House of Hate

By Dorothy Fletcher, ©1967 

The stately mansion of the Thibaults held more than art and music. More than beautiful people … it held vicious undercurrents of fear and frustration. When Nurse Norma Theale came there to live, she was the catalyst. Around her gathered the storm, to burst in shattering fury. Because she was there, someone had to die. Would it be Norma herself Whose side was she on? Who was the enemy? Only Norma could find out—if she could survive the storm!

GRADE: A-

REVIEW:
This book is wicked smart (I can say that because I grew up in New Hampshire using that expression before it started appearing in ad campaigns). When you pick it up, I hope your French is not too rusty, or that you have a good translation app at the ready, though you’ll have to go farther afield to learn that crotte de bique means nanny-goat droppings. You might also need Wikipedia as well, to research Iras (the second lady in waiting in the Shakespeare play Antony and Cleopatra), Rouault (an Expressionist French painter), and Sidney Carton (the hero of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens). (If you understand the reference to Berenson’s theory of intuitional knowledge, let me know, because I could never figure it out.) But if this book was more intelligent than me, it is certainly not too dense to make for a lovely, enjoyable read. 

Norma Theale is a 26-year-old nurse who begins our story by attending a concert at Lincoln Center to hear the Violin Concerto in D by Tchaikovsky played by violin virtuoso and heartthrob Nicholas Thibault. She’s about to interview for a job caring for his mother, Victoire Thibault, who is at death’s door at 68 from some unspecified illness that sporadically gives her fits of stupor. She’s drawn to the job because she is a true music aficionado who can identify and chat very knowledgeably about composers and artists, and would be living “under the same roof as the dark god, the legendary enfant terrible of the musical world. The celebrated, gifted artist, the withdrawn, controversial personality who fascinated music lovers and press with his disinclination to conform to type.” Furthermore, she’s completely fluent in French, which the immigrant family lapses into now and again; how an impoverished orphan came by all this education is never explained.

Norma arrives at the mansion on Fifth Avenue somewhere north of the Met, and the property is lovingly and meticulously described, “a darkly glowing jewel,” so it doesn’t exactly fit with the “House of Hate” title. The other problem with the title is that the people who live there are nice—matriarch Victoire, Victoire’s her 17-year-old niece Simone, her daughter Michelle, and Michelle’s husband Henri, are all very kind to Norma. Only Nicholas is cold and aloof, possibly because the rest of the family does tend to pick on him a lot. It’s revealed that he was an unwanted child, possibly the result of a husband-on-wife rape; Madame, in one of her delirious spells, thinks she’s pregnant with Nicholas and shouts, “I will not have the baby. When I bore him Michelle I loved him. I cannot bring his child into the world now. Conceived in hate, nourished in bitterness and loathing—” And though Nicholas is a world-renowned concert violinist, his family does not appreciate his career; they think that “what they did, the family considered work; what Nicholas did was simply fritter away his time on the violin, giving a concert now and then but hardly earning his keep.” Curiously, despite his fame, he has no money at all, and is dependent upon a stingy allowance from his wealthy but tight-fisted mother. The constant barbs from the family, the lack of love, and his inability to escape have made him a quiet, angry man, “frozen with anger and resentment,” Norma thinks, deciding, “A person could be pushed too far.”

But when Norma demonstrates her knowledge and interest in Nicholas’s music, correcting him that it wasn’t Busoni he was playing when she first entered the house but Mendelssohn, he takes an interest in her. He accompanies her on her daily walks, and they window shop and hunt for baklava. Their relationship warms realistically, particularly during a sweet afternoon in which she, Simone, and Nicholas play music together. But then two paintings go missing from the family’s art gallery, and Nicholas is accused of stealing them. Next Norma sees someone bending over Madame in her bed in the middle of the night, and Norma becomes convinced that Nicholas is trying to kill his mother. The climax comes on the opening night of a show at the gallery, when Norma is drugged and another murder attempt is made—during a lightning storm, of course!

The problem with these Gothic murder mystery nurse romances (and there does seem to be such a genre; see Matravers Hall, Nurse Missing,  Nurse at Mystery Villa, Nurse Incognito, Nurse Jean’s Strange Case, Nurse on Nightmare Island) is that they usually stink (I’ve given out two C’s and two D’s among the six). Happily, here we have a quiet gem. The book is sprinkled with a gentle humor that does not translate well for the Best Quotes section, and if only slightly moody and mysterious, the unfolding of Norma’s feelings is prettily described. Its only real flaw is that the author seems torn between painting a luxurious, elegant building and an eerie backdrop for her tale of mystery and love, making discussions of the house as “a beautiful horror,” “a prison, a cauldron of smoldering passions” with “gloom in the wide corridor” completely unconvincing. But ultimately, this is easily the best of this particular sub-sub-sub genre, another lovely offering from the masterful writer Dorothy Fletcher, who, when she is on, is easily one of the best.

Navy Nurse

By Rosie M. Banks
(pseud. Alan Jackson), ©1960 

Alice Smith, pretty Navy nurse, had an attack of love at first sight. And she didn’t want to be cured. The man was tall, good-looking and French. Thrilled by his kisses, Alice longed for the day when she would be Mrs. Jacques Stern. But Jacques never talked of marriage. And he was mysterious about his private life, especially the source of his wealth. Meanwhile, the Office of Naval Intelligence had rated Jacques “top priority.” And handsome Morgan O’Neill, ONI agent, was making a particularly thorough check. Morgan loved Alice deeply. He’d stop at nothing to save her from the dangers that threatened her happiness—and her life. 

GRADE: B+ 

BEST QUOTES: 

“If you look like that, why do you need to say anything?”

“The fact that she is, well, homely should make her an excellent, obedient, and faithful wife.” 

“Had she lived in a society which approved of polyandry she might have been completely happy.” 

“This Communist thing is getting to be a bore.” 

“Your heart does not leap into your throat, the nurse in her told her, but, oh, yes, it does, said the girl, the woman.” 

“Morgan had thrown his arms around Alice to prevent her from pitching forward. Even at the moment of danger he had experienced a thrill at feeling the warm suppleness of her body pressed in fear against his. It was like making love in the millionth of a second.” 

“He’s out this minute shopping for an engagement ring and I’ll need a magnifying glass to see the stone.” 

REVIEW: 

It simply cannot be denied that adopting as your pen name that of a fictional character—herself a romance novelist of the most torrid kind, having penned the renowned Only a Factory Girl—is absolutely sublime in its cleverness. Add to that the fact that my esteem for the original Ms. Banks’ creator, P.G. Wodehouse, is nigh reverential, and my hat is doffed in deep respect to the Rosie M. Banks who brought us Navy Nurse. It doesn’t always pay to open a book with this sort of obligation already hanging over you, but Ms. Banks very nearly manages to be worthy of it. Very nearly. 

First off, her writing is quite good. Maybe a little too good, in fact. Where are the heaving bosoms, the stolen glances, the bitter tears we would expect of someone who has chosen such an eponym? What we get is that crisp, fresh, almost innocent prose that to me evokes the 1950s, when everyone wore their shirts tucked in and their hair neatly combed, and blasphemed by cursing, “Golly!” But at the same time, the writing is entertaining, smart, and lively. As just one example, Ms. Banks describes the audit of a crooked French character’s bookkeeping: “And so the little purple figures, with their crossed sevens and their guileful misdirections, began to tell a curious story.” 

The actual story, however, is less of a nurse romance than a spy novel with a nurse as a peripheral character. Indeed, we spend the entire second half of the book, right up to the last two chapters, hanging out with a gang of communist spies, following the intricate machinations of their plot to get the suave Frenchman Jacques Stern to marry Navy nurse Alice Smith, so as to milk her and her officer friends for military secrets at vodka-soaked cocktail parties for years to come. It’s an interesting enough thriller, if a little confusing at times, trying to remember who is double-crossing whom, but it just wasn’t really what I signed up for. 

When we’re not witnessing conversations with the mysterious ringleader behind a one-way mirror, the untimely deaths of various characters who get in the way, and naval intelligence officers scrambling to catch up with the bad guys, we drop in for a quick visit with Alice. She has another boyfriend, naval intelligence officer Morgan O’Neill, who is madly in love with her. She, from the first day she meets him, believes “he would be a close friend, something like the brother she never had.” When Morgan proposes, knowing full well he will be rejected, she complies, telling him, “I do not love you in the way that would make for a happy marriage.” After all, “it was Jacques who excited her, Jacques whom she wanted to marry.” Well, we know full well she will change her mind, for two simple reasons: (1) No VNRN heroine ever marries a foreigner, and (2) no VNRN heroine ever refuses a man in uniform. Hit the road, Jacques. 

You know he will, and you can even figure out that Morgan will have a hand in bringing Jacques and his gang to justice. But the patriotic whitewashing of every difficult fact, such as Alice’s abrupt change of heart toward Morgan, is too facile for a writer of Ms. Banks’ talents. I’m not one to throw away such promise so easily, though. She’s apparently written at least three other VNRNs, Surgical Nurse, Ship’s Nurse, and Settlement Nurse, so I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt until the evidence of these books comes in.

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Wilderness Nurse

By Marguerite Mooers Marshall, ©1949 

Cover illustration by Isabel Dawson 

Denise Burke was gay and youthful and a very good nurse in a big city hospital. She loved her career, and she loved Larry Randall, who wanted to marry her and have her give up that career to be his wife. Troubled and uncertain, Denise went north for a vacation and a chance to make her decision away from the pressures of either work or love. Then … she had a serious accident and it took the skill of a master surgeon to heal both her body and her heart.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“All nurses are supposed to be in love with a doctor at least once.”

“I got this cold last night because I like to wear my decollete black lace nightie instead of the hospital Mother Hubbard.”

“I’ve got several murders on my conscience, but they don’t count. All of them were doctors!”

REVIEW:
Again I feel compelled to say that the VNRNs written in the 1940s have, for the most part, a special spark about them. They seem to be written, as opposed to churned out. And with that I give you Wilderness Nurse, a snappy, vivacious little book with intellectual pretensions and some really lovely descriptions of rural Quebec. And the cover!!! How fantastic is that?!? 

Denise Burke is a girl from New Hampshire of Huguenot ancestry, which explains her fluency in French. She’s dating her twin brother’s colleague, Larry Randall, an advertising executive who takes her to the Yale-Army football game when she has time for him. But he’s a mixed bag: He is constantly pressing Denise to marry him (“You can’t hold me off forever with notions you starch like your uniforms”) and to quit nursing (“‘Cut out this nursing!’ he exploded”). She doesn’t take it from him, however: “Quit running down my profession, the work I like to do best in the world, the work I’ll never give up. You’ll have to take me on my own terms as a nurse and a—a companion, or not at all.” You see this attitude from time to time in VNRNs, but seldom is it as sincere as it is in Denise, and I admire her for it. 

She works at Holland Hospital in New York. Chief surgeon Dr. Curtis Steele is made of, well, steel. He barrels around the hospital snapping, “You do as I say!” to everyone he encounters, from patients to the chairman of the board of trustees. She admires him, however, and not just for his inevitable “strong, sure hands”; she loves his “dedication of body and brain and heart to the never-ending war against pain and death.” But after a string of patients wears her out with their rudeness and demands and suicidal behavior (one patient has postpartum depression, before the condition had a name), Denise up and quits her job. “A nurse has to take too much, from doctor and patient alike,” she tells her brother. To Dr. Steele, she says, “What I can’t stick, not any longer, is not being able to help, seeing them want to kill themselves, seeing them die with hate for us as their torturers! I won’t nurse any more. I can’t! I’ve had enough!”—to which he responds, “Don’t be a chump! You do as I say!” Needless to say, that doesn’t really change her mind. 

What she does do is agree to go with Larry and a group of other young folks to the Quebec home of Maurice Tremblay, who owns a Canadian company that does business with Larry, for a month-long fishing trip. Larry, however, does not take the opportunity to win over Denise. When she takes a short trip to Mr. Tremblay’s home village, Larry asks her, “Why do you have to go poking off to visit a bunch of dirty, ignorant Canucks?” Then he tells her to butter up Mr. Tremblay so the businessman will give Larry more work, which does not impress her much. “His predatory self-absorption was so naïve, so honest, so colossal that she had no answer.”

As the trip is coming to a close, one of the guides gets appendicitis, and she accompanies him to the area’s only hospital and assists with the surgery. The doctor there, Ned Eliot, wastes no time in begging her to sign on for a six-month term as a nurse at the hospital, and in falling for her like a ton of bricks. But try as she might, she can’t bring herself to care for him. He doesn’t order sulfa antibiotics because they’re expensive even though they decrease the death rate from pneumonia by almost 20 percent, and this shocks Denise. When she asks him about it, he says, “I hate to make a nuisance of myself” by fighting his board to get the medication. “Her chief sometimes seemed timid, unsure and uninformed in his procedures of treatment,” and she compares him unfavorably to the “martinet” Dr. Steele, who would never let a little money or a hospital trustee stand between his patients and a good outcome.

One day while walking out to assist the local midwife in a delivery, she jumps down a rock and breaks her ankle so severely that “bone pushed out flesh at a sickening angle just inside the instep.” Now that she’s on the receiving end of Dr. Eliot’s tentative medicine, she is not pleased. She gets ether instead of pentothal, which has fewer side effects, because “he hates to argue with our fund-raising committee about buying these new drugs.” He tells her after the surgery, “I hope I’ve done the right thing”—not exactly words to inspire confidence in your patient. “Was his best good enough?” she wonders, and the answer soon turns out to be no, as infection sets in due to a screw he has left in her ankle, and he tells her he is going to have to amputate her foot.

She doesn’t take this lying down, and fights for better medical care. She cables Dr. Steele to consult on the case, and soon he has touched down in the tundra to tell off Dr. Eliot. “Doctors, like thieves, are supposed to stick together and call the operation a success even when the patient dies. But I say this girl is suffering from almost unbelievable neglect,” he says. “I’m going to fight to save her foot. And no medical-ethics-conspiracy-of-silence will stop me!” So he packs her into his plane and takes her to Quebec City. The foot is saved, of course. Whether she will ever be able to work again with a feeble ankle is another question. But her nursing talents won’t be wasted, Dr. Steele tells her: “Don’t you realize you can use your nursing heart and passion for service as a real wife and a real mother? … You’ll nurse your husband, not just physically, but nurse him through the fatigue and discouragement and despair that come to all men. You’ll nurse your children, their hearts and minds as well as their bodies, for you’ll be the mother who works at her job instead of shirking it.” Small comfort, perhaps, but she does land on her feet, as it were, with a consulting job that can fulfill her professionally. And even Dr. Steele’s constant command to do as he tells her is turned on its ear in a pleasing conclusion.

It’s a welcome change to find a VNRN that has a brain. This book is sprinkled with quotations from J.M. Barrie, Tennyson, Kipling, Thomas Morton, Seneca, and the Bible, to name a few. It also mentions in passing, like you’ll get the reference, to the Belvedere Apollo (an ancient Greek sculpture) and Grover Whalen, who ran the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. One of Denise’s patients is the “keenly intelligent private secretary of a noted economist.” And, of course, Denise is bilingual and regularly chats with the Quebecois in their native tongue. The book is also well-written, with passages like, “ ‘I am very strong,’ she informed him with dignity and oral italics.”

The descriptions of the Canadian countryside and wildlife are quite vivid: Beside the cairn, Denise caught her breath in admiration of the dazzling purple-blue miles of St. Lawrence Gulf. She stood in the center of an archipelago of islands, or rather of gray-green rocky islets, carved into cliffs and coves by the hammer and chisel of wind-driven surf. Even on a midsummer morning such as this, the waves tore and lashed, sending up cascades and spires of tormented white foam. Rockledge itself was not an island but a peninsula, with lush green mossy valleys stretching behind the hospital as far as she could look. The time and places of the book are easily imagined by the reader, and the story is a real pleasure to read. At the end of the day, it’s still just entertainment—certainly not literature—but it’s easily a top-notch VNRN. I am looking forward to more of Ms. Marshall’s nurse novels (I count at least four more)—they may not be easy to track down, but I am certain they will be more than worth the effort.

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