By Rose Dana
(pseud.
William E. Daniel Ross), ©1969
Nurse Carol Holly
accepted her summer assignment to the Mic-Mac lodge with joy. It seemed full of
promise. Her patient was wealthy Arthur Kulas, a stroke victim, a diabetic, but
a fascinating art collector and lecturer still active in his career. And the
Canadian resort offered the finest in entertainment and sports. Only Walter
Pitt, the carefree young man who had pursued her from Boston, and Dr. Bill
Shaw, the Mic-Mac’s resident physician, presented a problem; she liked both
more than she cared to admit. Then Carol’s lightheartedness came to an abrupt
end. Her patient was beaten, his room burglarized. By whom? By one or more of
the too-fashionable guests at the lodge? But why? Harried by the mystery, Carol
still dedicated herself to her nurse’s duties—until the criminals struck
violently again, this time at her!
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“Let’s admit, in spite of all the colleges, Boston is not
the fun spot of the world for a single girl.”
“My last nurse had an unfortunate addiction to ginger ale.
It was one of her more distressing aspects.”
“I hope you’re not given to making touching philosophic
speeches like that. I couldn’t bear it.”
“Bart adores bullying me, and I find it so flattering.”
“Everybody acts idiotic at one time or another, but the
people I have to deal with seem to make a career of it.”
“If Gabriel was blowing his horn and walls were tumbling all
around us, you’d be running after me with a medicine bottle.”
“You are at your best in tennis clothes.”
“Don’t worry your pretty bullet-singed head.”
REVIEW:
This being a book by Dan Ross, you know it won’t be long
before we meet a woman who will be referred to as “the dark girl” again and
again. Enter Mimi Gamal, a Lebanese woman staying at the hotel in St. Andrews,
New Brunswick, where stroke victim Arthur Kulas has gone to recuperate. “The
name Gamal suggests she could be Turkish,” Arthur explains to Nurse Carol
Holly, who he’s dragged along to tend to him on his trip. “But she’s too
beautiful for a Turkish woman. More apt to be of mixed blood. They are always
the loveliest women.”
In addition to being a racist, Arthur is a gloriously cranky
Back Bay Bostonian (Beacon Street, to be precise), a former State Department envoy
to Egypt, who puts on lectures about the Middle East illustrated with valuable
exhibits from his personal art collection. He’s going to Canada to recover from
the stroke that he’s showing no signs of; it’s his diabetes that gives him
trouble, so Carol is there to administer insulin shots twice a day and urge him
to eat on schedule. But that’s about the job entails, so this leaves her plenty
of time to play tennis with various men at the resort.
One of her would-be boyfriends is Walter Pitt, a man she has
encountered on the street outside Kulas’ house before they departed for Canada.
He stops her with the story that he’s found a lost purse, but when she tells
him it’s not hers, he chases her down the street for several blocks, insisting
that he’s not “some sort of crazy person”—his persistence clearly proving
otherwise—adding that her reluctance to engage in conversation with a stranger
marks her as “unreasonable and Victorian,” saying, “Here we live in a swinging
age, and you’re acting this way!” Naturally, when she meets him in Canada, she
tells him, “I’m glad to see you again,” and takes him up on a game of tennis
after he easily convinces her that his being there is a complete coincidence. Later
she snubs him after he dances with Mimi Gamal, and her raging jealousy of Mimi keeps
her sparring with him for the rest of the book, she all the long fervently
insisting that she is not at all jealous! I hope for her sake that no one ever
tries to sell this poor dope a bridge.
Her other beau is the local doctor, Bill Shaw. “You seem to
attract young men,” Arthur notes drily. “I trust you’re not going to allow a
biological urge to get you into trouble.” Given her gullibility, I don’t have
much confidence in Carol’s ability to say no. Indeed, Bill soon convinces her
to spend her afternoons at the understaffed hospital, since they need her help
so much more than Arthur does. Curiously, though, for an overworked medico Bill
has plenty of time for tennis with Carol. Bill doesn’t impress much as a doctor
when he’s actually working, either; he treats a man for a mild heart attack,
and decides, “But we won’t tell him that. No need to scare him.” Later, tending
to an accident victim whose leg is clearly broken in several places and bleeding
heavily, he chooses to first repair the facial lacerations before determining
if the major arteries in the leg have been severed. If the kid bleeds out, at
least he’ll look good in his coffin.
A number of people in the hotel profess a deep interest in
Arthur’s artifacts, including Mimi, the hotel’s orchestra’s bass player and his
wife, tourists Captain Bart and his wife Ellen Hooper, and sea Captain Tim
Mullaney—who offers Holly a ride on the street which she accepts because she
didn’t want “to give the impression she considered herself above riding in a
truck.” It doesn’t take a genius to feel suspicious of their salivating enthusiasm
for the valuables, but Carol is not the brightest bulb on the tree, so she
drops what should be confidential information—particularly after an attempted
burglary—at the slightest hint, including the fact that Arthur has brought a
lot of his valuables with him on the trip. Even when she starts to have “the
scary feeling that behind all this casual talk there was a pattern, an evil
pattern,” she still tells them that the artifacts are kept in locked bags in
the hotel suite but that Arthur will probably be taking them out to sort
through them at some point. She’ll be lucky not to be charged as an accessory
to the burglary that anyone but Carol can see coming a mile away.
Indeed, at the halfway point in the book, Arthur wakes up to
find he has been robbed again, but only items of little value are taken. Carol
wastes no time in publicizing this fact, along with the information that the
cases just have light locks on them. It’s not surprising, then, that Arthur and
Carol are soon held captive by four of the obvious suspects, who are after a
treasure map they have assumed that Arthur not only owns—which he has already
plausibly denied in private to Carol—but brought with him to Canada. The pair is
rescued by Walter and Captain Tim, and the would-be crooks escape. Then two more
invite Carol and Arthur on a cruise piloted by Captain Tim, with Walter
crashing the party at the last minute. Miles out at sea, one of the party pulls
a gun and insists that Arthur “hand over” the treasure map—now the assumption
is not only that he brought the map on vacation but that he carries it with him
everywhere he goes.
Suddenly the plot takes on the velocity of a tornado: In
four paragraphs the criminals have been apprehended and investigated, and
Arthur and Carol have checked out of the hotel. Now all that remains is for the
treasure map to be found and Carol to decide who to marry. Four pages later
that has been accomplished, too, and with the nauseating final sentence, we can
be shut of this stupid book.
If there is one thing I cannot stand, it’s a stupid heroine.
The only enjoyable feature of this book is the witticisms that Arthur tosses
off with marvelous frequency, but unless you have the ability to enjoy a dumb
book, it may not be enough to compensate for an insultingly flawed story line and
a moronic main character.
