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.

Research Nurse

By Florence Stuart

(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1968
Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

Also published as A Nurse’s Nightmare

Nurse Sue Brinkley’s life had seemed complete in the arms of handsome Dr. Luke Connor. But the time came for her to prove her love—when a man from her past pleaded for her help and her heart. She went to him—and suddenly her life was torn by fear and terror.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“You know how much I need this job, Dr. Favour, how much I need the money, because my dad is a helpless paralytic and my mother is up against it, trying to catch up with all the bills.”

“I’ve had experts try to make out with me. The best never have any luck, and your approach is rather amateurish.”

“Oh, stop sounding off like something out of a book for morons.”

“It was the nature of man to elude capture as long as he could, just as it was the nature of woman to resort to all sorts of wiles until the object of her pursuit was safely in the bag.”

“Since he firmly believed that mental disturbance triggered a vast number of physical ailments, Luke was not surprised to awaken with his temperature way up, his head splitting, and the worst cold he had experienced in years.”

“She knew the explanation of alcoholism. The victim was allergic to alcohol, and after one drink hit the blood stream, some compulsion in the brain took over. And that was it.”

REVIEW:
Once again, writer Florence Stonebraker has chosen a title that has very little to do with the actual book within. Nurse Sue Brinkley is a nurse in Los Angeles, trying to decide whether she should marry Dr. Luke Connor, when she gets a love letter from Dr. Carl Favour, who actually is doing research, on leukemia. Carl was the major crush of her adolescence, when she was a self-described “moronic, idiotic, lovesick, sixteen-year-old problem brat,” but when she told Carl of her feelings, he laughed in her face. Crush over. Now, nine years later, Carl writes that he’s always loved her and wants her back—and, by the way, his brother Bob is dying of leukemia and needs her nursing skills. Luke, curiously, takes the position that Sue should go to Carl and take care of Bob, as in so doing he feels she will learn if she is still in love with Carl. “You sound like you’ve been sniffing glue or something,” she responds, but eventually agrees to go—more to help Bob than to see Carl.

Carl is living in Clayton’s Castle, a 60-room mansion in which a young bride scorned her old, wealthy husband and was locked in the ballroom on the top floor until she jumped to her death. He spends most of his time in the basement doing research, but he’s assisted in the upkeep by Pete, a shotgun-totin’ ex-con who guards the gate, and Laura Blaisdell, the old family housekeeper. To say Laura is mean and nasty is an understatement. She feeds Bob a starvation diet of broth and skim milk, and leaves a bottle of barbiturates on his bedside table in the hope that he will decide to swallow them all down one day. “You’re just a worry and a burden for your brother to carry and do for—a brother worth ten thousand useless, worthless bums like you,” she tells him before Sue cuts her off and orders her from the room. Bob’s also getting odd phone calls in his room in which a woman’s voice tells him, “Why don’t you jump, you bum?” But no one seems to piece together who might do such a thing.

Bob, home from the (Vietnam?) war with a diagnosis of malnutrition after months in a prison camp, has been given the death sentence of leukemia by his esteemed brother. However, no other doctors have been consulted on the case, which Sue finds strange. Then Dr. Carl starts getting creepy. When Sue returns from a drive into town, he says that she should have asked his permission. When she stops laughing, he adds, “I would like to feel that you regard my wishes as a command you are only too happy to obey.” Before long, she learns that Carl is keeping his and Bob’s alcoholic mother, Siggy, prisoner in a room down the hall, the closets full of cases of whisky to keep her out of commission. Sue drives home to see Luke and talk things over with him—and finds that Luke has learned that Carl spent time in a mental institution after he deliberately injected a child who was allergic to penicillin with a large syringe full of the stuff and kills her. Luke helpfully tries to rationalize Carl’s actions, though he himself is worried literally sick, because he can’t talk her out of going back to the house.

Carl soon tells Sue that he is planning to inject cancer cells into Bob and then try out this new curative serum on him. It doesn’t work, so Bob will certainly die, but what Carl learns from the experiment will help further his research. Siggy even overhears this conversation—but instead of running straight to the cops, Siggy concocts a fabulous plan for Sue to marry Bob so as to rescue him. It’s not clear how this is going to happen, as it would be about as easy to smuggle the vicar past Pete as it would be to get Bob out. Then Sue remembers the gun in her car. “Bob had been through jungle fighting. Bob would know exactly how to handle a revolver. He would know how, if necessary, to take a pot shot at Laura; just a harmless little shot, the kind that would knock her senseless, but result in no serious injury.”

How everything works out in the end is pretty typical, dopey stuff, even stooping to include babies switched at birth—not very satisfying at all. There are occasional flashes of Ms. Stonebraker’s usual witty writing, but the plot is drawn-out and silly, and the heroine is a total imbecile. I remain a devoted fan of Florence Stonebraker, but this is not one of her best, so you might as well just leave it on the shelf and re-read one of her better books (e.g. The Nurse and the Orderly, Runaway Nurse) instead.

This book was also published
with a really terrible cover but 
a better title.

Night Nurse

By Fern Shepard
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1962
Cover illustration by Victor Kalin

Nurse Kitty Casey’s personal concern for her young patient alienated the boy’s domineering mother who demanded Kitty’s removal from the case. While Doctor Tom Barbour understood Kitty’s feeling for the boy, he had no alternative but to order her reassignment. If she protested, it would mean dismissal from the hospital. But Tom Barbour had never met anyone quite like this spirited redhead. How different Kitty was from his own coldly self-centered fiancée. There was no denying the attraction Nurse Casey held for him, even as she challenged him in a dramatic clash of wills.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“He started to cough; the racking, chronic cough which his mother insisted came from a tubercular condition, although a dozen or more doctors and tests galore had found no trace of T.B. He asked Kitty to light a cigarette for him.”

“Honey, there’s a time to forget about all figures—except how to make the most of your own.”

“The kiss he gave her when he said hello had all the warmth of a refrigerator that needed defrosting.”

“You’re a nurse, and that’s the most important thing of all. All a doctor does is walk in, look wise and walk out again. The nurse is the really big deal.”

“What’s the point in being a doctor if you aren’t going to cash in?”

REVIEW:

Nurse Kitty Casey never once works at night. So why is this book called Night Nurse? I seem to be on a string of books that have little to do with their titles (see Runaway Nurse and Ozark Nurse), and frankly, this trend bugs me. When I pick up a book called Night Nurse, I expect there to be at least one night shift, damn it! I mean, otherwise you could just as well call it Nurse Nancy Navigates the Nile. Which sounds like a great book, actually.

The “boy” referred to in the back cover blurb is 19-year-old Kenny Wilson. Kenny has the monster mother we’ve met before in other books by this same author (The Nurse and the Orderly), the fat one who wants to keep her boy a helpless, dependent baby. We’re told this more than shown it, as when sad Kenny tells Kitty that his mom drowned his pet kitten and then whipped him, telling him to control his “silly emotions.” Though we do get to witness Mrs. Wilson screaming at the staff on multiple occasions, the sting isn’t as harsh as if she were saying these nasty things to her own child. 

Kenny is on the brink of a nervous breakdown because his mother ruined his engagement. Kitty encourages his recovery with helpful exhortations such as, “You don’t want to turn into a mental case, do you?” The compassionate Kitty just wants to help the poor, broken boy, but every time she tries comforting him, in walks Mrs. Wilson, who takes her tales of the brazen, provocative hussy straight to the chief of staff, Dr. Tom Barbour. He tells Kitty that she is too emotionally involved in her patients, to which she responds, “I’m a human being as well as a nurse!” Many VNRN heroines seem to consider humanity and nursing to be mutually exclusive (see Headline Nurse), but Kitty is an exception. Must be that red hair of hers.

Being the impulsive, hot-headed gal that she is, she up and quits the hospital, but Dr. Tom chases her down at her apartment that night, and takes her for a drive in the hills of Los Angeles to his secret little house, replete with packed bookshelves and Navajo rugs, on a cliff overlooking the city. Not even his fiancée, social butterfly Eleanor Blair, has been there. Natch, it isn’t long before Tom is kissing Kitty. He doesn’t really love Eleanor, who is a cold, calculating glamour puss who dazzled him with charm shortly after he arrived in California from the sticks. She wants a rich physician husband, but he’s more inclined to be a do-gooder, so they have a lot of arguments about why he can’t make this dinner party or has to go check on that patient. But not to worry, it’s just a matter of time before the men, who are fortunate to have Kitty to set them straight, are pointed in the right direction, which means down the aisle for all three of them (there’s a longtime beau in the mix as well).

Marge, the ubiquitous witty roommate, livens up the dialogue. Marge gives Kitty some advice before her date with Dr. Tom that is worthy of Polonius: “Don’t start fighting the man, even if he does say things to irritate you. Men can’t stand belligerent women. And keep your opinions on all matters to yourself. That’s another thing men don’t like: women with opinions. If you feel your face sort of falling apart, make for the nearest rest room and give it a going over. And take along this vial of perfume—it’s a weapon a gal should never be without. If he tries to kiss you, don’t shy away. You aren’t a skittish horse, you know. And you might throw in a few words about what a wonderful, wonderful man he really is. Nothing throws a man faster than being told how truly wonderful he is.” And this above all things, to thine own self be true.

The writing is crisp and brisk, with some campy touches now and again, and we are regularly treated to sentences like, “ ‘Friends?’ she said vaguely, as if it were a word she must look up in the dictionary,” and “‘Really?’ she said, trying to look wildly interested.” It’s a good book, and it certainly makes for a pleasant afternoon. But I still closed it with a sense of mild disappointment. If only Ms. Stonebraker had just cranked it up a notch, this could have been a great book.

Challenge for Nurse Laurel

By Fay Stone, ©1970

“Is that you, Laurel? How are you, darling?” When Nurse Laurel Winston realized who was on the phone, she was startled, then angry, at her pulse-pounding reaction. Ambitious young Dr. Neil Elliott had jilted her months before, for a rich heiress. Now here he was calling the suicide prevention center where she worked, asking her … what? To come on a case where a 12-year-old child tried to drown herself? To “watch over the poor psychotic little thing until she can be committed.” Laurel’s impulse was to say no—she wanted nothing more to do with Neil Elliott. But she changed her mind when her chief, Dr. Powers, asked her to take the case, as a favor to him. And when she met her young patient, Laurel was glad she had changed her mind. Because something was very wrong—something she didn’t begin to understand until it threatened them both…

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“For six months you haven’t heard the fellow’s voice. The minute you do, your body chemistry goes right out of balance.”

“She was just another jilted girl, and she’d have to make the best of it.”

“A little girl burning up with fever really should have priority over such minor considerations as to whether a nurse had the right to be blonde and dressed in black pants.”

“She considered all the psychopaths running loose around California. One could read any front page. Some nice-appearing, apparently trustworthy character would suddenly go berserk and murder somebody, many half a dozen somebodies. And as often as not, the murderer turned out to be the gardener! Oh, yes. For some reason not at all clear, psychos seemed to gravitate to wealthy homes to look after the flowers.”

“Plenty of women seemed grim indeed when they showed their faces as nature made them.”

REVIEW:
An unwanted child; a glamorous, wealthy mother perched on the brink of psychosis; a hunky guy in love with the nurse but contemplating marrying the shrew for the sake of the child—haven’t I just read this book? Well, yes and no. It’s true that the circumstances of Challenge for Nurse Laurel are strikingly similar to the last book I read, Runaway Nurse, but oh, what a difference an author makes. While Runaway Nurse is lively, campy, and fun, Nurse Laurel is ponderous, dull, and stupid. The best line—the back cover blurb quote in which nurse Laurel is exhorted to “watch over the poor psychotic little thing”—is not even in the book, and it’s a sad day when the blurb writer outshines in one paragraph an author who has 208 pages to exert her muscles.

Laurel, a country bumpkin loose in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles, was jilted by the suave psychiatrist Neil Elliott months ago. But now, for reasons never explained, the only nurse who can help him is Laurel. She is to babysit the adopted and despised daughter of Nina Newlands, 12-year-old Pat, who is hearing her recently deceased father’s voice telling her to kill herself. Laurel, first hearing the story, asks, “Could it be that the youngster was psychic?” If Neil weren’t such a jerk, he would have entertained this perfectly rational explanation. But instead, mean old Neil “brushed the notion aside as so much nonsense.” Probably because Neil needs Laurel’s testimony that the girl is nuts so Pat can be popped into a straightjacket and whisked off to the asylum for a lifetime of shock treatments. This would mean that her father’s oil well fortune, which has been left entirely to Pat, would then be at Nina’s disposal—just an incidental fact that surely has no bearing on the matter.

When Laurel first meets the little nut job, Pat has been tied to her bed for two hours because Nina “must have a little time to rest and meditate, and not be worried wondering if you’ve run off to destroy yourself again.” The gardener, Al Kendrick, shimmies up the drainpipe to assist the girl, who has started screaming. For just a hired boy, he is pretty aggressive and rude to Nina, who uncharacteristically wilts before him. Pat is untied, and Laurel gives her a bath. (My 12-year-old daughter would rather hack off an arm with a butter knife than let me give her a bath, but I hear girls grow up quicker these days.) Tucked amongst the towels is a note ostensibly written by Pat’s dead father Byron, urging her to join him in heaven. That night Laurel, in the next room from Pat’s, hears scraping and whistling, and then Pat is screaming her head off about a ghost in her room. This is all Dr. Neil needs to start ordering the girl’s one-way ticket to the nuthouse.

Laurel is horrified by the prospect, because everyone knows those places are just packed with “hopeless derelicts of a subterranean world; a variety of defectives, from high-grade morons to low-grade imbeciles and idiots … the abnormal, the mentally twisted, the grotesque creatures who were lost to hope. … the mentally retarded, the unfit, some of them Mongolian idiots.” Oh, God, anything but people with Down syndrome!!! If this is the qualified opinion of a highly skilled psychiatric nurse, the profession is in serious trouble.

Will Laurel and her new-found love Al be able to get to the bottom of the mystery in time? Well, if all it takes is a hare-brained scheme, everything will be great, because this pair has them in spades. First, Laurel is going to kidnap Pat, and Laurel’s esteemed physician friend and mentor, whose medical license apparently means nothing to him, is going to help them hide the child. If that doesn’t work, Al is going to marry Nina in exchange for her promise to leave Pat alone. Nina is all over this plan like the dog on your leg. Never mind that there is absolutely no reason why a very wealthy woman should go for the gardener (Lady Chatterley notwithstanding) when she has done nothing but snarl at this one, and she certainly has no shortage of better prospects, Dr. Neil included. The only thing Al can give her, she herself acknowledges, is “the delight of abandoning herself to the joy and delights of a vital woman in the arms of a truly fabulous man.” As it were. She could probably just drive down to Sunset Boulevard and get herself a gigolo for a lot less hassle.

The plot is telegraphed from every page. Again and again Laurel goes over the implausibility of there being an actual ghost, who might be behind it, what there is to gain from this plot—though only a low-grade imbecile could miss it. Could it be Nina? Is it Al? Neil? Nina? Al? Neil? Around and around we go, pounding to death a question no reader could possibly care about. There are a few other “mysteries” tossed in, like who Pat’s parents really were, and has anyone else noticed that her eyes are so much like Al’s?

Then there are the parts that just make no sense at all. Nina takes a great deal of crap from Al, and when she tries to fire him, he tells her that the house belongs to Pat, so she can’t make him leave, because Pat “has the legal right to decide who was to stay there, who was to go.” I really don’t think a 12-year-old child has that kind of legal authority, even in California. When Nina rightfully retorts that she, as Pat’s guardian, indeed has that right, Al says that the court has not yet appointed her Pat’s guardian. Again, wha-a-a-a-a? Are we really supposed to believe that Pat was adopted by Byron Newlands alone, and that Nina has no legal relationship whatsoever to a girl she has raised for 12 years? And when you get to the final aha moment, when all is revealed, the unbelievable coincidence is so contrived and lame that it’s all you can do to keep your gorge in check. Really, just toss this bore of a book and run straight to Runaway Nurse.