Everglades Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis ©1964

Celia Chalmers was used to conquering men. And Jennie saw the look in her eyes when she met Johnnie Ottwell. It made her wonder if she had been foolish to postpone her marriage to Johnnie. He was a struggling schoolteacher. And she had vowed to help him save for their future. But Celia Chalmers knew how to use her beauty as a weapon to get what she wanted. And now she wanted the man who belonged to Nurse Jennie.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Who was she, Jennie Cosgrove, with her cherished cap and pin still a beautiful novelty, to object to any orders given her by one of those lordly beings, a doctor?”

“I’m a heel to wish that you were as rich as you are beautiful. I’d do the caveman bit—throw you over my shoulder and lug you off screaming!”

“I’d rather be an irritant to a girl than somebody she just looks at and forgets.”

“I do declare, I cannot get over the fool things city folks will do when they are in the Glades, knowing as they must that the place swarms with poisonous snakes and alligators and mean-natured beasts. They just go blundering around as if they were mowing the lawn in their own back yard.”

“When you are in love you will know that one man, and one man alone, spells the fulfillment of all your dreams, hopes and aspirations.”

“Scruples? I don’t burden myself with anything so silly.”

REVIEW:
Author Peggy Gaddis must have been in a crabby mood in the four hours it took her to churn out this throwaway novel: Characters have the inexplicable habit of flying off the handle at the slightest provocation. Even Gaddis’ usually saintly mother character here gets all peevish when she is offered money for some jam she presents to a guest, snapping sharply at the hapless young woman and making her “flushed and uncomfortable.” The next second Mom “suddenly smiled a warm, friendly smile that wiped out any hint of the momentary resentment she had felt. ‘And I certainly hope you’re going to be a friend of mine and that you will come out again.’” No thanks!

Just like her mother, Nurse Jennie Cosgrove is also prone to being cold and snippy, such as to the rich patient’s handsome chauffeur, a seemingly friendly man who offers to take her to dinner, or to the patient’s daughter, who offers to drive her home and innocently remarks that Jennie’s family of eight might be a bit much taken en masse: “Put down that gun, pal!” Celia Chalmers drawls when Jennie comes at her all ablaze. But when Jennie is in the arms of her intended, Johnnie Ottwell, you’ll definitely need a slug of Pepto-Bismol to tame that tummy upset from too much sugar: “He and Jennie were looking at each other as though they would never tire of it,” and then he “drew Jennie close, entirely oblivious to the others, and kissed her, a long, ardent, satisfying kiss ... Jennie was starry-eyed when she got into the car.”

The lovestruck pair are not planning on getting married until after Johnnie finishes his PhD, which appears to be years in the future, since he works full-time as a teacher, and then there’s the little snag of how they will live together: She works in town, and his job, which he has no intention of ever giving up, keeps him in the heartest heart of the Everglades. You do have to wonder why he’s bothering with the PhD at all, actually.

The problem arises when Celia meets Johnnie and is instantly smitten with the heartthrob. Oblivious Jennie suggests that he take Celia on a tour of the Everglades in his “swamp buggy,” and while they are out, Celia’s conversation—apparently intended to win Johnny over—only proves that the two are completely unsuitable for each other. Johnny explains that he teaches English as a second language to the children of migrant Mexican farm workers, and his attitude is actually quite enlightened for the times: “They must be educated so that eventually they can climb above their parents’ present place in the world and be something more than migrant farm workers. Education is the only answer to the problem of the migrant farm worker, not only here in the Glades but all over the country.” “Sounds pretty dull,” cracks vixen Celia. She digs her hole deeper when she adds, “It seems a shame for a man like you to be wasted on a job like this.” Given this triumphant beginning, it is only natural that Celia should think Johnnie is “everything any same girl could possibly hope to find in the man she wants to snag for herself.” It must be his hot bod; I cannot otherwise explain it. But needless to say, Johnnie is not overly impressed.

Back at the ranch, in a remarkable conversation Celia tells Jennie that since she and Johnnie have not yet set a wedding date, “it looks to me very much as though Johnny were available to any girl who really meant to have him!” and tells Jennie that she plans to pursue Johnny. “Then I am afraid if that is what you want, you will probably win,” Jennie answers. “You are a novelty, new, beautiful, and you can probably sweep him off his feet without have to trying!” It’s a novel attitude about your relationship with your fiancé, I’ll say that much.

To put the deal across, Celia, perhaps realizing she’s blown the interview, tells Johnnie that he should break up with Jennie so Jennie can hook up with Dr. Mark Foreman, a handsome young resident who is clearly smitten with her. It seems Jennie is dating Mark regularly, and frankly we do agree that Mark is the better choice—certainly the more typical pick for a VNRN—but in fact we barely see poor Mark again, except one memorable scene in which Jennie tries to set up Mark with Celia and, when he asks her “just why you are shoving me off on Celia Chalmers,” she “stared at him, completely outraged,” and shrieks, “You must be out of your mind. What possible interest could I have in trying to shove you off on Celia?” when, of course, it’s clear that had been her exact intention, to try to divert Celia away from Johnnie and, at the same time, Mark away from herself.

The book takes a bizarre detour through the life of Celia, who has been adopted by a couple at the man’s request, and the “mother” has never cared for Celia at all. The marriage is not a happy one, and the pair snipe and spar through most of their scenes, but in the end, the husband, who has been on the brink of divorce the entire story, decides he’s going to stay with the horrible woman. Furthermore, he agrees to a lopsided and baffling trade: She will give up her current lover, and he will pack Celia off to college, essentially kicking out of the house for good the one person who dearly loves him. Another strange side story is the friendship of two older women who are patients of Jennie’s, one of whom is a pinched, angry woman who does not deserve the kindness of her wealthy and generous hospital roommate.

The story comes to an abrupt end when Jennie is offered a job in the Everglades at a clinic that caters to the local Seminole population—the doctor is in search of a nurse who is known to the Indians so they will learn to trust him—which means she will be living near Johnnie and they can get married. But there’s one hitch: Upon hearing of this turn of events, Johnnie snaps, “I will not be supported by my wife.” This does not mean that Jennie can’t have a job, but rather that her income will be set aside to pay for their children’s college educations.  Once this little hiccup in their plans is smoothed over, “all about them the jungle seemed to stir and whisper as though the very palms themselves and the unseen animals that looked in the undergrowth were joining in the song that was filling both their hearts.” Time for another slug of antacid.

Peggy Gaddis can write some good books, but this is not one; it’s a perfunctory story that lurches around like drunks in a van. The characters are a mercurial, moody, disturbed lot, not one of them worth the ink. The most interesting part of the book is its approach to teaching English as a second language and education for migrant children, and that is sadly brief. It offers a mixed bag toward the Indians; on one hand, Celia—honest to God—greets an Indian shopkeeper by saying “How!” and “lifted her hand in what she had long ago been taught was the proper greeting to an Indian.” But the shopkeeper just snickers and answers, “Haven’t you heard? We all speak English now.” Whenever we meet Indians in the book, they are seen through Celia’s bigoted eyes (“Celia stared at them, and suddenly realized that they were Indians!”), even if the Indian characters do have the last laugh, and “turned away as though he had found her unworthy of his scrutiny.” So it’s another donation for the American Indian College Fund, and another book I can’t recommend, though you might want to check out a Peggy Gaddis novel that might vaguely pass for a sequel, County Nurse—you really can’t beat a monster running loose in the swamp!

Nurse Stacey Comes Aboard

By Rona Randall, ©1958

Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

Janet Stacey could not believe it when Peter Fuller broke their engagement. He told her that it would be unfair of him with so little income to ruin her chances for a “successful” marriage. Only a girl as much in love as Janet could have failed to read between the lines of such an excuse. As it was, she asked her uncle, owner of a shipping line, to employ her as assistant nurse on the luxury liner Regina, on which Peter was taking a business trip to New York. She thought that if she saw him every day she would be bound to win him back. In this innocent hope she reckoned not only without Peter himself, but without the ship’s doctor, Blane Hartley, who despised all girls in general, and Janet, the privileged niece of the shipowner, in particular.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“The best cure for sea-sickness is champagne.”

“No man who wanted to get on in the world could afford pride, these days. Not if he hoped to afford a wife, too.”

“When I was young I could spend a couple of hours choosing between only two frocks!”

“How one man could hope to stand up against two women Maude couldn’t imagine!”

“I’m off to get that dress material. We could cut it out on the surgery table this afternoon. How about it?”

“I’m always rude myself, and enjoy it, so of course I must excuse the fault in others!”

“Every woman is hurt, at some time or another. It’s better for them to experience it when young. They grow into better women because of it.”

REVIEW:
When we first meet Janet Stacey, she is being jilted by ne’er-do-well Peter Fuller, who says that he can’t marry her because he cannot support her in the lifestyle to which she has been accustomed. And also because her father had let his very considerable life insurance policy lapse, “most unfairly,” Peter grouses. Valiantly attempting to change his mind, she reminds him that she can get a job as a nurse. “Nursing for amusement is one thing,” he says, and so, right there on the third page, we’d like to close the door in Peter’s face. Unfortunately, Janet Stacey is not as smart as we are. “He was all she wanted in life and nothing would ever make her stop loving him,” and though we know she will be proven wrong in the end, unfortunately it’s going to be a long and somewhat excruciating journey.

Stacey’s rich Uncle Jim has a fondness for Janet and can see through Peter, realizing that he’s dumped Janet when “he’d learned that her father’s aura of wealth had been but a façade, that she was penniless, that she wasn’t such a catch as he believed when he met her.” So when Janet asks Uncle Jim to give her a job as a nurse on the same ship on which Peter is sailing to New York on business, with the aim of proving to him that she can too hold a job, he agrees to the scheme, thinking that Peter won’t be able to resist being the adventurer he is and that Janet will finally see his true colors.

Unfortunately, the doctor on board the ship, Dr. Blane Hartley, isn’t impressed with Janet at all, because he thinks she’s a rich girl playing at a job, and “a good-time girl out for what she can get.” During their first meeting, “they looked at one another, antagonism leaping between them like an invisible current. … It was open warfare between them,” and they’re snarling insults back and forth across the surgery. Naturally we know—so smart we are!—how that is going to turn out. Dr. Blane, it seems, “was trying to escape from some emotional problem, or a disappointment which went deep—or maybe only from himself.” So many mysteries! So many tropes!

After her verbal fisticuffs with Dr. Hartley, Janet sets about proving herself, and you will not be surprised to find that she is an excellent nurse, though the only job she ever really had was caring for her dying father. Along the way she takes the nasty rich Lady Elvira Travitt in hand, which turns out to be not too difficult because Lady Travitt, too, has a mushy center: “The first thing Janet noticed about her was the guarded expression of her eyes, as if she determined to allow no one a glimpse of her heart, and the second thing was the tightly maintained line of her mouth, as if she were afraid that if permitted to relax it would betray her. What would it do—droop pathetically? Reveal a sadness she was too proud to acknowledge?” Before long the old dragon has asked her to high tea in the first-class lounge and is plotting out her life.

There’s a beautiful young woman named Patsy Davis, whose luxurious wardrobe is described in such great detail that it isn’t long before we suspect something is amiss. Sure enough, Lady Travitt soon learns from a newspaper article that Patsy is a typist who won a beauty contest—”the only competitor actually holding the perfect measurements”—with a $2,500 prize, and now she’s blowing the wad on a round-trip ticket and one taste of the rich life. Her act quickly lures in playboy Peter, who is rushing her off her feet—and soon she’s in love with him, valiantly so, because she doesn’t believe she will ever see him again after the voyage is over, because she is no dope and can see Peter for exactly what he was—“the wrong man, of course. She knew that with the certainty and wisdom acquired in a tough school. Life had taught Patsy Davis to recognize people for what they were worth, for their character and integrity. But somewhere, somehow, Peter’s character had wavered; his sense of values had gone awry. But it didn’t make her love him any less.”

And of course it isn’t long before the hardened MD starts to bend. Though he is nothing but rude and insulting, Janet stands up to him and earns his respect: “She had sprit, at least, if nothing else. She stood up to him without insolence, answered without impertinence, and displayed a dignified sort of courage which he was forced to admire.” We learn that Blane had been engaged to Lady Travitt’s daughter Carol, who had dumped him for a “rich American—twenty years her senior and father of a grown-up family by the time she became his third, and youngest, wife,” because he was an “impresario” and had been impressed with the talent of the ambitious young woman. She’s “a star in her own right now, and didn’t need Wilmot any more,” and is getting a divorce—and she wants Blane back.

Lady Travitt turns out to be a bit Machiavellian, if not kind, when she tells Dr. Hartley that they should team up, keeping Patsy’s secret and “letting Janet find out for herself, slowly and surely, that the man she loves simply isn’t worth loving! That way, at least, her pride will be preserved. You’re not going to get the best work out of your nurse if her heart is broken.” Even more scheming is her recognition that Dr. Hartley is interested in Nurse Stacey. “She saw a lot—and she saw it clearly. To fall in love with someone else, to forget Carol completely, would be Blane’s salvation.”

So when he catches Janet sitting at his desk one evening—“she had wanted to touch his paper, sit in his chair, feel his pen between her fingers”—yes, just his pen – he swoops her up in an irresistible embrace. She tries to slap him, but he grabs her arm and pulls her toward him “until he pinioned her body close to him again. ‘You can’t escape, Nurse, so you can give up the struggle! Be still, you little fool, while I kiss you again.’” Though initially sobbing, naturally in the end she loves it, and “lay quietly in his arms,” until she tears herself loose and runs off to her room. Now there are pages of internal struggle—why, if she loves Peter, did she love being kissed by Bland? Why, if Bland hates her, did he kiss her?

The biggest problem with this book is that Janet is a complete dope. As she witnesses Peter’s first infatuation with Patsy, she nonetheless thinks, “Peter was absolutely trustworthy—she was sure of that. It didn’t matter to him that his fiancée was merely ship’s nurse, or that another girl was beautifully dressed and obviously moneyed, and that glance of his, which had seemed to observe every detail of Patsy’s appearance, had certainly held no hint of calculation.” Every letter of which is a lie. Even as she catches Peter and Patsy mooning at each other time and time again, she just thinks, “What if they were flirting a little? Her own affair with Peter was so different, elevated above all others. It was something much bigger.” Snap out of it, Janet! When the moment finally comes and Janet wonders, “just how stubbornly, and for how long, a girl could blind herself to the obvious,” we know the answer—125 dragging pages. And when Patsy unburdens herself to Janet, asking her if Peter will dump her when he finds out the truth about her, the scales fall from Janet’s eyes and she decides that she does not love Peter because she never saw him for who he really is. “She was disillusioned by his true character. She saw him as a different person, and one who no longer meant anything to her.” But guess who really is honorable, and who really does mean something to her!

The prose is fairly purple as well, with much hand-wringing and excruciating navel-gazing examinations of every possible angle of every interaction, offering moments when you have to reach for the Tums. But wrapped in all the lavender satin are some truly interesting characters, Lady Travitt and Patsy chiefly, and even Peter to some degree. It is surprisingly common that a writer will give all her skill to the supporting cast and leave the main characters flat and vapid. Janet is one such character, and Blane is just mercurial and moody, cut in the Heathcliff mold, without much real depth. So if there are some parts of this book that sparkle, they are sadly just not enough to make this book really worthwhile.

2020 VNRN Awards

Eight is great! And this is the eighth time we have put on our most splendid eveningwear and turned out en masse to recognize the most superlative vintage nurse romance novels we’ve met in these electronic pages this year. Here’s the fine print: Winners are chosen from the 45 VNRNs I read this past year, which were penned by 28 different authors. The Best and Worst Authors categories includes all the VNRNs reviewed for this blog (421 to date), but only authors with more than one review are included. It’s an interesting year for Peggy Gaddis and Arlene Hale, who have books on both the best and worst of the year lists. Kindly hold your applause until after all the winners have been announced!

Best Books:
1. Nurse Annette by Rebecca Marsh (pseud. William Neubauer)
2. Dental Nurse at Denley’s by Marjorie Lewty
3. Nurse Morgan’s Triumph by Rubie Saunders
4. Nurse Elliot’s Diary by Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton)
5. Settlement House Nurse by Jane Converse
6. A Nurse for Dr. Sterling by Ruth MacLeod
7. A Nurse Comes Home by Georgia Craig (pseud. Peggy Gaddis)
8. Nurse in Charge by Elizabeth Gilzean
9. Nurse Nicole’s Decision by Arlene Hale
10. Challenge to Nurse Honor by Pauline Ash

Worst Books:
1. Harbor Nurse by Arlene Fitzgerald
2. Peace Corps Nurse by George Sullivan
3. Jane Arden Head Nurse by Kathleen Harris (pseud. Adelaide Rowe)
4. Nurse April by Katherine McComb
5. Nurse of the Crossroads by Colleen Reece
6. Jane Arden, Surgery Nurse by Kathleen Harris
7. Nurse Angela by Peggy Gaddis
8. Lake Resort Nurse by Arlene Hale
9. Resident Nurse by Frances Dean Hancock (pseud. Jeanne Judson)

Best Covers:

Peace Corps Nurse

Nurse Nicole’s Decision

Lake Resort Nurse

Emergency Calling Nurse Mallon

The Doctor of Blue Valley

      

 

Best Authors:
Marguerite Mooers Marshall (3.9 average, 3 reviews)
Marjorie Lewty (3.9 average, 2 reviews)
Faith Baldwin (3.8 average, 4 reviews)
Olive Norton (3.7 average, 3 reviews)
Irene Swatridge (3.7 average, 2 reviews)

 

Worst Authors:
Patti Carr (1.5 average, 2 reviews)
Arlene Fitzgerald (1.6 average, 4 reviews)
Jeanne Bowman (1.7 average, 11 reviews)
Zillah McDonald (1.7 average, 3 reviews)
Anne Lorraine (1.7 average, 2 reviews)

Best Quotes:

“I’ve never seen a strange man in a bathrobe before!” Candy Stripers by Lee Wyndham

“I hope you’re not tearing off to deliver quads, darling. We’ve come for lunch.” Nurse Templar by Anne Weare

“I hike all the roads around here, and haven’t been kidnapped even once.” Nurse Kay by Virginia Roberts (pseud. Nell Marr Dean)

“On visiting the convicted man at the penitentiary a year later, he had found him gay.” Emergency Calling Nurse Mallon by Jeanne Bowman

“He was too anxious to get the cloak-and-dagger meeting under way to notice Donna’s new lounge suit.” Settlement House Nurse by Jane Converse

“She swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the lump of apprehension that clogged her esophagus.” Harbor Nurse by Arlene Fitzgerald

“I often stand on my head for a short time if I am exceptionally tired.” Jane Arden’s Home-Coming by Kathleen Harris

“I’ve seen a lot of girls wearing their hair like that. Usually they’re accompanied by men with beards.” Resident Nurse by Frances Dean Hancock (pseud. Jeanne Judson)

“Marjory learned some new words she doubted she’d ever use.” Emergency Calling Nurse Mallon by Jeanne Bowman

“You must be happy in your new job, watching the doc cut people up.” Jane Arden Surgery Nurse by Kathleen Harris

The Doctor of Blue Valley

By Frances Dean Hancock
(pseud. Jeanne Judson), ©1960

When Dr. Barbara Davies returned to Blue Valley to practice the profession she loved, she found two newcomers to the remote little town. Young Dr. Richard Blake, handsome and unmarried, who, for an unexplained reason had left a big city practice to open an office in Blue Valley. And wealthy young John Lowton, badly crippled by a terrible accident, who said Blue valley held happy childhood memories, that he had returned to hide his pain and helplessness from the world. One of these men found the way to Dr. Barbara’s heart. But she knew she must solve the riddle in his past if she were to find peace for the future.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Barbara always talked to children just as she would to adults, which was one reason they liked her. They liked it when she used words they didn’t understand, because words are such fascinating things and one can repeat a new one over and over until it has color and all sorts of mysterious meanings.”

“As a young girl, she had been active in the fight for women’s rights and she never seemed to realize that the battle was over and that all the parades and hunger strikes and imprisonments were now ancient history. Her fight against MEN went on.”

“It’s worry and boredom that make people sick and old—especially boredom.”

“You’re a very pretty girl, even if you are a doctor.”

“If you can persuade some of these people to have fewer babies and fewer hound dogs, I’ll appreciate it. They come out to meet you in packs—I mean, the hounds, not the babies—and they bay at me. They’re entirely too affectionate; they ruin my trousers.”

REVIEW:
Dr. Barbara Davies has returned home to Blue Valley, Tennessee, the small town where she grew up. “She knew that she could have done nothing else in view of Aunt Agnes’s encouragement and financial help,” because all rich spinster aunts are also very imperious. Here she finds another doctor in town, Richard Blake, who is doing fairly well for himself: “Dr. Blake was quite generally popular. The men liked him. He went hunting and fishing with them and had even bought a coon hound. The men might laugh a little at his Abercrombie and Fitch clothing and elaborate fishing gear, but he was a fairly good shot and could take his ‘likker’ straight and was an all-around good fellow even if he was a city man and a Northerner.” Immediately all the townsfolk pair him up as the future husband of Barbara, but it’s easy to see that’s just a red herring. Dr. Blake is fun to hang out with and he’s certainly cute and all, but he’s a bit of a lightweight, and he is condescending to his patients. “The way you get on with these backward people without losing your temper over their superstitions and their yarbs is wonderful,” he tells Barbara. “He was always frivolous, she thought. There was nothing that she could honestly criticize about his treatment of his patients, but he did it all as if it were some secondary occupation.”

The main hook of the story hangs on a young man, Lawrence Price, who is almost tossed in the front door of the clinic, which adjoins Aunt Agnes’s house where she lives, by a huge thug. Lawrence has been slashed in the face, and it requires Barbara’s skill to sew him back up, and this being the old days when folks needed weeks in the hospital to heal a paper cut, he is moved into the back bedroom for his convalescence. “He was, without question, a very good-looking boy, and she did wish that he was not a young thug. He didn’t look like one, but all the evidence she had pointed to his guilt.” But despite his being a hoodlum, out of concern that he will be attacked again, she and Agnes tell a little fib, that he is a cousin from out of town, but this proves a smidge inconvenient when Charles continues to hang around, aided and abetted by Agnes, who likes having a young person around to dote on, since Barbara is too busy working all the time for petting. Barbara’s office gal, Willi May Sayre, also takes a shine to Lawrence, and one minute she’s swooning with love, and the next she’s bursting into tears and running out of the room.

There’s this other man in town, John Lowton, who the town believes has been wounded by elephants, rendering him a cripple for life. He’s proud and reserved, but he immediately cottons to Barbara, and early on in their acquaintance he kisses her—but then takes it back: “I’m sorry. For a moment, I forgot that you’re a doctor—and that I’m a cripple,” he tells her. “It was dreadful that he should feel so humiliated simply because he walked with a crutch—as if that debarred him from casual kisses,” she thinks, and schemes to get him seen by her old mentor, the great orthopod Dr. James Gray.

All the men have mysteries, come to think of it—how John Lowton became crippled (a tree fell on him when he was “collecting” rare birds for the Smithsonian and a book he was writing), and the back stories of Lawrence and Dr. Blake, who it turns out has been accused of something in Chicago and fled to where his reputation couldn’t find him. Two of the mysteries are intertwined, of course—it turns out that Dr. Blake had been dating Lawrence’s sister, and on a date had argued with her, and she’d jumped out of the car and gotten hit by a truck and killed. Lawrence had gone to Dr. Blake’s office with a gun, and Dr. Blake had slashed him with a scalpel, and Dr. Blake’s father had been visiting and had grabbed Lawrence and dumped him at Barbara’s office. Wounded in the act of attempted murder, Lawrence had kept his mouth shut about the incident lest he be arrested. But now, scared straight after another unsuccessful attempt on Dr. Blake’s life in which he shoots Dr. Blake in the shoulder and gets away scot free when Dr. Blake flees town again, he is ready to marry Willi Mae and move back to Chicago.

John Lowton, of course, undergoes surgery with Dr. Gray and is no longer crippled, so all is right there, and we can tie up that completely predictable ending in a completely perfunctory way. All is not completely lost, however; Barbara is an independent woman who tackled adventures without fear and does her job very well. She’s also the only VNRN heroine I’ve met in months who actually refuses to accept it when someone says that nothing is wrong as they mope around the house. On the other hand, she refuses to ask John Lawton to dinner, because “asking him to dinner, although the invitation came from Aunt Agnes, he might make him think that she was pursuing him. The thought was unbearable.” So that’s one job she doesn’t tackle very well. I had hoped this book might be along the lines of the soft, sweet, and slow stories of a different Hancock, Lucy Agnes (who, ignoring the really bad Student Nurse, has earned a 3.5 average in the other four reviews she’s gotten here), but alas, it’s more commonplace than that. It’s certainly worth reading, with good humor, several big vocabulary words, and a reference to Jane Austen, but it’s just that I had hopes for more.

Hollywood Nurse

By Alice Brennan, ©1966

Merry Neil, private nurse to the “King of Hollywood” finds but nearly loses brilliant, handsome Jeff Morrow in the heartbreak city. Her love is threatened by Natalie Pries, moviedom’s beautiful, spoiled darling, and the romantic tension builds and builds …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Everyone who comes to California has to drink orange juice. It’s part of the protocol.”

“‘He didn’t try a pass or anything like that.’
“Tammy said crisply, ‘I’d feel  insulted if I were you.’”

“We all live by ourselves. I mean, when you come right down to it.”

“Who wanted a big, husky girl anyway? Not men, surely.”

“One thing that always ruins a conversation is somebody getting serious.”

“What she needs is the kind of guy who’d sock her any time she got out of line. She’d respect a guy like that. But she was born with a beautiful face and that louses everything up.”

“Don’t you know blushing is passé?”

“One thing I’ve found out,  nurses don’t need to diet. They run it off!”

“‘It isn’t fair for nurses to be as pretty as you two,’ he chided. ‘It makes people want to be ill.’”

“‘You don’t have the proper look of awe,’ he chided. ‘Don’t you know I’m a very important guy?’”

“How can you get romantic about a girl who has to stick her tongue out first thing so you can get a look at her throat or intestines or something?”

“‘Do you know what I really like to drink?’ Natalie asked her. ‘Milk. I mean, really, isn’t it ghastly? Can you imagine something like that getting out? “Sex queen admits she drinks milk”? I mean, really!’”

“You’re a very difficult person. I’m beginning to feel slightly sorry for your patients.”

“Southern California in the smog would make a great background for one of those old English horror movies.”

REVIEW: 
Author Alice Brennan brought us a triplet of nurse heroines in Nurse’s Dormitory, and here she earns another B+ for her second trio with the incorrectly singular Hollywood Nurse: By my count, Merry Neil, Agnes McLeod and Tammy Moore are more than one. As stories go, each character is less than a whole, though, so maybe not much more than one.

Merry Neil is the ostensible star of the book, and she’s a fairly bland lass who as roommate Tammy grouses, “for a girl who doesn’t want any breaks, and who wouldn’t know what to do with a break, you’re getting them all. It’s a shame you’re so nice, because I’d like to hate you.” For starters, Merry is nursing aging producer Pierson Webb, who’s checked in for what turns out to be metastatic cancer. Then, in attempting to escape the paparazzi who chase her down for an update on Pierson’s status, she’s picked up by a strange man in a white Jaguar who turns out to be famous crooner Arch Heller. She ends up dating Arch’s lawyer Tom Harton, who had been squiring young starlet Natalie Pries. It’s true that for a  lowly nurse, Merry does land undue attentions: She’s stalked by both Natalie and gossip columnist Mai Hinge in addition to the aforementioned male celebrities. But to no avail, she swears! She’d fallen for a man back in Michigan who’d turned out to be married, and now, time after trying time, she reminds herself fiercely, “I will not allow myself to fall in love with him. Or with any man. Never, never, never again!” The fact that this means she will be alone all her life never crosses her mind, and her philosophy certainly doesn’t stop her from dating. But all this is irrelevant; we know how her story will turn out!

Next we turn to Agnes, who had married an intern at an early age, but the bastard had walked out on her, not knowing she was pregnant, because “I suddenly realized the enormity of what I’d done. I’d saddled myself with a wife when all I’d ever wanted in my entire life was to become a doctor. So I walked out on her,” Harvey Miles says now when he miraculously turns up as a blind date at the nurse’s apartment in Hollywood, when he’d last seen Agnes in Ohio six years ago. In the interim, Agnes has had a baby, Ellen, who lives in San Francisco with Agnes’ mother—apparently there are no nursing jobs in the Bay Area—and is rapidly dying of a congenital heart defect that Agnes cannot bring herself to acknowledge, much less agree to treat. Once he learns of Ellen’s existence, from blabbermouth Tammy, Harvey forces Agnes to agree to Ellen’s surgery, and what a break for Agnes: “She wasn’t ready to admit it,  but there was almost a feeling of relief in her: She was almost grateful to Harvey for taking the decision out of her hands.” After Ellen’s operation, the rapprochement is pending, even if Agnes can’t admit it. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not ready to think about it yet,” she says but the pair are not actually divorced, so you can feel fairly confident they will get back together, especially since they have a child to consider. “What she did would depend on what she thought best for Ellen,” and Ellen herself is already growing attached to Harvey. “Agnes watched his head bent over the child’s bed. The word ‘daddy’ was still painful and shy in Ellen’s lips, but she seemed to find delight in saying it.”

The most interesting of the three nurse roommates is Tammy, who only became a nurse “because her mother had thought she should  be one. She wasn’t like Merry or Agnes … dedicated.” Instead, Tammy wants to be … a star!! Her plan on becoming one do not, however, involve trying out for parts or taking acting classes—that’s strictly for chumps!—but to wow famous people with her good looks and be “discovered,” so she begs Merry to ask Pierson to give her a screen test. Pierson agrees to meet Tammy at his house, and the scandal is that he’s planning to put Tammy on the casting couch with gossip columnist Mai hiding behind the curtains to witness and publicize Tammy’s downfall. It’s an interesting dilemma, because Tammy has said conflicting things: “If anybody … I mean anybody … tried that proposition stuff on me, I’d punch him in the nose,” she insists, but then wonders, “Is that the truth? Would I do that? If … if Pierson Webb offered me what I want, a screen test, a contract, and there were strings attached to it, what would I really do?” For better or worse, though, she’s spared the actual test of her character when Pierson changes his mind and “talked to me like a father. He said I should go to drama school and learn how to be an actress. He told me beauty alone can’t get a girl by in Hollywood these days.” Phew! Although the book holds up Natalie Pries as a woman who’d been working in a dinky drugstore when Pierson had wandered in and made her a phenom, so the lecture doesn’t really hold a lot of water.

Then Tammy meets Pierson’s son, whom he’d abandoned decades ago, and wilts into a pathetic, spineless nothing: “She was content just to be with him. And she’d never felt like that with any man before. Always before a man had been there to be used.” Here we uncover the book’s main theme—“what she really needs is to get married to a guy who’s the boss and makes her know it and like it.” Frankly, I can’t imagine any sane woman liking the fact that she has no say in a relationship, but what do I know? Clearly these nurses are all landing  men, the only thing that matters, once they surrender their independence. Two out of the three, anyway—Merry’s man just forces her to admit what she doesn’t want to, that she’s in love with him—before she lands safely in his arms. If this central theme is a bit disturbing, on the whole this is an amusingly written story with one slightly complex character, anyway, even if she’s cut off at the knees in the end. You could certainly do a lot worse than Hollywood Nurse, who’s worth the drive up Mulholland Boulevard.

A Nurse for Dr. Sterling

By Ruth MacLeod, ©1962

Young and idealistic Janet Raleigh, fresh out of an exclusive school, found herself bored by the shallow pleasures of high society. Seeking something to fill her life and give it meaning, she chose nursing as her career. To her amazement she found that her wealth and background created an unexpected barrier. The doctor she loved doubted her sincerity and patronized her; her supervisor questioned her conduct and humiliated her; and then came the brutal attack that put her very life in danger.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“I hurt so! Kiss me and make it well!”

“Please, nurse … I’m going to die! Give me just one kiss to take with me—”

“Janet, you don’t want to be a nurse! You’ll have to do awful things! As a nurse you’d have to make hundreds of beds, and bathe all sorts of dirty people, empty bedpans and emesis basis, and listen to people whine about their aches and pains!”

REVIEW:
Imagine my horror when, arriving at the house we’d rented for a long weekend of walking in the apple orchard and reading on the couch, I discovered I had left my nurse novels at home! What to do, what to do? Well, thankfully this is the era of the e-book, and I was actually able to find a handful of actual nurse e-novels out there, including—imagine my surprise!—The Nurse Novel Megapack of four novels, including three I hadn’t read yet (actually, I knocked off two of them over the weekend, so now I’ve just one left). Coming soon, a blog page listing other nurse e-books, should you happen to find yourself in a similar horrifying predicament, dear reader!

Anyway, A Nurse for Dr. Sterling is a curious choice for a curated selection of nurse novels, because it in my opinion crosses over the line of true VNRN just a smidge. The problem here is that most of the  book is told from the point of view of Dr. David Sterling; nurse Janet Raleigh anchors only about a third of it, despite what the back-cover blurb suggests (and in this case, the blurb errs on a number of points, so beware!). When we meet him, Dr. Sterling is fleeing a malpractice suit he’d lost—he had not diagnosed a terminal brain cancer in a man who had demonstrated few vague symptoms, so though it wasn’t really his fault, most of his patients had left him and he’d fled town and the blot on his reputation to come to Las Lomas, California, an actual town on Monterey Bay.

He’s been hired by his old acquaintance Dr. Graham Burns, who had dumped his excellent, dependable, strong, smart wife Mildred, who had supported him during his up-and-coming years, for a young vixen half his age. Mildred’s gone on without him and is now superintendent of nurses, while Coralee is making passes at David from about the first minute they meet. David is determined not to wreck the marriage of his old friend and his second chance, but Coralee is a very determined young lady!

What’s interesting about her as a character, however, is that she has an awful voice, and we are reminded of this repeatedly, “a tone that had neither resonance nor depth. If he had heard her first on the telephone, David thought, he’d have pictured her as a dull, drab, dishwater blonde, probably chewing gum.” Mildred, on the other hand, “wasn’t a beautiful woman, but her personality made looks unimportant,” while Coralee seems to be the opposite. “I think she’s beautiful,” David admits of Coralee, “and would be even more so if her voice matched. As a person, however, I wouldn’t stack her up against Mildred at all.” It’s an unusual take in a VNRN, that personality outweighs looks; where will this come out in the end?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we learn about Janet Raleigh, a nursing student who has left her privileged background because “I want to do something important, she thought; not just to keep occupied, but to make my life count for something.” Under the withering eye of Nurse Daisy Andrews, a 40-year-old spinster battle axe who does not deserve her name (or the nickname Dizzy, which the girls have given her, tee hee!), however, Janet is losing her resolve, as Nurse Andrews bawls Janet out in front of the doctors on numerous occasions (but winning her the sympathy and interest of one Dr. David Sterling, so it isn’t all bad!). One day poor Janet is given the difficult task of bathing the most difficult patient on the ward, 19-year-old Archie Crane, who is not recovering from his burst appendix eight weeks ago. He refuses to cooperate with the sponge bath until Janet kisses him, which she does only after he has wrapped himself around her and refused to let go.

The bastard tells another nurse of his exploits, and Janet is bawled out yet again by Nurse Andrews. She’s ready to quit, until wise Mildred asks Janet to write down all the reasons she wanted to become a nurse and why now she wants to quit—and when one page is full of scribbling and the other has only Nurse Andrews’ name on it, Janet is ready to get with the program. Mildred sends her on her way with some kindly advice: As a student nurse, even if her superior is unfair, “in respect for her professional knowledge and standing, you follow her orders meticulously, listen carefully to all she says, refraining from comment or retort if you don’t agree. You accept her criticism gracefully, knowing it’s for your own benefit eventually.” Initially I was a little bothered that the bully was going to triumph, but I should have trusted Mildred—two weeks later, she demotes Nurse Andrews from head nurse to assist in the OR. (Of course, we astute VNRN readers see the writing on the wall with this move!)

On the lam from Coralee, David asks Janet to go out with him, and she agrees. “Janet was an easy girl to be with, David reflected. She didn’t make demands, and was at ease in any social situation. It’s her poise that makes her so darned attractive, he thought, watching her.” Soon the pair are seeing each other almost every night, but that doesn’t stop Coralee, who literally chases David around the golf course when every shot she hits lands 10 feet from David’s ball. The woman could have out-whacked Louise Suggs (a neglected golf giant who beat Sam Snead on a par-three course in 1961, correctly arguing that what they lacked in driving distance, women could make up in the short game). When he turns down her forty-ninth pass in the sand trap of the 14^th hole, Coralee almost slugs David in the head with her niblick, but Graham saves her from becoming a murderess by dropping with what appears to be a heart attack. Dr. David Sterling knows better, however, and diagnoses a cardiac tumor, and never mind how ridiculously rare those are, because he’s already correctly diagnosed masher Archie Crane with a liver abscess. 

In the interim, David cannot commit to Janet, so she foolishly accepts a date with Archie, and her date with Archie goes horribly awry when he proves that his behavior in the hospital was, far from an aberration, just the tip of the iceberg when he drives her to Rocky Dell Park and assaults her, eventually pushing her off a cliff after he’d thrown her to the ground and she’d bashed him on the head with a rock. Knocked unconscious, she comes to only to find he’s fled the scene, leaving her to flag down a passing car to get home. She’s two hours late for curfew at the nurse’s dorm, and there’s Nurse Andrews, all full of slut-shaming. To the high credit of all her friends, everyone who hears the story wants Janet to call the police, but she resists—and then it turns out she’s suffering a subdural hematoma and needs immediate brain surgery! The surgeons, of whom David of course is one, are scrubbed and boring holes in Janet’s skull when Graham drops of another attack, and David steps up and completes the surgery. Does he get any thanks? Well, Janet’s grateful, but Nurse Andrews is livid because David is not a brain surgeon! In revenge, she’s ready to testify on behalf of Archie Crane in the assault trial, pulling out what she calls David’s affair with Coralee—what this has to do with the assault is beyond me—as it’s her opinion that Janet asked to be attacked at the park after her scandalous behavoir, being attacked at the hospital. But she’ll withhold her testimony if Janet agrees to resign—that’s one hell of a grudge!

But before Andrews has the chance to crush the pair like little bugs, Graham finally agrees to exploratory cardiac surgery if David will do it, as it seems he can do anything except the dishes. Andrews is assisting in the surgery, and—you guessed it—hands David the wrong drug when Graham’s blood pressure tanks. David manages to pull Graham away from the Grim Reaper with open-heart massage, and Andrews flies out of the OR and commits suicide in the scrub room, injecting her own heart with the same incorrect drug she’d handed David, one of the more spectacular VNRN flame-outs I’ve ever witnessed. So everyone’s reputation is saved, and now it’s just for David to come to his senses and propose to Janet. Also for Graham to come out of surgery to find that Coralee has left him and that Mildred, bless her, will take the louse back. So happy endings for all.

This book has strong women characters in Mildred and Janet, women whose character is more important than their looks; Coralee, who wins big in the latter department, is the loser in the end. I did appreciate her dramatic presence, though, as I did Nurse Andrews. I also found some wisdom in the book, in the advise that Mildred gives Janet about accepting criticism, and also in passages in which it’s suggested that Archie is faking his illness: “I believe it’s a mistake,” David says, “to ascribe illness to neurosis before every physical source is thoroughly checked,” which is a maxim still very true today and of which I’ve needed to remind myself on occasion. But while it has a lot to recommend it, I just didn’t love this book—my beef with it being that it’s mostly about David Sterling, and the writing, though it had some interesting ideas, just didn’t sparkle enough to make an A-grade book. It’s worth a read, though, so if you have the chance to spend the afternoon with David Sterling’s nurse, take it.

One String for Nurse Bow

By Joyce Dingwell, ©1969

The twelve young graduate nurses were waiting eagerly to see what glamorous jobs were to be allotted to them, and none was more eager than Charlotte Bow. And to say that she was appalled at the prospect of being sent to Binkabunkacarrawirrawarrawillapillimundi, in the heart of the Australian Northern Territory, was putting it mildly!

GRADE: C+

REVIEW:
Nurse Charlotte Bow is graduating from a training program with the Farflung Nursing Association, which sends nurses into remote areas for a term. The day the assignments are announced, everyone is so excited to find out where they will be sent! Mostly, it seems, because they are really looking for husbands: “She’s as good as married right now, resented Charlotte,” after a colleague was posted to an assignment as the only woman on an island of 80 men. Poor Charlotte, however, wins the assignment to—here’s the joke of a name—Binkabunkacarrawirrawarrawillapillimundi, way Down Under. “They had all agreed that if they got that draw, they would blow out their dedication lamps there and then,” because it’s “too farflung,” but mostly the problem seems to be that there are not going to be many men, or white men, anyway. The guy on whose farm the hospital is located is called Brother Seb, and another hilarious joke is that Charlotte thinks he is a monk sworn to celibacy, though this is cleared up on page 29.

The third joke we’re subjected to is that every man who meets Charlotte asks her about her strings, an apparent reference to an apparently outdated saying (I’d certainly never heard of it) “a string to your bow”; which means, “If someone has more than one string to their bow, they have more than one ability or thing they can use if the first one they try is not successful,” here “thing” signifying “man.” It turns out that almost every man she meets is another string for her, e.g. Tony the teacher, Dr. Jamie Carley, and prospector Jeff Wright. Not Seb, though, ha ha! “Charlotte scoffed, a string! Brother Seb!” And, we’re told, the feeling is mutual: “He was not even aware of her other than as the matron of his clinic. He did not understand strings for bows.” We’ll see about that!

The book is a fairly mundane plod through the ups and downs of life in the outback, including a typhoid epidemic, an earthquake, an indigenous woman who delivers quadruplets and keeps them—in this backward narrative, native tradition has parents abandoning all but one of multiple births, I’m sorry to report—and delivering a small herd of cattle overland through the bush. None of it is terrifically riveting, and the condescension toward the indigenous people, if not the most egregious I’ve met in a VNRN, is uncomfortable at best (the children are always referred to as “pickaninnies,” for starters), so there’s another donation to the American Indian College Fund.

One thing I did appreciate was Charlotte’s ability to stand up for herself. Though she’s a brand new  nurse, she manages to meet each crisis with relative aplomb and even success. She also expresses outrage at some of Seb’s declarations, such as when Charlotte finds that a native woman has been beaten by her husband. Seb calls the bruise “nothing serious,” and when Charlotte protests, he insists that “a bashing and a thrashing” is indeed off limits, but a “spank-bruise” of the “wifely spank variety” is OK, and Seb, who speaks the native language, tells the husband “it was not good to hit very hard,” and that he should “give it next time where it didn’t show.” Charlotte is spluttering with rage, but in the end, Seb just says that Charlotte herself was not spanked enough and that’s the end of the conversation, leaving Seb with the apparent upper hand. So even if she is right, the story does not come down on her side.

On Charlotte’s less admirable traits is her complete inability to see the obvious. She doesn’t understand when first Dr. Jamie and then Tony say they are no longer wooing Charlotte because there is “one too many, which is a whole lot too many. In fact it closes the subject, doesn’t it?” Dr. Jamie explains. But Charlotte can’t figure out what he means. “Won’t someone please enlighten me?” she asks Tony. “Ask Sebastopol Brown,” Tony says, and she still doesn’t get it. Then, though Seb has asked the friars at the nearby mission if they can perform marriages, Charlotte doesn’t  figure out why Seb, gored by a bull in the bush, is refusing to go to the nearby mission for medical care. “I vowed that the next time [I went to the mission] it was to … it was for … it was …” but no pennies are dropping for the otherwise capable Charlotte. At least, as the only healthcare practitioner for hundreds of kilometers, we know she won’t be quitting her job as a nurse when she and Seb eventually get things sorted. The prose is pleasant enough, but there was nothing for the Best Quotes section, and the lame jokes about the endless name and the strings quickly grew flat, if they ever had any dimension, with repeated pounding. In the end, if not the worst VNRN I’ve read, One String is a one-note story without a lot of life to it.