made Laurie dislike him.” She’s not wrong, actually; he’s not a likable man, aggressive, always pushing himself onto her and attempting to control her. She is frequently furious with him, but alas, we know what that means—she won’t have the sense or the ability to resist him much longer.  Soon he’s kissing her on a regular basis. “If Jeff had wanted to kiss her again, she knew he would have, without asking,” and the thought gives her chills—of pleasure, unfortunately, because have I mentioned that Laurie doesn’t have much sense?

Laurie tries to make it her job to protect Irma from wolves and thieves, but it’s not going well. She suspects Jeff of being a crook in part because he refuses to have his photograph taken. “If he was the adventurer she believed him to be, his past might catch up with him,” she decides, but is unable to keep him away from Irma. And then Irma is travelling with an enormous amount of valuable jewelry and wears it all at once, so everyone is aware of it, and then she won’t keep it in the safe. Laurie has concerns about a few other suspicious people besides Jeff, starting with a man named John Harvey who uses crutches to walk and whom Irma constantly calls “pathetic” due to his disability. Laurie regularly catches Mr. Harvey in the hall outside Irma’s room, though his room is on another floor, but immediately decides not to say anything about it, deciding that it “most likely amounted to nothing.”

Eventually Laurie decides that the best thing is for her to keep the jewels in her own room, and guess what? The  next night they’re stolen, and Laurie is a suspect! Now she’s trying to figure out who stole them and making a poor job of it. When she finds Mr. Harvey arguing with a rich older woman passenger, “it was another riddle that Laurie decided she might as well forget.” The next night, after finding Mr. Harvey in the hall again, she finds the empty jewel case back in her room—and promptly tosses it overboard. Then Laurie stumbles across a crewmember who is dying from a gunshot wound. He tells her, “The jewels—she found out I knew where they—” but she mentions this to exactly no one, and the man promptly dies. Laurie has the common sense of a gnat. Eventually she does something really stupid and almost gets herself shot, too, but almost every strong male on the ship shows up at the same time and she is rescued! And discovers she’s in love, too!

This is a perfunctory story whose plot makes no sense. On one hand, Laurie cannot put two and two together and constantly sabotages herself—until she is deciding she alone can capture the criminal, who she selects essentially out of the blue, and nearly gets herself killed by someone whose presence is unexplainable, too. Her—no surprise, this—love interest is portrayed in unflattering terms at every meeting, but after hating him for most of the story, she falls for him hard, and the sudden conversion makes as little sense as pretty much everything else in the book. To cap it all off, we have the consistently insulting descriptions of Mr. Harvey’s handicap, and, on visits to numerous ports of call, all the typical colonialistic, patronizing attitudes about Caribbean citizens and countries. My White Doctor Foundation is making a dual donation following this review, to the UNCF and the Cabrillo College Accessibility Support Center (a favorite cause of disabled and most beloved VNRN author Bill Neubauer). You can avoid the particularly noxious ick factor I had to wade through by just refusing to get on board Nurse Laurie’s Cruise.

Nurse Chadwick’s Sorrow

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1967 

Ruth Chadwick would never forgive Dr. Barry Kade for a night of insanity that changed her life. She would never return to Dr. Graham Chadwick, her husband. The only thing that still tied her to these two men was a bond of pain and hatred. And now Tracey Norton was involved. Tracey … pretty, talented, very attractive to a man like Dr. Kade. Unable to stop her, Ruth saw Tracey being caught in her own hidden past—in the frightening truth that lay behind Nurse Chadwick’s sorrow.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Frigid type? No, you’re too pretty.”

“A man could be made to forget anything else when the girl he loved kissed him.”

“By Friday she had almost resolved to forget all about Barry Kade and dedicate herself to a lifetime of nursing.”

REVIEW:
Author Richard Wilkes-Hunter is not an author I enjoy. His books are generally sexist, stupid and dull, usually landing C-minus grades. So here we have a little treat—not the cover, of course, which is pretty lame—RWH has given us a book that is only irritating, without the usual over-the-top sexism! Curiously, Nurse Chadwick of the title is only a peripheral character. The book centers on Tracey Norton, who has just been hired as a scrub nurse at Pasadena General. From her very first surgery, when she meets Dr. Barry Kade’s large gray eyes beneath very black brows and long, curling lashes, she has to force herself to concentrate on the operation rather than the handsome young assistant surgeon.

Ruth Chadwick is the OR charge nurse, “still attractive, though she must be 30 or more,” thank you very much, Richard. She is also a strict disciplinarian who hates Dr. Kade with a burning passion, for some mysterious reason, so there will be a lot of floundering around in the plot until the secret is finally revealed two-thirds of the way through the book. In the interim Tracey has coffee with Barry Kade and then a few very pleasant dates, though she risks the ire of Ruth Chadwick in doing so. That risk is made especially problematic since Ruth has invited Tracey to take a room in her apartment. Improbably, Tracey accepts, and then, in the name of being honest, is fairly consistently rude and insulting to Ruth.

In close quarters, Tracey is able to spot the mysteries in Ruth’s life. Ruth acknowledges she has a 3-year-old son named David who obviously does not live with her. Ruth goes away every weekend to some undisclosed location, and is driven home by a man in sports clothes in an open convertible—and then cries herself to sleep in her bedroom. “A woman with a child to live for had no right to abandon herself to such grief,” thinks Tracey with great wisdom and kindness.

One afternoon, after a very tense surgery, Ruth takes it as a mild criticism when Tracey says she is going to the cafeteria for coffee—Ruth usually asks one of the student nurses to make the coffee but had instead sent the student to do more important chores—and Tracey “stared defiantly” and snaps, “I wish you would take that chip off your shoulder, Ruth. Why don’t you save that charge-nurse jazz for the operating room? Outside working hours it neither becomes you nor impresses me!” This sort of hyper-aggressive, snarky remark is, unfortunately, characteristic of many of Tracey’s comments to Ruth, and peculiarly, Ruth responds like a puppy who has been smacked with a rolled-up newspaper and becomes thoughtful, then sad, whimpering, “Am I as bad as that?” and asking if they can still be friends. I liked Ruth better when she was snapping, “Walters! A towel for Dr. Russell!”

Now, as Tracey’s mean-girl ways inexplicably cause Ruth to open up more, we get numerous hints about Ruth’s past. Barry tells her that he has been “nearly four years saving for something that’s very important to me,” and that Ruth’s dislike of him goes back four years. Calculating Tracey thinks, “Nearly four years ago. That would be before Ruth’s child was born.” Ruth’s husband doesn’t help when he when he waylays Tracey as she is walking home from work, creepily offering her a ride with the friendly comment, “I promise not to attempt your seduction.” Tracey immediately volunteers that Ruth cries at night and that she knows he drives her home on Sundays, but when he tells her fiercely that he loves Ruth and wants to make the marriage work, Tracey answers, “It’s really not any of my business. I neither peep nor listen. Nor do I pry into other people’s lives!” It’s a remarkable, completely obvious lie. So when Graham asks her to break her date with Barry and go spy on Ruth and David at a remote beach, of course she does, though Barry turns out to be insecure and all but stops speaking to her. What Tracey finds naturally causes everything to turn out perfectly for everyone, even for her, the one who deserves it least. If the Big Secret everyone is keeping is actually interesting, it’s just way too complicated to be resolved by Tracey showing up at the beach and yelling at Ruth some more, then sending David for  “cutting-edge” surgery (not used today) that is explained in such excruciating detail you might nod off.

Some male writers can pull off nurse novels. Bill Neubauer and Jean Francis Webb, for example, are respectful, gentle authors who can tell a story with real feeling. Others, however, such as Mr. Wilkes-Hunter (and William Daniel Ross, to name another), clearly view women as objects, and not infrequently demonstrate no understanding for how women act or speak, instead making them bros with perky breasts. This is Tracey Norton in a nutshell, who may be the heroine of this book, but she is no hero—neither admirable, charitable or even likeable. “You have the old girl eating out of your hand,” says a fellow nurse to Tracey, as if dominating Ruth is the only option. It’s not, and if Ruth is happy at the end of the book, I still felt sorry about how badly she’d been treated. So unless you enjoy spending time with mean people like Tracey Norton, you’d do a lot better to look for a book by Bill Neubauer.

The Nurse and the Crystal Ball

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1969

When Sue Whittier unpacked her suitcase, 3000 miles away from the nurses’ dormitory in Maryland, she found a fortune-teller’s crystal ball under her nylons. It was a friend’s idea of a joke, but Sue—who didn’t believe in such things—wished it could tell her what she was letting herself in for. She had driven to California to be with Dave Harding, the man she had walked out on seven years ago just before their wedding—a dying man now who had written, begging her to come. And she had … Even though seeing David would mean seeing his half-brother, Marv, too—the secret reason Sue had broken the engagement. Still, she was prepared for that. What she wasn’t prepared for was finding another old love of Dave’s at his bedside: Gloria, the blonde he had married on the rebound, the wife who had deserted him two months later and has now returned—with a son she claimed was his. But was it true …? Sue didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her that here was a woman who could not be trusted …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I am going upstairs to Mr. Harding. If you try to stop me—well, like most nurses, I know a few judo tricks.” 

“In my young years I was never a juvenile delinquent. But it’s never too late to start, even at my ripe old age. So how about us having a little snort?”

“Love and money! She sighed to happily and kept smiling to herself. What more could woman ask for?”

“Just to prove that she was a woman of patience and strong well, Gloria did not box his ears as she longed passionately to do.”

REVIEW:
When you find a book with a title like this, you can’t help but get your hopes up. So much potential for rollicking, campy fun! Florence Stonebraker can certainly deliver the goods, too, but it must be confessed that the quality of her work is erratic. So my optimism was guarded. And this turned out to be warranted. 

Sue Whittier has left her job and driven 3,000 miles to La Jolla because the man she dumped seven years ago has leukemia and is at death’s door. He had written to her, begging her to come care for him in his final weeks, so sure! But things are little complicated. First of all, there is a crystal ball in her suitcase under a stack of nylons. Remember nylons? I hope you don’t. Secondly, the first person she runs into is Dave’s half-brother Marv, who is actually the reason why Sue left Dave—right before her wedding “she went down to the beach with another man. And that other man took her in his arms. And her dream of forever and ever love with Dave was forever blasted.” Upon her return, she and Marv immediately get into a rather strange argument in which Marv tells Sue to leave but will not tell her why, and then finally, as she is stomping off, he tells her, “I have never stopped loving you.”

Next she meets the surprise guest, Dave’s wife Gloria. He had picked her up on the rebound during a wild few months “with a crowd who spent their time drinking, smoking marijuana, driving to Vegas to gamble over weekends, swimming in the nude,” but Gloria didn’t last very long either. Now, learning somehow that Dave is about to kick off and has a large fortune to dispose of, Gloria is back at the family mansion and has somehow installed herself as supreme ruler over Dave’s mother and Dave himself. The trick is that she has a six-year-old boy in tow named Bobby, who she claims is Dave’s son. Gloria and Bobby are quite the pair—Gloria is a vicious, scheming vixen out to sabotage Sue, while Bobby is an angry, uncontrollable wrecking ball. “It is not as if he were retarded or anything like that, sweetie,” Gloria explains. “Actually, Bobby is unusually bright for his age. His only problem is that he is inclined to be a psychopathic liar, and that needn’t bother you.” OK! But everyone else in the house is kind to Bobby, who transforms under their supervision into a friendly, gentle boy. Sue even gives him the crystal ball, and he starts talking about seeing his dead parents in it. Um, what?

Meanwhile, Gloria has hired a doctor to care for Dave, but Sue suspects the man is a quack. He is prescribing no end of medications for Dave, and has even given a prescription to Dave’s mother Martha, who had seemed fairly healthy until she had started taking the pills as ordered, but woke up feeling dizzy, strange, unable to speak clearly or even walk without falling. Sue advises Martha to “hold the prescription pills under her tongue until Gloria left the room.” Why she cannot just refuse to take the medication outright is unclear, but once Martha starts dumping the meds in the toilet she is feeling spry and energetic again. Dave keeps taking his medication, and is getting worse and worse.

Marv, meanwhile, is trying to kiss Sue, usually after a loud argument in which he grabs her arms painfully, but she is fighting him off and running, at least for now. He keeps exerting everyone in the house to “play it cool” with Gloria, but is not sharing his long-term plan with anyone, so soon naturally decides without any evidence whatsoever that Marv is in cahoots with Gloria, plotting to inherit Dave’s money.

Suddenly Dave decides he is going to make a new will and locks himself up with Marv, who happens to be a lawyer, to create the thing. Exactly two nights later Dave “simply fell asleep, after taking the pills which Gloria made a nightly rite of putting into the tiny plastic box—and he did not wake up.” The rest of the book plays out pretty much as you know it will, including one character going stark, raving mad—a Florence Stonebraker specialty.

There are a lot of irritating aspects to this book. One is the constant suggestion that there are deep secrets at work here: For example, on her first day, Marv inexplicably tells Sue “I don’t feel free to tell you” why he wants her to leave immediately, though the reason is obvious the minute she walks through the mansion door. Marv, brooding in his room after an argument with Sue, “could not figure in exactly what way this money-greedy woman could hurt Susan,” when the obvious answer is that she can’t. When Bobby starts seeing his parents in the crystal ball, Martha declares, “there’s more to his story than meets the eye. We haven’t enough sense to understand what it is.” Yet the most egregious mystery—did Gloria kill Dave?—is left completely unanswered. Is it fair play for an author to throw out a bone that huge and then walk away from it? I spent some time thinking this question over and concluded that the answer is usually no, though I might accept it from an author so gifted that it actually worked (see A Series of Unfortnate Events by Lemony Snicket). So in this case, no. Even the eponymous crystal ball has no impact on the story. I will always have a deep fondness in my heart for Florence Stonebraker, so her failure in this book makes me doubly let down. If you would prefer to avoid philosophical quandaries and disappointment, you won’t need a crystal ball to tell you that you should probably avoid this book.

The Midnight Wards

By D.K. Jennings (pseud. John Glasby), ©1967
Cover illustration by Henry Fox

Throughout the world, large hospitals are much the same; exuding an aura of medicinal efficiency, men and women who supervise the lives of their patients, overseeing a hubbub of intense activity that goes on around the clock. At the old and elegant St. Stephen Hospital on the outskirts of London, it had been a fortnight of the usual minor incidents, common in such a complex of wards and isolated departments. To Veronica Devlin, just beginning her hospital work as a nurse, everything seemed much larger than life. The doctors, surgeons and ward sisters were either gods or ogres and her small mistakes were great tragedies. Then the resident surgeon, Ralph Conway, found himself facing a crisis which threatened not only his career but the whole future of the hospital, a crisis which meant he had to challenge the authority of Sir William Carruthers, the senior surgical consultant, and attempt to uproot policies and ideas which were as old and as established as the hospital itself and somehow, Veronica found herself drawn, against her will, into this personal conflict of ideologies.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Someone ought to pass a law against night duty.”

“You have the makings of a fine nurse, provided you learn to keep your own emotions under tight rein and do only as you are told.”

“It seems that fate has decreed that all of the emergency cases happen between midnight and 6:00 in the morning.”

“That is the main trouble with some of the younger men who come along, wanting to become surgeons. They see themselves in white coats, walking through the wards, adored by the female patients and idolized by the young interns. But it isn’t all like that. After a while, you find that each operation takes a great deal out of you. Not until it’s over do you realize just how much.”

REVIEW:
First off, I have to tell you that this is not a nurse novel. Our nurse, Veronica Devlin, is a peripheral figure, and the story centers on Dr. Ralph Conway, hero young surgeon battling the dinosaur senior doctor who is gradually choking the life out of the prestigious hospital he runs with an iron grip. Frankly, Veronica is robbed of the credit she deserves in curing the patient central to the story, so I wondered if author D.K. Jennings was a man. Guess what—I was right!

In the first chapter a man is struck by a car and brought to the hospital, but he is suffering from amnesia—which came on before the car accident. Naturally, he is not carrying any identification. On duty in the ED are Veronica and Ralph Conway, who further clinches this book’s status as not-a-nurse-novel because he is married! Since Mr. X’s leg is broken in two places, he is likely to be stuck in the hospital for months. “In a way, it is a good thing. It may enable us to do a little detective work and try to find out who he is,” Ralph tells Veronica. 

Another patient, Sylvia Monaghan, has been admitted as a suicide attempt after taking too many sleeping tablets in the middle of the night. Ralph is convinced that she is “not the suicidal type.” But Dr. William Carruthers, the aging medico who runs St. Stephen Hospital, is convinced Sylvia is a danger to herself—not only that, but if she is not transferred to a psychiatric ward and is left on the general ward, “she could prove not only an embarrassment, but possibly a menace to the other patients,” he declares dramatically. But Ralph convinces Dr. Carruthers to leave Sylvia where she is, at least temporarily.

Meanwhile Veronica is put on night duty watching Mr. X. He is mumbling in his sleep, of course, and “she thought she caught the name Clarke repeated several times.” Ralph, going above and beyond the call of duty of a surgeon, checks with the police and finds that a jeweler named Vincent Clarke was beaten during a robbery the same night that Mr. X came in, and though the assailants were masked and Mr. Clarke has no way of identifying them, “one of them could have been our mystery patient here,” says Ralph to Veronica. So she hits the streets and starts knocking on doors, and finds an old woman who saw Mr. X walk out of an alley—and at the other end of the alley is Vincent Clarke’s jewelry shop! Back at the hospital she reluctantly reports her findings to Ralph, though she nonetheless argues that Mr. X could be innocent. Ralph wonders, “Had she fallen in love with that man?” But he does encourage her to “stick with your convictions, Veronica. I for one would not want to change them.” So he is due a little credit.

Then Veronica obtains permission from Ralph to take Mr. X out of the hospital in a wheelchair, though she does not mention her plans to bring Mr. X to the first place he remembers. Though nothing comes back to him, Mr. X directs Veronica to push him down the infamous alley, so they end up in front of Mr. Clarke’s now-boarded-up shop. He suddenly remembers being in the trashed jeweler’s shop and seeing Mr. Clarke lying inert over the counter—and the shock is too much for him and he passes out. Now Ralph is in hot water: “All of this publicity is having a bad effect on the reputation of the hospital. Some of the things he does are little too radical from my way of thinking,” says the hospital matron, though these “radical methods” are not really explained. Ralph is called on the carpet by Dr. Carruthers, and when Ralph defends Veronica, Dr. Carruthers bizarrely threatens not to give Ralph the top hospital job when he retires next year.

Undeterred, Ralph stops by Mr. X’s room, and Mr. X tells Ralph that he has remembered the names John Forrester and Redbourne. Ralph recognizes Redbourne as the name of a small village 30 miles from London, so the next day he and Veronica head there for another illicit detective trip. This book occurs so long ago that their only option is to stop in at a pub and ask if anyone knows John Forrester, and as it happens his parents live across the street! In no time flat Mr. X’s identity and backstory are laid out. “Another shock might prove sufficient to send the mind toppling over the brink of the abyss that led to insanity,” Ralph thinks, so he invites Mr. X’s mum to come back to London with them, goes straight to Mr. X and in five sentences explains all. Fortunately the shock does not prove sufficient to send Mr. X's mind toppling over the brink of the abyss; instead he remembers everything and is reunited with his mum and Veronica, so next Ralph goes to visit Sylvia Monaghan and puts to right all her psychiatric problems. Then he pops by Dr. Carruthers’ office for another enlightening chat and finally goes home to his wife, whom he is seeing for about the third time this whole book. Has anyone ever mentioned that it is really rough being a doctor’s wife? Though Ralph does try to give Veronica a little credit for Mr. X’s recovery, his wife is insistent that it is all due to him, so he smiles and leans back in his chair. I hope he doesn’t hurt himself patting his own back.

Throughout the book we do spend occasional pages with Veronica, following her concerns about Mr. X and watching the pair fall in love, though the uncertainty of his identity and past activities makes their relationship somewhat tenuous—even if we have a pretty good idea how it will turn out. But we don’t see enough of her to make this book worth reading, if it’s a true nurse novel you are looking for. It’s not a bad book in general, but without a strong, independent, female heroine to spend your time with, I’m not sure what the benefit is in reading it. But I am a little biased in that respect. Try it for yourself, if you don’t mind a rather hackneyed plot and a slightly arrogant, self-centered main (male) character, and see what you think.