Beauty Doctor’s Nurse

By W.E.D. Ross, ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Lovely blonde nurse Irene Hunt considered herself lucky to be working in such a fascinating field as plastic surgery. And her growing romance with handsome, readheaded Dr. Max Marshall promised a happy future. Then came the anonymous letter about Max that changed everything—that made her determined to put him out of her mind, to close the door on the past. But transferring to another hospital became more involved than she had anticipated. And even her friendship with the brilliant young plastic surgeon, Dr. Ralph Grant, became more than just a friendship. As Irene found herself drawing closer and closer to Ralph, Max made an unexpected reappearance, eager to resume the romance she thought was over. Could Irene trust her heart to lead her to true love …?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Many people are responsible for their ravaged faces in the first place. It’s not age alone that destroys their appearance. Leonardo da Vinci said centuries ago that when a man is past forty years of age, he is responsible for the head he has. And I can vouch for its truth. I can almost tag them when they come into the office Sometimes I feel like calling them Mr. Greed or Mr. Lust or Miss Avarice. It’s written that plainly in their faces.” 

“That’s the attraction of buffets. They give you a chance to be a glutton in style.”

REVIEW:
Irene Hall works at Manhattan General with two great plastic surgeons, Dr. Cabell Grant and his nephew, Ralph. Irene had been dating Ralph, but it had turned out that he had also been “seeing socially a few times between operations” one of his patients who has having a series of operations done to remove a birthmark on her face, “a young woman patient, attractive but definitely neurotic” who had “taken his attention as a sign of love” and, when Ralph told her he did not love her, had attempted suicide, leaving a note with “hysterical, pathetic references to her love for Ralph Grant, and directly accused him of leading her on.” The ensuing scandal had led Dr. Grant to “surprise everyone by turning vindictively on his nephew and accuse him of breach of professional etiquette.” Summarily fired, Ralph had moved to Connecticut to rebuild his career under an aging plastic surgery expert, Dr. Franz Lederer, now 80 and too arthritic to perform advanced surgeries. The feeling at the hospital, we are told, is that Dr. Grant had been “much too harsh and quite unfair” to Ralph. Irene shares this opinion, though she has a personal stake in the matter because “she’d gone out with him several times.” 

After Ralph had left, she’d started dating Dr. Max Marshall, and “it was taken for granted around the hospital that she and Max were going together” though they were not engaged. But her roommate didn’t like Max and thought he was “glib,” and Irene decides “there had been lots of small warnings,” though we’re not given any real examples other than that he was too poor to take her out—“he was supporting a semi-invalid father and trying to set up a practice”—and so came to her house for dinner a lot, so “she hadn’t expected him to spend much money on her. And he hadn’t!” That bastard!

She gets an anonymous letter in the mail—who had sent it we never learn—that informs her that Max had also been dating another nurse at the hospital. So she quits her job and takes a position with Ralph Grant—and then has a conversation with Max, telling him that it’s over between them, not exactly demonstrating much faith in Max if she trusts an anonymous letter to such a degree that she’ll turn her entire life upside down over it.

In numerous scenes, Max apologizes again and again, acknowledges his mistake, ends it with the other nurse, and tells Irene that he loves her. But cold-hearted Irene is completely unable to forgive the apparent fact that Max as exposed her to “gossip and snickers” in the hospital, and off she goes to Connecticut. It seems to me that Max had a lucky escape.

On her first day at Ralph’s hospital, she meets a nurse who is in love with Ralph and whom he has been dating. She declares to Nurse Blanche that “she’d only known Ralph in the most casual way and so couldn’t possible see herself as a rival for his affections.” Then she sees Ralph, and he tells her that he’s in love with her and “was on the point of asking you to marry me” before he’d been driven from New York. Irene replies that if she had known this, she wouldn’t have taken the job—but on the next page, he asks, “Do you think we could pick up where we left off?” And she literally replies, “Why not?” and their subsequent kiss “spoke eloquently of their mutual need,” and now they are “making vague plans for the added happiness that lay ahead.” I’m really struggling to find much honor in Nurse Irene Hunt.

The main crisis of the book arrives in the form of a poor, shifty couple who want a scar from a car crash removed from the woman’s face. They had seen Dr. Grant in Manhattan, who had not done the operation for unclear reasons, and now they want Ralph to do the job. He feels, though, that the couple is hiding something—intuitive Irene just thinks “it’s mostly because they’ve been through a good deal, and this operations means a great deal to them”—but Ralph, after discussing the case with Dr. Grant, agrees to do the surgery, and the woman dies on the table from a severe allergy to the anesthetic. Now the question is, who is to blame? Did the couple deliberately withhold the information of the allergy? Had Dr. Grant known and not told Ralph? Had Ralph been aware and gone ahead anyway?

The reveal at the end, I must say, is unsatisfying. The not-surprising fact that the couple knew and didn’t tell is acknowledged, but one of the two Drs. Grant is also in on the secret, and has their own personal and parenthetical misdoings to add to the mix. The problem with this book—actually, as per most books by Mr. Ross, there are a few—is that the massively incorrect moral assumption in the foundational scenario of Ralph and Max’s respective “guilt” for their social crimes. Ralph has indeed, as Dr. Grant states, committed a severe ethics breach in dating a patient he was actively treating, truly shocking to my eye and one that should absolutely result in dismissal from his job if not his profession, and why Irene and apparently the rest of the staff sees this as inconsequential is unfathomable. Furthermore, it is clear that Ralph was dating Irene and his unfortunate patient/victim at the same time, yet Irene waltzes lightly into Ralph’s arms and an engagement on her first day in Connecticut.

Max, meanwhile, seems to be guilty mostly of being too poor to take Irene to restaurants and of seeing a wealthy nurse—Irene makes much of the idea that Max  must be planning to marry her for her money and social connections, though he never says that’s the case and clearly prefers Irene; he is the first male character I know who cries when she dumps him. Dating or kissing multiple women, even when engaged, is an activity that men often engage in completely without comment in many VNRNs, so it’s unclear to me, when Max is openly sorry and repentant for an apparently minor crime, is he given the cruel boot without even a hearing? And frankly, I liked Max more than Ralph. Worse, Irene is a completely flat character. She demonstrates little charisma, personality, wit or intelligence—she can’t even see the truth of the unfortunate couple—so part from her (of course) pretty face, she ahs nothing to offer her boyfriends or, more importantly, the reader.  So this is one of the dreaded C-grade novels—not great but not so laughingly bad to be entertaining in a different way. This story would need a substantial makeover from an editor’s sharp scalpel to make it at all worth looking at, so I suggest you just enjoy the Alan Kass cover illustration and move on to something with more character.

Nurse in London

By Jane Converse 
(pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1970
Cover illustration by Bob Abbett 

“I want you, Luv,” said Lee Watson. He was the star of The Tree of Life, the top rock group in England and America, and he lay in a hospital bed, victim of a crippling motorcycle accident. In pain and despair he had clung to Nurse Holly Brooks. Now, he was going back to London to resume his career. “I love you, Holly,” he told her. “Come with me.” And Holly came because he needed her … stepping, unaware, into a frenzied, psychedelic landscape where The Tree of Life flourished, and she was a stranger.

GRADE: C 

REVIEW:
Lee Watson is the creative genius behind The Tree of Life, a rock group that “the young patients on our floor rate up along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” except that this music is “country baroque. Banjo meets harpsichord.” Whatever that is. He and his band have come to the U.S. on tour, and while out for a ride one day on his donorcycle, Lee missed the curves of Topanga Canyon and went over the edge, resulting in injuries that insisted on the amputation of both legs. Though “he hasn’t lost his talent,” the accident set him back on his heels, if you don’t mind the metaphor, and he’s become reliant on Nurse Holly Brooks for his emotional as well as physical recovery. 

Interestingly, we meet here an orthopedic doctor who is concerned that his patient will become addicted to opioids (a rare species in this day and age) and who works with Holly to wean Lee off the morphine he’s been getting. “I am not so certain, not certain, at all, that our young man is unfamiliar with analgesic drugs,” he tells Holly. “We cannot risk addiction.” His solution is to administer an IV placebo, but guess what?

Lee is a volatile individual who one minute is screaming in Italics, “There isn’t going to be any tomorrow! It’s over! Can’t you stop playing your idiotic games and see that it’s all over?” and the next minute he’s going on “like a gushing fountain” about a proposal that his group give a free concert in a London park. He’s a bit manic, if you ask me, but no one else seems to have noticed. In the first scene between Lee and Holly, he tells her—hot on the heels of him rejecting the pills and begging for “a shot”—that he loves her and wants her to come back to London with him. His orthopod agrees: “To prevent him from becoming addicted to a narcotic, to keep his morale high enough so that he does not refuse to follow the routine of his exercises; this appears to be within your power,” he tells her. “Your presence at this time could mean the difference between recovery and total collapse.” But no pressure, luv. And, of course, contrary to all teachings about addiction; only the addict is responsible for their addiction. On Holly’s side, she feels “the flattery of being singled out by the exceptionally attractive idol of thousands of girls,” and has a “breathless sensation” over being invited. So off she goes, and her attitude about being able to save Lee does not bode well for either of them.

Dr. Glenn Raymond is the doctor who is taking over in England, and he quickly turns mean when Lee shouts for her in the middle of a press conference, “C’mon over and give us a kiss, pet. Give these ink-stained vultures something to write about.” Nonetheless, as Dr. Raymond continues to be “blunt, unsympathetic,” “smug and unpleasant,” Holly decides that she is falling in love with “this dictatorial, waspish man,” because nothing turns a woman on more than a man who is an asshole. Dr. Raymond suspects that Lee is on drugs, given his “mercurial” “manic-depressive” presentation. Furthermore, Lee won’t let anyone see his arms, and Glenn and Holly decide that Lee is “hooked on morphine,” provided to him by one of the groupies. They discuss getting him into drug rehab, but Holly thinks Lee will not cooperate. She wants to wait until after the big concert: “You can’t imagine what it means to him … a chance to prove that he isn’t a useless, unwanted cripple.”

The doctor stomps off, and Holly paradoxically decides that “whatever was done to save Lee had to be done quickly, and it had to be done, Holly decided, by herself alone.” She’s worried that it would be “an unforgiveable breach of ethics” because she would be “proceeding contrary to his orders,” but “all heroic acts were acts of defiance, were they not?” Lee’s monstrous egotism has apparently rubbed off on her. So she gets into a fistfight with the groupie who is dropping off the drugs. Lee’s manager stops the fight and throws out the groupie, and then a hellish night in which Lee suffers withdrawal ensues.

The next morning she summons Dr. Raymond. If Lee is not cured of his addiction that night, Holly recovers from her “arrogant conceit.” Dr. Raymond arranges to have Lee moved to rehab, but before he can accomplish this, Lee flies the coop. They tried to make him go to rehab, but he said no, no, no! He’s got to finish preparing for his big concert, see, and after that’s over, he’ll go, pinkie promise! Dr. Raymond comes over to yell at Holly some more, but after he’s done, and after he’s learned that Holly is not engaged to Lee, he warms up considerably and tells her that he’s in love with her. After some smooching, they decide to get married, because their one date and his subsequent horrible behavior have told her she needs to spend the rest of her life with him.

The concert goes off, and during the last number, Lee wheels himself offstage before the music has concluded. Holly has an ominous feeling and rushes after Lee, only to find that he’s shot himself dead in his dressing room. It’s soon revealed that Lee has left his entire substantial fortune to Holly, and Dr. Raymond trots out his Mr. Hyde personality again, accusing her of having pretended love for Lee to engaged and win his fortune. She dashes off to the airport, but it’s taking her so long to get a ticket that Lee’s manager, Bart, catches up with her. “You’re as bad as Lee, thinking you can run away from yourself!” he says, adding that Dr. Raymond had immediately realized, after hanging up on Holly, that he’d made a huge mistake, and had been trying to track her down ever since.

With a bit of time for backstory before the doctor catches up with them, Bart tells Holly that when he made his will, Lee had had to ask what Holly’s last name was, and mentions that Lee had been married twice before, the first time to an honest woman who’d had a son with him, and who had “kept hoping Lee would come around to see the boy someday. Fall in love with ’er again, if she didn’t annoy him.” Holly tells Bart that it’s was she and his Los Angeles doctor who had made an addict of Lee, but Bart shrugs that off, telling her that Lee had been high on speed at the time of his accident, and that his addiction was inevitable. By now the doc has found a parking spot and rushed into Heathrow to give her a kiss. Immediately she starts to plan “spending the rest of your life in a foreign land. Yet wouldn’t she be willing to live anywhere, for the remainder of her days, if she could be at Glenn’s side?” The terrible problem of her estate she decides to entrust to Bart to manage for her, never mind about helping out Lee’s good-hearted first wife or son, and they head off to get a wedding license and struggle with the burden of being millionaires. Poor kids.

Author Adele Maritano can crank out plenty of great sentences, but here she hasn’t given us anything for the Best Quotes section, and she’s lousy with plots, which is a tragedy for her and for us. Here she writes of addiction as if the attitude that the addict is helpless in the face of drugs is a new one; of course, in 1970 it may well have been, so we can’t blame her for that. But it’s tiresome to the more modern sensibility, especially when a professional like Holly is not with the program and falls into all the typical traps about her responsibility for Lee’s addiction or sobriety. It’s also dated in how it treats the musical genius of Lee; we are told that his brilliance endows him with “the superiority that permitted him to behave like a tyrant and get away with it.” Again, it’s not easy to swallow that perspective 50 years on or watch him abuse people who revere him. Here we have another of Maritano’s many mediocre works that offer little beyond a flashback to another time, which of itself is not really enough reason to pick up this book. There are other, better VNRNs that will take you to London (see An American Nurse in London, not to mention many of the Britain-based Harlequin nurse novels), so I advise you to turn in your ticket and catch a different flight.

Night Call

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1961
Cover illustration by Robert Abbett

To Nurse Lyn Jennings, hurrying through Carter Memorial’s cool white corridors, emergencies were part of the life she had chosen—the challenging, exciting world of a hospital at night:
—in the operating room, a valiant struggle to stem a sudden hemorrhage—
—in 212, a lonely, crying child, afraid to go to sleep without its mother—
—in the driveway, an ambulance shrieking to a halt after a race with death, bearing the victims of a highway collision—
—in the darkened supply room, storage place for drugs and narcotics, a mysterious figure moving toward a cabinet,
no longer able to resist temptation.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“There’s nothing like having a baby to reveal a woman as she truly is.”

“As a surgeon he was a good butcher.”

“I wish you two were married. When a man is in trouble he needs a woman.”

“Her superbly brassièred bosom heaved a sympathetic sigh.”
 
REVIEW:
Lyn Jennings works the night shift at Carter Memorial in Carter, Ohio, with surgeons Dr. Arthur, the assistant chief of staff, and Dr. Seymour, the chief of staff. In the opening pages, a local alcoholic attorney and bastard hits another car and “finally” kills someone. Brought to the hospital with a major hemorrhage, he dies on the table in the OR when the surgery appeared to be finished—but then a new bleeder mysteriously opens up and the surgeons, Dr. Seymour and Lyn’s boyfriend, Tim Neil, are unable to stop it.

Lab tech and hospital gossip Nat Willis thinks one of the surgeons made a slip with the scalpel. The attorney had it coming, everyone agrees, but the attorney’s wife sues the hospital over his death, and a major scandal erupts. The hospital itself, according to Lyn’s astute perception, seems “tossed in the troubled wake” of the crisis, “filled with a plaguing unease, a dysphoria that touched even the sickest patient.” The building has so many feelings this book almost counts as a gothic novel.

No one who was at the table is talking, but the gossip around the hospital—and the town—is that it was junior surgeon Tim’s fault. It seems some people in town—like the manager of the local high-end department store—have information that clearly comes from inside the hospital, like that the cause of death was a severed inferior epigastric artery. “He doesn’t know his inferior epigastric artery from his astragalus,” says another nurse in an obscure reference to the ankle. Who’s spilling the beans?

Lyn is frantic with worry about what this will do to Tim’s reputation, and then, to make it worse, Tim is removed from OR duties. Tim himself has nothing to say about this, and indeed in the two or three dates we observe between the couple in the entire book, he says little at all, mostly just lying on the grassy bank of a stream and watching the clouds while Lyn respectfully observes him and his silence. What exactly she is attracted to remains a mystery, but I guess there’s someone out there for everyone.

Then Lyn is strangled by someone walking with a staggering gait that she almost recognizes—who could it be? Narcotics are missing from the hospital, it is eventually revealed, and slowly her suspicions turn, no matter how reluctantly, to Tim—it would explain the slip in the OR!

This book gives us a lot of questions—Lyn is strangled by someone with “strong efficient hands that had strangled people before,” who is spilling the hospital’s secrets around town? Why wasn’t Dr. Seymour’s wife (his second) not home in the middle of the night?—and few of them actually get answered. It’s shades of Nurse Kathy, though perhaps not as extreme. Confusion also stems from trying to keep track of the 66 characters that populate this book; a dramatis personae would have been helpful. I did have to wonder what Adeline was thinking in creating this extensive cast. It might be more realistic, but did she really think it would be helpful to her book? At 190 pages, it’s a bit over-long, since there’s not all that much to the plot, and the extra pages seem to further only the hand-wringing, angst, and unanswered questions, which it could have done with less of. It’s not a bad book, but it really didn’t deserve this magnificent cover.

Undercover Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1972
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Nurse Gail Arnold was young and beautiful and happy. Her work at the Narcotics Rehabilitation Center was interesting and rewarding. And her silent worship of handsome Dr. Bruce Cranston filled her heart with hopeful dreams. But her serene existence was in for a startling change. An unknown young woman, viciously beaten and near death from an overdose of heroin, was brought to the hospital. Gail, assigned to the case, now found herself working in heart-quickening closeness with the man she loved. Then menace marred the picture. For the new patient harbored a tormenting secret that was to spell deadly danger for Gail. It would lead her, innocent and unsuspecting, into the nightmare world of narcotics traffic where not only her dreams of love but also her very life would be threatened!

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTE:
“It’s hard to kiss you when you’re moving your lips.”

REVIEW:
Just because a book is fluff doesn’t mean it has to be a complete waste of time. If the author cared about it, thought about it, and worked on it, it can be an interesting, amusing story. This, alas, is not what happened with Undercover Nurse. This book feels tossed off and mechanical, and even the great writing of some earlier Jane Converse novels (e.g. Surf Safari Nurse, Backstage Nurse) is totally lacking. You can zip through it with less pain than with some VNRNs, but that’s hardly a worthwhile motive to pick up this or any other book.

Gail Arnold works at the Bayou Narcotics Rehabilitation Clinic in New Orleans with Dr. Bruce Cranston, who she has loved from afar for quite some time. The fact that they work with drug addicts gives the book a rare flash of originality, though the constant lectures about how misunderstood drug addicts are is a serious, well, downer. Bruce and Gail get a case one night, just as Bruce has asked Gail out to dinner at Antoine’s, which totally wrecks those plans. Stella De Shiel is overdosing on heroin and has been beaten to within an inch of her life. The pair brings her back from the brink of death (curiously, they give her Dilaudid, a derivative of morphine, to help her kick her narcotics habit), and she starts spinning wild, hysterical tales about how the clinic’s main benefactor, Paul Mascon, is actually running a narcotics ring and is trying to kill her because she worked for a competing syndicate. Yeah, right, thinks our heroine.

A “friend of the family” drops in to see Stella, and doesn’t seem overly upset that she is not having visitors. He starts chatting up Gail, and in about three minutes flat she lets drop that they suspect foul play with Stella’s injuries, Stella has named Paul Mascon as the ringleader of a drug syndicate, the police have not yet been notified, and Stella was moved to a new room—that would be Room 109—last night. Would you be surprised if I were to tell you that Stella turns up dead a few days later, murdered with a heroin overdose?

That night two “policemen” show up in Gail’s apartment and drive her out to some house in the bayou to meet the “chief”—and would it shock you to learn that the “chief” is really Paul Mascon himself, and that he orders the two thugs—they’re not really policemen after all!—to kill Gail? Honestly, Gail is dumber than two sticks. “This couldn’t be happening! They were going to kill her! In a few minutes she would be dead, and there was nothing she could say, nothing she could do to save herself!” (And the italics are the author’s, I’m sorry to say.) Well, it turns out she can save herself, but that can’t come as much as a surprise, either.

Maybe drug clinics were new and interesting in 1972, and maybe reading about heroin addiction was really exciting in those days. But even if that’s the case, I don’t think that could make this a better book. It takes more than some slang expressions (“shooting junk,” “joy-popping,” “bummer LSD trip”) and a couple of patients having seizures to make for a good read. The “easy to see large type” doesn’t really help matters, making the book seem even more juvenile. It’s not painful, but that’s really the best I can say for this book.

Nurse on Trial

By Jane Converse
(pseud. of Adele Kay Maritano), ©1966

Jennifer Mellin, R.N., is on trial—before the world, before her own conscience. For she was the last person to see her mother, ex-movie star Angela Di Marco, alive. Exhausted by caring for her hypochondriac mother, her professional senses numbed by a never-ceasing tirade of hysterical demands, had Jennie in fact given Angela the wrong pills from the vast array of bottles in the medicine cabinet? Was Angela’s death—as her wardrobe mistress, Bessie Wykoff, hinted maliciously—the result of foul play?

GRADE: B-

REVIEW:
I was looking forward to my next Jane Converse title after the fabulous Surf Safari Nurse, but Nurse on Trial was a bit of a letdown. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t have the humor or even the fine writing of its sister. They were both written the same year, so maybe Jane shot the wad on the Safari and coasted through the Trial.

Jennifer Mellin is the daughter of a famous faded movie star, Angela Di Marco, who is a Garbo and a Joan Crawford all rolled into one glorious mess. Jennifer is obliged to leave the side of her doctor fiancé to nurse her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in years, because she is told that Mommie Dearest is on her deathbed. The scenario is compelling: “Unaccountably breathless Jennifer started toward the bed. It was a monstrously large round affair, mounted on a circular dais, and surrounded by sheer white curtains that were affixed to a curved track in the ceiling. The curtains were drawn back now to reveal Angela propped up against at least a dozen pillows and covered by a custom-made gold-threaded quilt of white satin. Two Siamese cats dozed at the foot of the bed. She wore a black marabou bed jacket over a low-cut nightgown of powder blue lace … The red-gold hair was brushed into a high Grecian halo on top of her head, an arrangement that brought her pale, drawn features into startling focus.”

After this introduction, we go round and round on the Hollywood starlet carousel: green pills, pink pills, smeared mascara, scrapbooks and clippings at 3:30 a.m., cigarettes, broken mirrors, black velvet negligees, bourbon and peppermints. The usual manipulations: “I wanted to spare you, Jennie. Sometimes I’m in such terrible pain, I don’t know what I’m doing.” “Let me die in peace!” “You haven’t noticed that I’m wearing the Dior. Careful, Jennie! You’ll muss me up!” “Lies, lies, lies! Is this why you came here? To slander me?” “Get me something for my nerves …”

For 76 pages the story staggers drunkenly along on its spike-heeled gold kid mules. We know that Angela is doomed—the back cover tells us so—but it isn’t until page 112 that she actually kicks off. There is no jury trial at all, as Angela’s doctor decides she died of cirrhosis. (Curiously, she has left-sided pain—the liver is on the right—and no jaundice, but then, Angela’s not much of a nurse: As much as she despises her mother’s self-medication, she always caves and gives her more pills.) Perhaps her trial is more metaphoric than legal, but she doesn’t acquit herself very admirably, inexplicably helpless to save herself from the manipulation or her mother from disease, organic or addictive.

The burning question, as condensed on the back cover, is whether Jennie poisoned her mother: “I don’t remember what I gave my mother last night. … Maybe I killed her!” But with just 16 pages between Angela’s death and the end of the book, we are not left to wonder for very long. The premise of the book is good, if a little hackneyed, but after it sets up, it doesn’t know what to do with itself. It can barely be called a romance, as Jennie is happily engaged from the opening chapter, and there is never any tension about that relationship. I’ve read books that are a lot worse, but I also know that Jane can do a lot better.