Nurse Kelly’s Crusade

By Nell Marr Dean, ©1969

Beautiful Kelly Jarman was a dedicated nurse, but she was also a young woman in love. And now her heart was torn between her professional pride and her personal emotions. At Harbor Hospital in San Francisco where Kelly worked, she led the demands of nurses for better pay and greater recognition—demands that handsome intern Cass Sterling looked upon with scornful disapproval. Kelly could not stop loving Cass, but she could not desert a cause in which she deeply believed. Nor was her decision made easier when jet pilot Marty Randolph offered to take her away from this scene of heartache. It took a shattering crisis, and a dramatic hospital battle against disaster, to show Kelly the way out of her painful dilemma, and into the arms of the man who was right for her.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“What happened to that darling little girl who had bubonic plague, I didn’t hear any more after she left Pediatrics.” 

“We think it’s marvelous that you have two men chasing you.”

REVIEW:
Kelly Jarman works in San Francisco but commutes to her home in Menlo Park, here surprisingly located across the freeway from the San Francisco airport (in reality it’s 20 miles south of SFO), where she lives with her two lively roommates, while her younger sister Babs—newly divorced with a one-year-old son—lives nearby. It’s not clear what Kelly’s titular “crusade” is, because though the nurses are planning a mass resignation from their jobs to get a pay differential for nights and weekends and Kelly is going along with the idea, she’s not really involved in any part of the organization of the effort. She does crusade hard to discourage Babs, however, from opening a makeup and jewelry store, believing that Babs doesn’t have the brains or perseverance to make it work, to the point that she moves to Telegraph Hill in the city so she won’t be around to help with the bookkeeping or manning the store on occasion. Not sure if that’s the most admirable cause to be working for, but maybe that’s just me.

Neither does Kelly seem very interested in the men she is dating: airline pilot Marty Randolph, who takes her out every week or so when he’s laying over in San Francisco, or Dr. Cass Sterling, the intern who has years to go before he can start paying off his medical school debts, not to mention a likely two-year stint in the Army. When Cass tells her he doesn’t have the money to marry her, she suddenly decides “she was only a convenient date” and snaps, “Whatever made you think I was interested in marriage? What’s between us but a few dates?” So Cass, surprisingly thin-skinned, stops calling.

Meanwhile, Marty flies Kelly to Texas, where he is planning on starting a small airline company—and fickle Kelly thinks this expensive venture is a way better idea than Babs’: “With you and Dave so much in love with flying, your venture should get off to a good start. I’ll admit it takes vision to make dreams come true.” And capital, marketing plans, an accountant, FAA paperwork—Babs took a class and studied her brains out, but Kelly still thinks her sister is wasting the legacy that their (of course) dead parents left her—until a man who knows how to put up shelving starts hanging around the store. “He’s what Babs needs—a man who will never kill her spirit but who will give her only so much rein,” Kelly says—not realizing that she herself has given Babs no rein at all while constantly trying to kill her dream. Seems like it’s all about the gender of the dreamer with Kelly. And while she’s “appalled” that Babs is spending her money on a business, when Marty says he can’t marry Kelly due to lack of funding, Kelly is quick to offer Marty her own money, knowing less about his business plan and character than she did about Babs’. Kelly may not have a crusade, but she does have hypocrisy in spades!

Then there’s a huge ship accident just outside San Francisco Bay, and Kelly curiously decides that her best course of action would be to drive to Fisherman’s Wharf and get on a fishing boat heading out to rescue survivors—because a nurse with no supplies on a boat is going to be so much help out there instead of in the emergency department—the walkout has kept her steadfast in refusing to go to the hospital where she could be of real help—and who should climb into the same boat but Cass Sterling? When she tells him she thinks she’s should instead to go to the hospital to help out there during the emergency, he barks, “You little bonehead, you’re doing nothing of the sort. You’re going to stand by your convictions. You believed in resignation once. You believe in it now.” Um, because a mass casualty changes nothing, even temporarily? “She was glad that he had such a way of making things seem all right,” after his persuasive, intelligent, respectful argument.

Of course you know Cass somehow recovers from his concerns about money and proposes—guess who Kelly has been in love with all this time?—and never mind that her salary and legacy never come up as a solution to Cass’s financial problems in her conversation with him they way they did when Marty proposed—why is a single nurse’s money never a consideration to a doctor who “can’t afford” to marry when they are both financially capable of feeding and housing themselves independently?

The best thing about this book is the armchair travel in San Francisco—Gumps, North Beach, Broadway and its “tasteless” clubs, Telegraph Hill. But the main characters have no sense—even Kelly’s roommate enlists in the Air Force apparently to convince her unsteady boyfriend to propose—so if the book is a quick, easy read, the advantage there is that it will be over so much the sooner.

Sharon Garrison, Clinic Nurse

By Phyllis Taylor Pianka, ©1977
Cover illustration by Edrien King

Young Sharon Garrison was eager to start work as head of the clinic at KSEA-TV Media Center. She would be responsible for the running of the entire clinic and the care of all those who worked at the center. Her association with Mercy Hospital had ended on a sour note, after her uncle Elliott Garrison had been named hospital administrator. Suddenly friends and acquaintances treated Sharon with exaggerated caution or as if she could directly influence hospital policy, and the young nurse had felt it best to look for a new position. At the Media Center, Sharon also hoped to gain some insight into her parents. Concert musicians, they had sent Sharon to boarding school and to live with her aunt and uncle rather than spending time with her. How could people be so absorbed with the entertainment industry that they neglected their own child? What was the fascination it held? Sharon quickly became involved in the center and caught up in its excitement. Charming and capable, she won the respect and affection of Skip Richardson, who was eager to give her a screen test, and Paul Hamilton, the handsome boss of KSEA-TV. And she even befriended the young picketer, Chuck Baker, who seemed to have a grudge against the station. Misunderstandings seem to be the rule rather than the exception in Sharon’s love life, however, and it is not until the exciting climax that the young nurse’s future seems certain.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Angel, you are darn late but you look good enough to get us off the hook. For once they sent me a body with class.”

“I guess they warned you this job isn’t likely to get very exciting. So far there haven’t been any murders, although when I see Sheila I am tempted.”

“‘Take it easy, Sharon. You look nervous. It isn’t as bad as you think it will be.’
“Sharon wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s what we tell our patients just before we give them a barium enema. They don’t believe us either.’” 

“I still think he will make the perfect husband once he is properly trained.”

REVIEW:
As Sharon Garrison enters the building of KSEA-TV in San Francisco for her first day as nurse in charge of the company clinic, she’s grabbed by the shoulders and whisked onto the elevator by Skip Richardson, who is in charge of casting for commercials. “This must be your first commercial,” he tells her. “I couldn’t have forgotten your packaging.” He picks up her hand to point out that she’s not wearing a wedding ring, too. Ha, ha, it’s a mistaken identity, quickly set to rights, and “Sharon had to smile in spite of herself. There was something appealing about the man despite his brashness.” She doesn’t mention how attractive his misogyny is.  

It seems to be epidemic in the company, unfortunately: If a show is successful they hang a toy elf in the cafeteria for a week and the girls are supposed to line up underneath it to be kissed by the boys. “All the pretty girls at the center have been kissed at least a dozen times,” explains casting director Skip Richards. Unfortunately, she accidentally walks under the elf when her boss Paul Hamilton is nearby, and though “the muscle in his jaw began to throb,” he just turns away and walks out of the cafeteria. Sharon is humiliated! “Why couldn’t he have kissed her?” she wonders. When he shows up at the clinic at the end of the day, she explodes: “You certainly succeeded in embarrassing me in front of the entire staff.” So he grabs her and kisses her: “His mouth was hard against hers; bruising, seeking, demanding, compelling.” She cries, he looks bewildered and forlorn, and “Sharon ached to reach out and hold him,” like anyone would after being assaulted.

Now “a series of minor accidents began to plague Media Center,” and the scuttlebutt is that it’s bad luck raining down after Paul refused to kiss Sharon under the elf. So Paul takes her to the cafeteria the next day, steers her under the elf, and kisses her “without haste, without passion.” Everyone in the cafeteria gives them a standing ovation. Take that, bad luck elf! Neither of them has time for a lengthy lunch, so they spend 90 minutes dining at a French restaurant, and Paul tells her he hasn’t wanted to date until the studio was successful. It is now, apparently, so he asks Sharon for a date. She suggests they go to Fisherman’s Wharf, which no actual San Franciscan ever goes near except on pain of death. Further demonstrating her complete lack of understanding of the city, for her date she wears a mini skirt and a sleeveless shirt, so she’s liable to freeze to death, the poor ignorant thing (it’s notoriously cold year-round in San Francisco; when I moved out of that city after living there for five years, I didn’t own a single pair of shorts).

Then Paul invites her to the house he’s just bought on the Pacific coast south of San Francisco. He tells her he’s in love with her and that she’s the first woman he’s brought there, but then she conveniently finds an ID bracelet with his secretary’s name on it on the walkway, and now she’s livid. Rather than discuss it with him, she tosses in bed all night, unable to sleep. “Well, for heaven’s sake, ask him to explain it,” says her sensible friend Kitty the next day. But before she has the chance, Paul finds out that she had wangled an audition for her nephews at the studio and is furious, thinking somehow that she’s compromised her employment with the company by pursuing nepotism. Now she’s hypocritical enough to insist that he listen to her explanation, but before they can get to that, someone with a bloody nose and then a crazy young man with a gun taking one of the studios hostage get in the way. You will easily guess how everything winds up from there.

It’s not the worst book ever, and in fact has a number of silly moments to laugh at—just not enough to put it over the top like the delightfully daffy Nurse at the Fair. The misogyny here is rather shocking even for VNRN standards—a mistletoe elf in the cafeteria???—but the writing is perfectly fine and the actual romance part is kind of sweet. Overall, however, even if it is set in San Francisco, the greatest city in the world, there’s just not enough that’s interesting about this book to make it a good read.

The Fledgling Nurses

By Diana Douglas, pseud. of 
Richard Wilkes-Hunter, ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“Tina,” John whispered, “I’ve never seen you the way I’m seeing you now.”
“No? I guess you never bothered to look,” she answered. Any second now he was going to kiss her, and most girls would give anything to have such an attractive man look at them as he was looking at her now. But all Tina felt was a diminishing satisfaction that John’s date Dell would see them—that what Dell would feel would be payment for some of the dirty tricks she’d played on Tina at the hospital. John’s kiss was passionate and very, very exciting—too exciting. For when Tina saw Dell staring at them furiously, she knew that what had started out as a simple act of revenge might signal the beginning of a love that would threaten all of them … 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Inside this hospital, nurses do not run even in an emergency. Running promotes panic. In patients as well as nurses. Remember that.” 

“‘Sometimes it’s like that with people,’ he said. ‘You just look at one another and you vibrate.’”

REVIEW:
Tina Lambert, a second-year nursing student, hates her fellow student Dell Blandon with a burning passion. Dell, who’s at the top of their class, is always ratting out Tina, who is somewhere at the bottom. Tina’s problem is that she has mixed feelings about nursing, mostly stemming from her mother, who is director of nursing at a hospital in Berkeley, California, across the bay from Bayview Hospital, where Tina is a student. “My mother’s more than a trial—she’s a conviction, too,” Tina gripes, adding that it was her mother’s idea that she become a nurse. Honest and self-aware, though, she admits, “I wanted to be a nurse. But I wanted to make my own decision about it, that’s all. I didn’t want to be taken by the ear and led into a nurse’s uniform. Would you?” No, I wouldn’t, and it explains Tina’s attitude and mixed performance as a student. 

One evening Tina and the gang and their men friends go to a club—“It’s now, it’s wow, it’s the Rainbow Pad,” and I laughed for about ten pages at the wild, swinging hippie scene with hypnotic, psychedelic lights and a “depth-perception machine,” whatever that is. Unfortunately, Tina is not able to “swing your hang-ups away!” and instead decides to wreak her revenge on Dell by taking away her boyfriend, John Small. Unfortunately, it’s not very difficult, as John seems too eager to kiss Tina from the moment he lays eyes on her. She lets him do it as she sees Dell exiting the ladies’ lounge, and Dell, furious, leaves the club with Stanfurd playboy Peter Spain. That night, Tina hears Dell sneaking into the nurses’ dorm way past curfew and cry herself to sleep, and—too late—she starts to feel remorse. But it proves difficult to drop John, who now is hypocritically angry with Dell for dating Peter. Eventually, trying to get Dell to go back to John, who Tina is sure still loves Dell, Tina comes completely clean to Dell, in her startlingly honest way. Dell, not very surprisingly, is devastated and humiliated, and thinking that she’s lost the man she loves forever, walks out of the hospital when she should be heading for class.

The next 40 pages devote themselves to a long, drawn-out, day-long hunt all over San Francisco for Dell, ending with Tina, John and two friends driving through the thick fog (you knew the fog would make an appearance at some point) to track her down—only to end up in a car crash, and wouldn’t you know it, the car they hit contains Dell and Peter! Tina, who’s been a hit-or-miss student—though we do hear she’s especially strong on the first aid exam, in a bit of foreshadowing—saves John’s life while the other two student nurses go to pieces, and when the victims are finally wheeled into the ED doors, Tina wins the admiration of chief surgical resident Dr. Roger Carr.

Eventually everything is tied up, but not before Tina pulls a half-hearted Dell maneuver herself and runs into the park after dark and is nearly assaulted before Roger shows up in the nick of time, in a perfunctory 2½-page adventure that feels insulting to the reader. Overall it’s certainly not author Richard Wilkes-Hunter’s worst, which can be pretty bad (see Resort Nurse, Nurse Deceived, Mystery Nurse, and Surfing Nurse, to name just a few—he has definitely earned his berth on the Worst VNRN Authors list). But here he has given us a short story stretched yawningly into 125 pages, and we can’t avoid Wilkes-Hunter’s trademark awkward references to Tina’s “firm breasts” and the shower in which she is “letting the warmth pour down over her smooth young curves,” which make me feel like a creepy voyeur. But Tina is a forthright, insightful, admirable young woman who learns from her ability to perform under pressure that “if I can do that once, I can do it again, can’t I? I mean, I can help people who need what I am able to do for them.” It’s a rarity for Wilkes-Hunter to give us such a feisty and enjoyable heroine, but after wading through 13 of his other books and finding them overwhelmingly to be duds, I am glad to have met her.

Duty Nurse

By Diana Douglas 
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1968

Cover illustration by David Blossom

The girl in room 17 was so young and lovely and had so little time left. How could the doctor deny her anything ...  even himself? The duty nurse was kind and wise beyond her years. Could she deny her tragic patient anything ... even the man she herself loved?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“She is a woman. That’s the first thing I noticed about her.”

“Probin is like all hospitals, it doesn’t believe in encouraging its interns by overpaying them.”

“The guy has his good points. He’s asked me twice for a date.”

“You had to use psychology if you wanted a date with a girl like Sandra.”

“A man needs the kind of incentive only a wife can give him.”

“Jim Macauley was very immature, even for an intern. And that was saying plenty.”

REVIEW:

It is hard for me to believe that Richard Wilkes-Hunter actually penned this book. Only one solitary reference to a patient’s “firm young breasts” gave any indication that it just might be his work, after all. At book’s open, nurse Sandra Bethune is arriving at Probin Memorial Hospital in San Francisco for her new job. The cab in front of hers also sports a new addition to the medical staff: Dr. Peter Stewart: single, 26, and hot. And he likes the looks of Sandra, too: “When I marry it will be to a woman who looks like her, with a pale olive complexion and black hair that always looks freshly brushed, with a natural sheen of youth and health.” Frankly, I was looking for someone intelligent and kind when I married, but then, a good disposition may be highly overrated. In any case, Sandra is safe for a bit, as Dr. Stewart has planned to wait another two years “before he could afford to marry a girl, in the way he wanted.” These young doctors always talk about getting married like it’s picking up a loaf of bread at the supermarket. But we know how those plans are going to turn out, don’t we?

The two are thrown together right away when they are both caring for a new patient, Ava Sindell, who is 22 and admitted for anemia. We’re just waiting for her to give a cough to indicate that it’s a fatal illness, but Dr. Stewart’s thorough physical exam turns up an enlarged spleen, bleeding gums, and swollen lymph nodes, which will work even better. It’s too bad, because she’s so pretty, and legitimately quick-witted, smart, and sweet—for once a character’s actual behavior coincides with how other people describe her—but she’s got leukemia, which was fatal in those days. Unfortunately, the doctors and Ava’s family conspire not to tell her about it, so as not to destroy her hope or ruin her last month of life. I’m sure she won’t wonder why she needs all the steroids and blood transfusions, or why she keeps passing out.

Early on, Peter toys with the idea of asking Sandra out, but by the time he gets around to it, she’s accepted a date with someone else. Now Peter is certain that he’s lost his chance with her, even though she doesn’t really like this other man, and drops him after he becomes petulant and demanding. “That was the trouble with men, she thought. You went out with one a couple of times and soon he became over-possessive and thought he owned you.” For his part, Peter starts going out with Ava—at first, just to keep an eye on her after she’s been discharged so as to keep her from overdoing it and blowing her remission—but he quickly comes to care for her, and she easily reciprocates the feeling. And Sandra is left thinking that she’s lost Peter, all the while feeling rather conflicted about it, realizing this is her young patient’s only chance for love (cue the violins).

It’s clear from the beginning how this story is going to play out, but it’s told honestly and (I dare to say it) tenderly. Sandra is a strong, clear-eyed, intelligent woman, unlike any I’ve ever met in a Wilkes-Hunter novel, who firmly tells her would-be beau, as he rather nastily pressures her to marry him on their third date (being married to her would help him relax, he says), “It took me years of study and hard work to become a registered nurse and I wouldn’t give that up lightly.” Ava, too, is not so dumb that she doesn’t understand what’s really going on, and even Peter is a nice guy. There’s a bit of humor here, some unintentional (Sandra’s roommate is named Nancy Drew), and the writing is perfectly sound. Again, it is really hard to believe that this book could have been written by the same man who brought us the D-rated Resort Nurse, not to mention his seven other books of varying shades of C, because I have never seen even a hint of sensitivity or feeling in any of the other books written by him that I have read. But fluke or ghost-written, this is a lovely book.

Nurse of Polka Dot Island

By Jeanne Bowman, ©1966

After Nurse Agnes met Jim Mahoney, the tiny island where she worked became enchanted. The big Irish detective was tracing down a dangerous criminal, but he still had time to fall in love. However, Agnes was troubled. Their romance would go out with the tide if she concealed evidence from the headstrong young deputy. And her patient would die if he learned his own son was a suspect.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“Oh, why couldn’t he be just an ordinary deputy sheriff, out risking his life on murders and riots?”

“So much for girls who ran after men. Unless they had a legitimate reason for calling, they got further ahead by waiting.”

“If she could only somehow psychologize Jim into letting her help.”

“He’s in the café with that cute little number he’s been shining up to.”

“What man could stand having a woman, not even in his profession, win out over him?”

REVIEW:

Regular readers may recall that I have no fondness for Jeanne Bowman, who in my view is more unpleasant than a heaping plate of Brussels sprouts. This book is not her worst, but her trademark pedantic pop psychology is well-represented in these pages, so it’s still not worth the trouble. But since I did in fact brave the storm, here is my report from the front:

Nurse Agnes (yes, Agnes) Leahy is a nurse who owns a small house somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area. The geography is a bit confusing, and I never quite figured out if she actually lives on Polka Dot Island or somewhere else. But she is working there, caring for a Mr. Mason who has no first name and is recovering from a major car accident that killed his wife. As the book opens, Agnes and Mr. Mason’s son Ted, age 19, are plotting how to keep away the well-wishing hordes who will descend on the patient and wear him out. They settle on—and actually install—an electrified cattle guard at the end of the driveway to zap any friends who might come visiting, and I am not kidding.

Someone on the island is running around setting fires, and suspicion quickly settles on young Ted, who always seems to be near at hand when the blazes start—in fact, at one point he burns his arms attempting to put out the blaze, or so he says. His father alludes to the new return of a problem Ted had when he was younger; Agnes fears that it’s playing with matches, but somehow just cannot bring herself, through 80 pages, to ask Mr. Mason exactly what he’s referring to. As she is nursing the chief suspect’s father, Agnes soon meets Detective Jim Mahoney, who is borderline pathological about pyromaniacs, stemming from the fact that his family farm was burned by one when he was an impressionable lad, and the ensuing financial ruin is thought to have brought on his father’s fatal heart attack. This gives Agnes and Jim plenty of opportunity to spout platitudes about criminals and victims, such as, “With fire, no insurance can cover the loss of a man’s faith in himself and his ability to care for his family. Not if it is set by a pyro.” And these beauties sprout like dandelions on virtually every page.

Dating a detective who chases pyromaniacs can be tricky, however; Agnes at one point has to throw out the flowers she’d set on the table and change her dress because both are orange, “a tone of flame. She wanted nothing to remind him of his work.” Not that it matters; it’s all he talks of. We therefore spend a lot of time discussing the motivations and psychoses and behaviors of pyromaniacs; I am sorry to report they are not very interesting.

The pyro continues to light blazes unchecked, despite all of Jim’s obsessive police work, and eventually Jim asks Agnes to give up her job caring for Mr. Mason because the island’s too dangerous. She declines, and Jim gets angry: “You’d rather I worried myself into a frazzle than let some other nurse tie up that case,” he says, and Agnes, getting ridiculously ahead of herself, despairs that their yet-to-occur marriage will end in divorce: “This disagreement meant there was some profound difference between them; one that could swiftly wreck their marriage unless one or the other was willing to give up his integrity.” It’s a very long reach, but this sort of psychobabbling leap is not uncommon for Bowman. So to save their possibly forthcoming marriage, Agnes sets out to figure out who the pyro actually is, since the detective with the might of the police force and years of experience backing him can’t seem to manage it. But if Jim can’t even handle her working on the island, I can’t believe that Agnes’s success in tracking down the criminal would do anything but utterly doom their relationship.  

In the end, though, the days we spend following her around on her mystery-shrouded sleuthing vacation come to naught when her own house is targeted—and we saw this coming since about page 3—and she finds the perpetrator dancing with glee in the bushes, just seconds before Jim appears on the scene to do the same. The inconvenient fact that she figured out who the guilty party was well before he did is conveniently swept under the rug, and all that’s left for her to do is get married, which she does with nauseating drama on the last page.

Jeanne Bowman was, unfortunately for us, a prolific writer. Nurse on Polka Dot Island is not her most egregious offense, but now that it’s done, there’s one less for us to wade through.

San Francisco Nurse

By Barbara Grabendike, ©1964

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

 

As a nurse, Bret Ames had always dreamed of marrying a doctor, yet when handsome Dr. Nels Larson proposed, she began to have her doubts. Strong, yet gentle, he was the kind of man a girl could lean on. But that was just the trouble. Was he too self-sufficient? Somehow she found herself irresistibly drawn to Dick Travers who needed her care and her love, but who belonged to another woman.

 

GRADE: B

 

BEST QUOTES:

“He’s under sixty and male—that makes him just your type.”

 

“Half of you is twice as much as any other woman.”

 

“I won’t deny your husband’s obvious charms, but charms were meant for bracelets, not marriage.”

 

“Why is it that the unhappy people of this world hold so much power over the happiness of others?”

 

“How those smashing waves and rough rocks must be torturing his tender stumps!”

 

“I didn’t lose my head, just my legs.”

 

REVIEW:

I’ve waited a while for a nurse novel as campy as this one—and camp is something I hold quite dear. So it is with disappointment that I must declare that as much as I wanted to adore this book, the story line just couldn’t match the zingy one-liners. Besides, I was disappointed that a novel called San Francisco Nurse gave us little apart from a dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf—where only tourists venture—of that fine city.

 

When Chief of Nurses Bret Ames first claps eyes on Dick Travers, he is a “sour apple.” In for a nephrectomy after stones destroyed his kidney, he is as mean as they come—and now, with just one kidney, “only half a man,” he despairs. But she has a way with these types, and so she gladly takes on the challenge of trying to perk him up. Darn it, though, he is just so stubborn! “Look, Little Miss Sunshine,” he snaps at her, “you can save the routine for vaudeville, it may come back some day and you’ll need it.” You can see why after just a couple of minutes of his bitterness, she’s ready to throw in the towel, and not just because “she felt piqued at being so thoroughly ignored. There was no admiration in those dark eyes when he looked at her tall, well-distributed figure.” The nerve!

 

She soon finds out what his problem is—it’s Virginia Travers, Dick’s malevolent wife, who drove him to the brink of bankruptcy, left him for a wealthier man, and then nearly ruined his reputation when she found out he was in love with one of his graduate students. Her sugar daddy played out and the grad student long frightened away, she’s returned to Dick’s side, insisting he take her back. “I know now what his trouble is—a she-devil wife,” Bret concludes.

 

Under the terrible strain of his loss of manhood and the return of his evil wife, Dick refuses to smile for Bret. She eventually loses her cool with him, calls him—to his face!—an “ungrateful sour apple,” and then surprisingly kisses him full on the lips. “Dear God, I’m in love with him! Completely, crazily in love!” Bret thinks to herself. And so we have yet another dopey heroine falling for a man who has been nothing but mean to her. It isn’t too long before he’s taking her in his arms and kissing her, but given the Mrs. stomping around the hospital on her stilettos, those scenes are few and followed by guilty quarrels, as Dick sees no way out of his marriage.

 

So, in an attempt to cool her jets, Bret oddly decides to go visit Mrs. Travers at her home on the Berkeley campus of State University (and times have certainly changed; she drives across the Bay Bridge at 35 mph and is not killed, and the toll is 25 cents—now it’s $6 during rush hour). There, she tells Mrs. Travers that she is going to marry Dr. Nels Larsen, a fabulous doctor and all-around swell guy. “Self-possessed, he needed no one’s reassurance or approbation,” she thinks of Nels on their second date. “She would never lose her identity as Nels’ wife. He would not demand that her every waking thought be devoted to him—he did not need that kind of reassurance.” Sounds like a peach! Naturally she’ll never be able to love him.

 

When Dick finds out about this, though—and Bret is oddly shocked and furious that the Mrs. should pass along the 411 about the engagement to her spouse—Dick turns right back into that sour apple. He’s nasty, cruel, and shows up at Bret’s engagement party to slap her with the news that he got divorced four days ago—it apparently not crossing his mind to let her know before the announcement party—and chews her out for not waiting for him, when he gave her no reason whatsoever to do so. He also dares to say that “Nels will never give you the chance to be yourself,” when this is the opposite of what Bret had thought of him. “Nels needs nothing from you to make him a man!” he claims, and then clubs her with his parting shot: “I became a man for you. But I overrated your courage by asking you to be a woman for me.” Whatever that means, it completely overlooks his effeminate lack of kidney.

 

But now all we have left is to undo the engagement between Nels and Bret and all will be right. For your further enjoyment, there’s a side plot about a young man whose legs had to be amputated after a car crash, his engagement to a nurse friend of Bret’s, and his insistence that he cannot marry Sue unless he, too, can “be a man,” even with mere stumps for legs. I’m not sure what all this manliness is all about and why it’s so important to the gents in this book, but it really doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble for them or for their lady friends.

 

I was also not impressed at the way Nels is built up as a great guy in the beginning of the book, only to be depicted as a completely different man when Bret needs to dump him. His character change lets Bret off the hook too easily; she should have to man up herself, acknowledging the simple truth that she can’t marry Nels because she loves someone else, regardless of what an ass that man is, and not pretend her fickleness is due to any alleged flaw Nels possesses. She neither has to make any effort to go after Dick, because the very second she decides that she’s through with Nels, Dick’s hand drops on her shoulder. So while the zingers are hilarious fun, and these alone make San Francisco Nurse worth reading, the plotting just doesn’t have the backbone to carry this book to the top of the mark.

City Doctor

By Thomas Stone
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1951

 

Sometimes working with Philip was more than Jane could bear. She admired him as a doctor; she loved him as a man. But Philip preferred women like Cynthia—Sin for short. So Jane worked with him day after day, while his nights belonged to Cynthia, until that night when Jane found herself in desperate trouble, trouble that would smear her over the front page and wreck her career. No one could help but Philip, and to help her she must make him see her as a woman. … Here is a dramatic, behind-the-scenes story of the medical profession—the private lives of some of those men and women in white.

 

GRADE: A

 

BEST QUOTES:

“His patients practically never had the bad manners to die on him.”

 

“I play no favorites,” Phil sometimes said, when a woman asked him if he preferred blondes, or what. “All I demand of my gals is that they know how to hold their liquor, mean that come-hither look in their eye, and that I’m the one man in their life, as long as I’m holding them in my arms.”

 

“San Francisco is my first and truest love. But the old city is really quite a trollop, you know. She was conceived in abandoned sin. The miners came in Forty-Nine, the gals in Fifty-One. And when you think of the lovers she’s had since—show me a two-fisted, hard-drinking man who hasn’t loved San Francisco—she’s really quite the scarlet hussy. And still going strong, after nearly a hundred years.”

 

“Mrs. Lambert does so enjoy being ‘examined’ by you.”

“Too many casual dates leading up to a casual week-end was the most effective way to turn an efficient nurse into a darned nuisance.”

 

“I think women who go in for being reforming influences in other people’s lives should be drowned at birth, don’t you?”

 

“Every attractive woman should take time out for love now and again. It keeps you young, helps the circulation, and it’s very broadening. Don’t you want to be broadened?”

 

“Her hold on him was like the hold liquor gets on a man. The more you had, the more you wanted.”

 

“You’d be surprised how fast a lady can turn into a tramp.”

 

“Haven’t I told you your little iceberg of a nurse could be had, if you put your mind to it?”

 

“I’m not sure you’ll rate so high as a lover, without a few shots of liquor to start you off. Look at you tonight—about as passionate as an ossified oyster.”

 

“The women men respect are usually dull, stolid creatures with low blood pressure.”

 

“That breath of yours is strong enough to wipe out a Nazi division.”

 

“You make a lover sound like these one-a-day vitamin tablets they advertise on the radio. Are you feeling low, depressed, suffering from an energy deficiency; is it hard for you to get started in the morning; are you exhausted when night comes? Then take a lover a day, and you’ll be astonished at the quick pick-ups. Lovers are priced very reasonably and you can find one at your nearest corner drug store.”

 

“Youth tears itself apart over things that were very unimportant. But only age teaches you this. Nothing else can teach it to you.”

 

“Women are all alike, under the skin—all wenches. A man hasn’t got a chance.”

 

“This is a swell drink, baby. There are a lot of things you don’t understand. But how to make drinks isn’t one of them.”

 

“The minute a dame gets a hold on a guy, she figures she’s got to start doing things about his life.”

 

“Oh, it’s love all right, because I’ve lost my appetite. No other man ever did that to me before.”

 

REVIEW:

It is with great joy that I offer you the best nurse novel I have read all year, and once again loudly proclaim Florence Stonebraker’s genius. Not only is this a picture of a relationship that feels profoundly true at its heart even as it dolls itself up in a campy sequined dress and feather boa, but this hard-boiled yet gentle story is as much a romance with the city of San Francisco. So if you think that fabled metropolis is the greatest on earth, as I do, you will be greatly pleased by all the references to local landmarks as well as passages such as: “Phil got up and walked to the window. He lit a cigarette and stood there staring down into the steady drizzle which sprayed the city below, wrapping it in mist. It looked beautiful. Rains, sun, or fog—San Francisco was eternally beautiful. It was forever a dream city.”

 

Jane Walters is a 24-year-old nurse who has worked for two years in the office of Dr. Philip Hastings, located on Sutter Street. (In real life, Florence’s husband William also had an office on Sutter Street, in 1933, just before he left his second wife and ran off to marry Florence. But that’s another story.) Philip has a high-profile and profitable practice of “wealthy idle women whose ailments, in a sense, were one of their sources of amusement.” They summon the good doctor to administer a nightcap when they can’t sleep, wink, wink. Philip is, in other words, a slut.

 

His problem, as the book opens, is that “he was sick of it, to his soul. He was sick of money that he hadn’t really earned. He was sick of the kind of life he’d been living; being a fashionable, high-priced doctor by day, a playboy by night.” Worst of all, he’s been rejected by the Army because he has gastric ulcers, brought on by too much drinking. “It wouldn’t, of course, be some sturdy, he-man disease that could kill a fellow off, something he needn’t be ashamed of, but ulcers,” he says of his diagnosis. This rejection has made him dwell on past failures, such as how he was drummed out of a career in—what else?—surgery, due to a little confusion about his relationship with his mentor’s wife, a situation in which he was, for once, actually innocent.

 

So, maudlin and full of self-pity, he ventures back to the office after a five-day bender that included extended visits to Dizzy Dick’s and several fistfights resulting in a black eye, and tells Jane to tell Mrs. Lambert with the liver condition, who thinks she’s “turning yellow all over,” to “change her brand of whiskey.” Jane, though she recognizes that her boss is not quite right, adds to his misery by telling him that she’s leaving his employ, because “there’s work to be done in the world these days. Real work. I can’t go on any longer playing at work.” Jane’s not cruel, she’s just sees what he really needs: “Pity would be the worst thing in the world for him. What he needed most was to be prodded into standing up to reality and doing a little grappling with it.” So she gives him a few straight facts about himself, and instead of firing her, he asks her to lunch, the first time he has shown any personal interest in her. “You’re the first woman who ever talked to me like that,” he tells her. “You’ve been like a tonic to me.”

 

They go to lunch in Chinatown, he begs her to stay, she accepts. We spend a long afternoon eavesdropping on their conversation, and Phil tries to tell Jane, in a clumsy, honest way, that he’s fallen in love with her. But their new-found romance isn’t going to be so easy. Phil’s most frequent “lovely” is Cynthia Bolton—Sin for short—“a black-chiffon-negligee type of gal,” married to a famous war pilot who was blinded in battle and is now recovering in Palm Springs. She has taken Phil “as a lover,” which is unusual in that these novels very rarely ever give anyone a sex life. And in this case, Cynthia “had more stark physical attraction for him than any woman he’d ever kissed.” But now that he’s found Jane, “there was something flat to it. Somehow, it wasn’t as wonderful as it used to be.” He tries to break it off with Cynthia, but she refuses to go quietly, and tells him that she will tell her husband that she wants a divorce to marry Phil, which will splash his name all over the papers—especially after that incident a few years back with the surgeon’s wife, who named Phil in her suicide note before she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge—and he will never work again. Never! So Phil’s stuck with Cynthia for now, but still seeing Jane—they spend the night together in a rented bungalow in Carmel, a first for any VNRN heroine I’ve met.

 

They have an interesting argument about Phil’s growing jealousy of Jane’s work, which takes her into an aging neighbor’s house in the evenings. Phil hints that Jane is a “tramp,” which the book repeatedly holds up as the worst thing a gal can be, but then he apologizes: “I hate having to share you with other people,” he says. “I hate having to share you with your work. I want you—I want all of you. Men are like that.” Jane responds, “Either your love for me means something, and it includes understanding and friendship and a willingness to share me with the things that are important to my life, including my work—or it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s just another phoney.” Phil is angered by Jane’s response: “If just this once she’d come to him in the meek humility and surrender of love,” he thinks. But she does not! Instead, she quits! Then there’s another little misunderstanding, when Phil finds Jane in the arms of the surgeon who she believes been squelching Phil’s application for a job in surgery at the hospital, which seems like it might be the end of Phil and Jane, but it is Cynthia, oddly, who lets slip a bit of information that puts everything to rights between them. Phil passes his Army physical, and Phil urges Jane to enlist as well, saying, “Between us, the wounded soldiers will be pretty lucky guys. I’ll fix up their busted legs, and you can touch their fevered brows.” Even the ending of this book is cute.

 

I am immensely pleased with this book. It has it all: humor, camp, good writing, and a heartfelt story. I urge everyone out there to dig up a copy, fix yourself a frosty cocktail, and settle down with this siren in your lap for a glorious evening.

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A Nurse Comes Home

By Ethel Hamill
(pseud. Jean Francis Webb III), ©1954
Cover illustration by Edrien King

 

When lovely, blonde Elizabeth Lane returned home to San Francisco, she thought she could take up her life just as it had been before. But in the three years the young nurse had been away—years spent as a prisoner of the enemy in Asia—grave changes had taken place. Handsome Doctor Marsh Carson, who had sworn to marry her, now was engaged to the ravishing, yet strangely sinister Karen Russell. Barney Jordan, who had helped Elizabeth survive her harsh captivity, now claimed a debt she felt she could never honestly repay. Then there was the rugged young newspaperman, Scott Alexander, with his probing questions and disturbing attractiveness. And Elizabeth quickly discovered that she herself was no longer the same girl who had gone away, as she struggled to find out what this new person who bore her name should do.

 

GRADE: A-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“So you’re a good nurse. I need you as a woman. The woman I love!”

 

“I meant to get down to Dr. Carson’s shindig yesterday, but we had an unexpected polio case brought in, and I was all day on the telephone locating another iron lung.”

 

“It was Aunt Wilma’s firm conviction that none of this world’s ills struck too deep to be at least mitigated by hot tea and cinnamon toast.”

 

REVIEW:

As some VNRN authors induce fear and loathing (I’m looking at you, Jeanne Bowman), others land in your lap like a light blue box from Tiffany wrapped in a white satin ribbon. Jean Webb, writing as Ethel Hamill, is most definitely one of the latter; he can write circles around almost everyone else out there. The very first page serves up little prose gems to admire, such as when Nurse Elizabeth Lane is cruising into San Francisco Bay: “San Francisco … She said the name over to herself for perhaps the thousandth time that morning, taking comfort from the syllables as old ladies were supposed to take comfort from a cup of hot tea.”

 

She’s coming home after two years in a prison camp in Korea to be reunited with Dr. Marsh Carson (one of my ongoing quibbles with VNRNs is the ridiculous names they give to the love interests). Like most fickle fiancés, though, in her absence he’s become engaged to the svelte minx Karen Russell. But the man whom she leaned on during her internment, Barney Jordan, is standing by her side—maybe a little too close for comfort, as he soon professes his deep love for her, leaving her with two fellas to contend with. Actually, make that three—as she steps off the boat, famous photographer Scott Alexander snaps her picture, which is broadcast on front pages across the country. He’s now hounding her for an expanded profile piece with lots of pictures to go with it, so he’s hanging around too. For a malnourished, emotionally scarred wreck, she sure is irresistible to the boys.

 

Of course, every one of them has obstacles. Marsh is, of course, engaged to someone else, but he does seem to get awfully jealous of the other boys in Elizabeth’s life. “I’m hanged if I’ll let Barney get away with stealing my girl!” he fumes to Elizabeth, totally oblivious the fact that he abandoned any claim he ever may have had on her when he proposed to Karen. Speaking of whom, his fiancée is quite a cat, and she uses her armory of claws to full effect to keep a grip on her man. Part of her efforts in this direction involve uncovering the fact that Barney, before he went to Korea, was a bank robber who skipped out on his parole and has a little prison sentence waiting for him back in Chicago. She is on the verge of spilling this little tidbit—where else?—at Elizabeth’s welcome home party, but Elizabeth cuts her off and announces that she and Barney are engaged, thus saving Barney from jail: As long as Karen’s competition for Marsh’s affections are engaged elsewhere, she’ll keep her lipsticked moue closed. In the meantime, the old judge, who is a longtime friend of Elizabeth’s family, is working to get Barney pardoned in light of his heroics at the Korean prison camp, but it will go a lot easier with a standup nurse like Elizabeth willing, by marrying him, to vouch for his character and to keep him on the straight and narrow.

 

Scott, meanwhile, is playing the part of the wounded suitor, and though Elizabeth is torn by her feelings for him, she just can’t seem to bring herself to explain the truth of the situation to him and insists that she must go through with the sham marriage to Barney. Everything gets wrapped up tidily in the end, of course, with a crashing finale in the pool cabana that leaves Marsh in a coma. It’s pretty good stuff, but not quite as fabulous as it could have been, I have to say.

 

Part of the fun for me is the fact that this book is set in San Francisco, the greatest city on the planet. There are references to the usual landmarks, of course, but some surprised me, to wit: “They cut along the edge of Union Square, past a yawning mouth to that amazing underground parking garage for which the whole Square had been torn up and set down again just before the second World War.” All the times I passed by, it never occurred to me to consider that garage with anything akin to wonder.

 

I also appreciate the fact that after returning home from years of deprivation and torture in the prison camp, Elizabeth and Barney are not laughing and dancing and partying it up. They are haunted by their experiences—and though this is brought up regularly, it is not rubbed in our faces, sensationalized, or irritating. It’s just a fact of their lives. If the complicated web of Elizabeth’s love life is a bit overwrought—and I’m not a big fan of the I-have-to-marry-this-man-even-though-I-love-someone-else plot—the writing is excellent and the characters are well-drawn (with the exception of Elizabeth, who is the weakest of the lot). The most depressing thing about reading this book is that it means I only have four more books by Ethel Hamill left to read.

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West Coast Nurse

By Della Field
(pseud. Fanny Quincy Howe), ©1963
Cover illustration by Bill Johnson

Ellen Mallory thought being on the Vista Shane staff was absolutely perfect. The small private hospital had excellent facilities and allowed nurses substantial time with each patient. But the arrival of Dr. David Chase posed a threat to Ellen’s emotionally disciplined way of life. The tension she felt in his presence disturbed her. It wasn’t fear. Or dislike. It was—and the realization stunned her—a very strong romantic attraction. She wanted to run—but where? Away from Vista Shane? From San Francisco? Or right into David Chase’s arms!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Who wants a man in his hour of need?”

“It’s this career business that does it. As soon as a woman takes a full-time job, she ignores all her other responsibilities!”

“Nursing was the one career in which a woman could preserve her femininity.”

“Maybe we should send her to a psychiatrist. It’s the thing to do these days, you know.”

“She hated self-pity but could not help wishing that she had a man to cook for and prepare herself for.”

“He and I are opposed on certain things. He respects the uniform and not the woman underneath it, and I, as you so well know, hate the uniform but love what’s underneath.”

“Your crisp white uniform makes me nervous, you know.”

“People should gulp wine as if it was water. It’s good for the soul. I think I’ll begin to prescribe it as pre-operative sedative.”

“If you want to be sort of a masculine type, then go ahead. Get a job, make money to buy clothes for your own reflection in the mirror.”

REVIEW:

Ellen Mallory and her sister Katie live in a San Francisco apartment, on a hill in an Italian neighborhood with views of Marin County. This probably puts them on Telegraph Hill, or maybe Russian Hill (and this is an important detail because I used to live on Telegraph Hill). Ellen works at a hospital 20 miles south of the city—maybe in San Mateo?—where she takes on a patient named Emilio Rafaelli, a very wealthy and prominent attorney in his late 60s who has stomach cancer. He’s crotchety and demanding, but in about two minutes she has him wrapped around her finger, and soon she adores him as well.

The Mallory sisters are orphans—their parents were killed in a plane crash four years ago—and though Ellen was already in nursing school when the tragedy occurred and so has her career to keep her anchored, Katie is drifting. She’s refusing to go to college, which is important to her future because “you simply must if you’re to find the right sort of man,” as her aunt tells her, adding, “One of the all-important things in marriage is equality. The woman just has to keep up with the man.” In her rebellion, Katie is hanging out with a boy named Toad and “a group of students who raced around on motorcycles, drank continually, and lived in rotten warehouses in the city. They all protested every form of conventional behavior, ascribing their own to terror of the atom bomb.”

Ellen is naturally concerned about her sister, and so introduces her to Dr. Stephen Hull, a former boyfriend and now good friend. Naturally it’s love at first sight—but Katie’s not going to be pinned down so easily. In a last revolt against committing herself, she goes out partying with Toad and his pals, who are doing peyote. She refuses to take the drugs, but when the police swarm in, her pal Toad slips the buttons into her pocket and she’s hauled off to jail on drug charges. When Ellen and Stephen show up to bail her out, a police officer is shouting that Katie has tried to slash her wrists with a nail file, so now instead of a prison cell, it’s a hospital bed she’s occupying.

Ellen, clearly, has a lot on her plate. To make matters worse, there’s this guy at the hospital, Dr. David Chase. From the first day they meet, “she dreaded working with him, dreaded his aloof manner, and she disliked him for treating her like a maid.” He’s a dark, brooding type, and it doesn’t help that she’s a cool, efficient machine at work, even if she does go all to pieces when she gets behind her closed bedroom door. Whenever they’re in the same room, the sparks are flying, whether from anger or—could it be?—passion, it’s just so hard to tell how you feel about a guy, right? Until that moment when suddenly she “realized with a shock that she was in love with him.” Did anyone see that coming?

Unfortunately, Ellen is too constrained, and David is too restrained, and every time they meet it’s to say goodbye. He resigns from the hospital, so she stops running into him at the hospital. Then he shows up at a charity ball to see her, and after kissing her heartily, they glare at each other and he stomps off into the sunset. She thinks he’s gone to New York, but really he’s in Big Sur, and when they’re to be at the same dinner party, he sends her a letter telling her that his first thought was to back out of the party, but that’s too childish, so they will meet again, and could she please refrain from the intense sarcasm they’ve exchanged in previous encounters? Before she has the chance to compose a suitably caustic response, her patient suffers a relapse, and the only doctor available is Dr. Chase. He is “coolly efficient” and refuses to look at her—until he takes her in his arms and the book abruptly ends.

West Coast Nurse is an unusual, brooding book, different from the usual VNRN. Ellen is miserable in her life and in her inability to take chances. She loves David and suffers intensely from her inability to connect, both with him and the people around her. But despite numerous declarations that she’s really going to change this time, she still can’t bring herself to tell him how she feels. Even misguided Katie sees how stunted Ellen is, repeatedly advising her to talk to David: “Where’s the fight in you? You’re never going to get what you want unless you make the effort.” (Katie herself, after her trip to the hospital, has learned this lesson and traded in Toad for her prince, Stephen.) I was disappointed that the apparent reconciliation between Ellen and David, though it’s essentially played offstage, did not come about through any real growth in Ellen’s character: She’s still the emotionally timid person she was on the first page, and I’m not overly confident that this rapprochement is going to lead to a happy marriage, since David doesn’t seem to have changed any more than she has.

Another curiosity of the book is its double standard regarding working women. Stephen is insisting that Katie not work once they are married, and she actually breaks off their relationship over this point. He is the one who bends in the end, but Katie has no job and only sketchy plans to become a nurse; when she herself is in the hospital, she tells Ellen and Stephen, “I hate this place. I can’t see how either of you can stand it.” When Ellen asks Katie if she’d rather live in the country with Stephen or in the city with a job and without Stephen, Katie without hesitation chooses Stephen and no job—and then after Stephen has given in to her, Katie tells Ellen that she and Stephen have decided to live in the country after they’re married, implying that she will not be working after all.

Stephen tells Katie, “Look at Ellen. Do you think she’s any better off for being a career woman? Is it making her happy?” But it’s not her job that makes Ellen unhappy; indeed, her close relationship with her patient is about the only thing that keeps her getting out of bed in the morning. (Katie actually calls Stephen on this, responding, “If anything, it’s men like you and David Chase that make her unhappy.”) Not to mention the fact that if it weren’t for her job, she and Katie would be indigent. So the choice between career and husband is not as simple as Stephen would have you believe.

This book is thoughtful, and the author clearly understands Ellen profoundly. It’s psychologically sophisticated; when most VNRNs will drop words like neurosis and mania as if they’re going out of style (oh, wait…), West Coast Nurse describes Ellen’s insecurities in a way that feels deeply true. I was fascinated to discover that the author of this book, Fanny Howe, is an important experimental poet who in 2009 received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which is given to a living American poet whose “lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition.” This book, and her only other VNRN that I can find (Vietnam Nurse), were written when Howe was 23 and 26, respectively, years before her first collection of poetry was published in 1970. (Curiously, this book was published the same year she ended her marriage to Frederick Delafield (1963); her married surname clearly served as the foundation for her pen name.) So the fact that the book is well-written is not surprising, and I feel strangely proud to know that Ms. Howe went on to bigger and better things after leaving us with this remarkable little work.