Redheaded Nurse

Bennie C. Hall, ©1960
Cover illustration by Gilbert Riswold

Jane Hamilton stood on the top deck of the cruise ship Madrigal, watching the twinkling lights that marked the Mediterranean shoreline. It was midnight, and the sound of laughter and music floated up from the Carnival Room on the deck below. She had known so few carefree hours in her young life, and now she longed to become a part of the gaiety surrounding her—but as ship’s nurse, she was here to work, not to enjoy herself. It would be so easy, she thought, to set conscience aside and forget her job—to surrender completely to a world where anything might happen…

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“They’ll dance, drink and make merry till dawn—and tomorrow they’ll die.”

“Nurses are for healing, not feeling.”

“He removed her cape from her shoulders and folded it as carefully as if it were—well, at least squirrel.”

“Never jump to conclusions, Janie, though I’ll admit most of us redheads do. Remember—it’s impossible to look at a cat and tell when and how far it’s going to jump. It’s the same way with people. You can’t assign characters to human beings and expect them to stay put. They’ll fool you every time.”

“The best sedative was an open mind and a clear conscience.”

“Aside from an occasional headache or an upset stomach, the passengers had remained disgracefully well.”

“It was like a man, she reflected, to be excused for an infraction of the rules, whereas she, a woman, had to wear her remorse like a heavy blanket.”

“Peter was a very studious person and innocent of the implications of a gift from the Island of Lesbos.”

“I thought I’d inherited a temperamental redhead who would know more about catching a man than about curing whatever ailed him.”

REVIEW:
At one point, after being sunk by Cruise Ship Nurse and Sea Nurse, I threatened to toss all my cruise ship VNRNs right into the brink if I got one more dud. Redheaded Nurse doesn’t exactly make up for those two duds, but it will stay dry for the time being.

Jane Hamilton has been selected from all the nurses at her Boston charity hospital to fill the position of head nurse aboard the cruise ship Madrigal. The doctor on board, Dr. Jerry Clayton, is usually mean to her. It’s her “copper curls,” you see, that push Dr. Clayton over the edge, and he asks her to pull her cap down over her ears to hide them when she’s on duty. “You’re too young. And too beautiful,” explains Schuyler Dawson, a young man on the ship. “Chances are he wanted someone more mature, less decorative.” Jane is drawn to young Sky, though early on she had decided he must be a paid companion to one of the older passengers, Mrs. Carter-Peterson. “She knew all about those unscrupulous characters known as ‘gigolos,’ but she had never expected to meet one face to face.” Then Mrs. C-P tells Jane that Sky has stolen a diamond locket from her, and Jane is convinced that Sky is a “slick fellow” whom she should avoid. So the next day, when he plays up to her, she naturally agrees to go dancing with him that night and ashore with him in Alexandria, Egypt, the next day.

They have a great time, dancing as one—but then suddenly Jane realizes that all the other ship’s passengers have left the building. They have to fly across town in a pokey old cab while the ship’s horn is sounding insistently in the background, sprinting down the dock and losing Jane’s hat to reach the gangplank in time while all the passengers watch in amusement. This incident leaves Jane totally mortified beyond reason, and she determines never to go ashore again, until the captain scolds her, “It’s gotten so now your hair shirt is showing—and it’s not a bit becoming with those copper curls.” So all is right again in Jane’s simple little world.

In the meantime, Mrs. C-P has decided to throw a party for all the children at some port of call and give them all dolls, because the poor waifs don’t have any. On an expedition into a part of Alexandria that the captain had expressly forbidden passengers to enter, she is exposed to a smallpox epidemic. While helping the dowager sew dresses for the nude dolls, Jane notices a rash on the back of the older woman’s neck … and so the two ladies are quarantined for a week, until it is determined that it’s some other disease and not smallpox that the great lady has contracted. As a reward for her selfless duty, Jane is allowed to pick out one bracelet from Mrs. C-P’s collection, and inadvertently chooses the most expensive one there—the stone is so huge, it couldn’t possibly be anything other than costume jewelry. She wears it to another dance on the ship, where Sky sets her straight about its real value—and then the bauble disappears that night after he smooches her to such effect that “she could only feel as if she did not exist as a person but only as a part of Sky.” Jane begins castigating herself that “she had fallen in love with a playboy and a card shark. … He goes on one cruise after another in order to play poker with the wealthy passengers and fleece them.”

I am sure that I don’t have to tell you that in the end all this misunderstanding is cleared away, and Jane is proved once again to be a silly little girl. Some older VNRNs have this gentle feeling about them, like chiffon floating on air. Redheaded Nurse is one such book, with a soft touch both in the writing, characters, and situations they are put through. Jane’s mortifications and crises are really small molehills, and we can pass through them without a wrinkled brow. In the end, the book is so light that it doesn’t really amount to much, even if it does have a noticeable flavor of camp to liven things up a bit. But it’s enough to make me want to attempt another VNRN cruise.

Army Nurse

By Barbara Bonham, ©1965
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

“I can’t believe it,” Connie said in a stunned voice to the Communist agent. “We were so sure she was dead. Can you get her out of China?” “For a price,” Bo Duc said. “You could be very useful to us.” Connie shuddered. It was the cruelest form of blackmail, one the Communists used masterfully. “You devils!” she said through clenched teeth. Lt. Constance Moorehead had two great secrets—her war mission and her love for Captain Harmon. To carry out her duty she was prepared to risk her loyalty, her love, and even her life.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“What’s a gorgeous girl like you doing in this place?”
“Fighting Communism,” Connie replied.

“Connie had had to hold herself back the last few times Niles had kissed her to keep her lips from revealing her love for him.”

“I’m familiar with Communist tactics. I cut my teeth on them.”

“And you guys think you can conquer the world! You can’t even make a decent whisky.”

REVIEW:
Lt. Constance Moorehead is the first nurse heroine I’ve met who isn’t white – she’s biracial, as her mother was Chinese. Her parents met when her American father was teaching English in China, but when Connie was six years old, the Communists began to overrun China, and her family fled the country on a sampan for Hong Kong. En route, however, they were strafed by a Communist patrol boat, and her mother was killed. Which explains her burning hatred for the Commies. Now that she’s 22, she’s enlisted in the army has been stationed in the Southeast Asian country of Surbaco, which is struggling against a Communist take-over, serving capitalism the only way a girl can. “Nursing the wounded is the next best thing to actually carrying a gun against the Communists myself,” she says.

As much as she hates the Communists, she loves Capt. Niles Harmon, MD, whom she just met a month ago. He’s attracted to her “mysterious and exotic beauty,” as he puts it. Then Bo Duc, the waiter at the officer’s club, jumps out of the bushes next to the nurses’ quarters and tells her that the Communists have her grandmother. Unless she cooperates with them, they will kill Nana. She responds with the most vehement curse she can think of: “You devils!” she spits through clenched teeth. But she proves to be somewhat resourceful: She sends a letter to American Ambassador Kilby, who checks into the hospital six hours later, complaining of chest pain. Connie can’t get over the coincidence, but guess what? It’s all a big hoax so he can talk to Connie alone! He tells her to cooperate with Bo Duc for now, as they may have an opportunity to track down the communist leader through him. Though Dr. Niles is perplexed that he can’t figure out what’s wrong with the ambassador, he doesn’t suspect anything. Yet.

Connie leaves a window open in the supply room along with a list of the supplies that the bad guys need. Niles, discovering the break-in, sees Connie slip the list, which the thieves have inconveniently left behind, into her pocket. You’d think this would be an opportunity to bring up Connie’s racial background and use it against her, but Dr. Niles is made of sterner stuff, and just frowns. But the Commies aren’t satisfied, and soon come back with another assignment: She’s to put a bomb under the bed of the Surbacoan president. A few days later, at a ball at the president’s mansion, Dr. Niles catches her coming out of the president’s living quarters. The president, who has been informed of the plot by Ambassador Kilby (who Connie keeps in the loop), isn’t hurt, the scuttlebutt goes, because an aide had woken him to take care of an important matter that had just come up. Niles ups the ante and gives her the cold shoulder on rounds that afternoon.

Next the Communists kidnap Connie and Niles, dragging them out into the jungle to care for their general. Connie doesn’t have enough time to contact Ambassador Kilby, but she does manage to mail a letter – though she has no idea where in the jungle they are to be taken, so things are looking glum for the medical team. At first Niles is pretty pissed – “You lousy traitor!” he hisses at Connie – but after they’ve amputated the general’s gangrenous foot and they have a minute alone, she fills him in on her double-agent duties, and soon they’re smooching behind the general’s tent. But the Commies are threatening to kill them both as soon as the general is better. Will they be found in time?

As action-packed as the plot may seem in the retelling, I just couldn’t bring myself to care whether Connie and Niles were rescued or not. The ending was wholly predictable, the writing uninspired, and the only fun in it from the puerile jabs at communism. It’s interesting for its view on war in Southeast Asia at a time when the country was actually fighting one there, but apart from that, it’s pretty much a waste of time.

Cinderella Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. of Adele Kay Maritano), ©1967
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“Give it up,” Glen Seabrook had said. “They’re using you, Rita. They’ll never change.” But she couldn’t abandon her family. And she lost Glenn. It all seemed so long ago. Before she became wife to an alcoholic, mother to a son—and widow. At twenty-four, life held no more surprises for Rita Ambler. Then came the accident that changed everything. That thrust Rita Ambler into the arms of Dr. Lester Wyman and out of reach of his new protégé, Dr. Glen Seabrook…the only man she had ever loved.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“You’ve been out of it so long, you think dates are sweet gooey things that grow on palm trees.”

“She wanted to scream out her anger at the pink and white and lavender woman who sat reading about submerged continents while her grandchild displayed alarming symptoms.”

“If one’s vibrations are in tune with the infinitude, there are no insurmountable obstacles.”

REVIEW:
The problem with an author like Jane Converse, who has written many, many VNRNs – this is the tenth book of hers I have reviewed – is that you just can’t always be at the top of your game, but you’re always held to your highest mark. Jane’s highest, which would be (and faithful readers know what I’m going to say) Surf Safari Nurse, is a good mile or two above Cinderella Nurse. This book is not her worst, but I can’t help feel especially disappointed, since I know what she is capable of.

At book’s open, we have something very unusual in our heroine – a widow! With a three-year-old son, Timmy! Rita had fallen in love with Glenn Seabrook, a medical student, who takes the typical attitude of male medical students in love: “Do you think I’m going to let you support me?” he asks her. “It might be a good arrangement for some lush who’s looking for a meal ticket. Not me.” “What difference did money make when two people were genuinely in love?” she asks him, as all the other nurses ask their medical student boyfriends, but he, like all the others, will have none of it. Dumb guys.

So when he leaves her for a neurosurgery residency in New York, she accepts a marriage proposal from the first loser who comes along, a lush looking for a meal ticket named Keith Ambler. Rita nags and scolds, Keith keeps drinking, and soon he abandons the family for warmer climes. Eventually Rita gets a letter from one of Keith’s drinking buddies that Keith has died of cirrhosis in Mexico.

As a single mom, it’s not just Timmy that Rita has to worry about. There’s her good-for-nothing kid sister, Nadine, who is ostensibly studying to be a nurse but seems more interested in shopping for new dresses on Rita’s paycheck than going to class. Rita’s mother, a widow herself, has gone in heavy for the psychic scene, and spends what little is left of Rita’s money on tarot readers and Ouija boards. Neither of these two ladies has acquired any experience with holding a mop, much less a job, so it falls to Rita to clean and cook when she gets home from work. It is her role as the uncomplaining nanny for all these people that earns her the nickname Cinderella, given to her by Glenn before they split up, and which adds additional heat to Glenn’s insistence that he won’t be a sponge, too.

And now the book starts. Glenn is back in town, a surgical resident working with the esteemed brain surgeon Dr. Lester Wyman. But after seeing that Rita is no less a dishrag than she ever was, he turns to feistier nurses to keep him company. Then little Timmy, while under the care of his grandmother, sneaks out of the house and takes quite a tumble, knocking himself unconscious and fracturing his skull. Dr. Wyman operates, foots the bill, and starts seeing Rita and talking marriage. She agrees – but then she finds out that he believes it to be “axiomatic that a surgeon couldn’t keep operating without a steady supply of alcohol to sustain his nerves.” And rumors are flying around the hospital that it wasn’t Dr. Wyman who operated on Timmy at all, but sober Glenn, when Dr. Wyman, shaking with the DTs, drops a scalpel, and then stoops to pick it up … though I’m not sure that readers unfamiliar with the OR will understand the horror and italics this statement is expressed in. The sterile field of the operation is absolutely inviolate, and deliberately touching something that isn’t sterile during a surgery, or apparently intending to use a dirty scalpel, is, shall we say, frowned upon.

During all this crises, the battle axe head nurse, herself a doomed spinster desperately in love with Dr. Wyman, wreaks her vengeance on Rita. But for the first time in her life, Rita stands up for herself. She tells off the head nurse, which is overheard by Glenn, who happens to be standing outside the head nurse’s office when all this goes down. She calls home to check on Timmy and finds her sister is being uncharacteristically sweet, saying that she’s really tired from all the studying she’s been doing all day and that Rita and Timmy should go out to dinner without her and just let her sleep. Rita, the dope, throws this example of Nadine’s generosity in Glenn’s face, and poor Glenn has to tell Rita that Nadine was kicked out of nursing school months ago.

Then Rita gets another call from Nadine’s boyfriend David, a wealthy med school student, telling her to hurry home. She and Glenn rush back to Rita’s house to find that Nadine has somehow gotten her hands on a drug that will induce abortion and is nearly dead from it, while David implores them not to take Nadine to the hospital because if he is implicated in the sorry mess, he’ll be kicked out of medical school. Though it’s quite clear that there’s no way Nadine could have gotten her hands on the medicine of her own accord, after Nadine recovers from her near-death experience, she refuses to name David and says that it was all her idea.

Rita finally sees herself as “the world’s champion patsy,” who has “always latched onto weaklings and chisellers on the pretext that they need me.” Rita thinks about insisting that her mother to find a way to support herself. “It was that simple. And that impossible.” But she thinks she can tell Nadine to get her ass off the couch. Arriving home, however, she finds that she has been spared the opportunity of de-lousing herself. Nadine has extorted money from David’s family in return for her silence and split for Hollywood, and Rita’s mother, having wheedled a cut for herself, is just finishing her own packing before she leaves to become a resident disciple at the Institute for Ultimate Wisdom in California. Free at last, Rita calls Glenn, who rushes right over …

The book isn’t badly written, and Rita’s mother is certainly enjoyable as she chews the furniture with lines like, “Honey, if I hadn’t been properly tuned when your poor daddy passed over into the next world, I shudder to think what would have happened to us.” But she’s a one-note wonder, and while we don’t see much of her, we’d probably tire quickly if we did. Jane earns points for plotting, but the writing is ordinary, and there’s not as much camp as I know she is capable of. It’s more than a little disappointing that we don’t get to see Rita stand up for herself in the end. We’ve seen her take a few small steps toward independence, but nothing significant, and I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen when Mom and Nadine come crawling home from California.

Alternative cover

Nurse of the Midnight Sun

By Mary Collins Dunne, ©1973
Cover illustration by Edrien King

Cory Hanson didn’t consider herself a man-chaser, but it was six months since her fiancé, Paul Farron, had left Oregon for an engineering job with the Trask Valley project in Alaska—and she missed him! After writing Paul that she was flying out for a vacation, she gave up her apartment and her hospital job and boarded the plane for Kovarik. Once she reached the small sawmill town of Datlow Springs, Cory had to wait two weeks for Paul’s arrival. When he finally showed up, it was with the overwhelming news that he had just gotten married. Though Cory wanted nothing more than to return to Oregon immediately, an accident at the mill changed her plans—and laid the foundation for a surprising turn of events in the Land of the Midnight Sun.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“How could she convince him that this was for the best? ‘Really, this is all for the best.’ ”

REVIEW:
Cory Hanson met Paul Farron at a party back in Portland, Oregon, when he was in town for a few months as part of his job as an engineer in Alaska. Two months of nightly dates and they were engaged, and three weeks after that, Paul returned to Alaska. Now it’s six months later, early June, and Cory has gotten tired of dreaming about her boyfriend and fighting with the mean old head nurse, so she quits her job and flies to Alaska to be with Paul.

In what should be no surprise to readers familiar with the genre, Paul is not there when she lands at the nearest town, Datlow Springs. There’s no way to get to the mining village where Paul works, so she takes a room at the local doctor’s house, helps out during the day, and waits for him to show up. Three weeks later, he does … wearing a wedding ring, the fickle cad.

The morning she is supposed to leave Alaska forever, there’s the customary medical emergency, in this case a mill explosion, and she winds up accompanying the badly injured patients to the nearest hospital in Kovarik. There, the local doctor, tremendously short-staffed, begs her to stay for a few weeks while one of his few nurses is out on maternity leave. She agrees, and starts dating around. What with women being in short supply up there in the woods, she soon snags a few marriage proposals, including one from Paul, who has left his new wife after a couple of weeks and is in the process of getting an annulment. Have I already called this loser a fickle cad? Cory tries hard to talk herself into marrying the other man, who she likes but does not love; a bush pilot, who has a reputation of being something of a swinger, sets her chaste heart a-pounding but doesn’t make her any offers and is seen around town in the company of a gorgeous blonde, way out of plain little Cory’s league.

I desperately wish that this book, half again as long as most VNRNs at 180 pages, could be summarized in more than these three rather dry paragraphs. But alas, no. While perhaps not quite as protracted as an Alaskan summer day, this book has little to offer in the way of interesting plotting, good writing, or campy poses. Apart from descriptions of occasional Eskimo characters, the sparsely populated villages, and the abundance of sunlight, this book could be set anywhere. So you should set this book down emphatically, and move on to something else.

Doctor’s Nurse

By Dorothy Worley, ©1961

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Attractive Patricia Lloyd, R.N., had two problems—both of them doctors. Dr. Jeffrey Wayne was handsome, mature and mysteriously drawn to Patricia, beyond the call of duty. Dr. Bill Gregory was young, very much in love and intensely jealous. Caught between the two, Patricia found her personal emotions—and professional duty—in sudden and grave danger.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“I wish you’d worn something besides pedal pushers today. I have guests coming for dinner.”

“There are other things in life besides marriage.”
“Not for a woman there isn’t.”

“You’re spoiled. You should have been spanked every day of your life.”

REVIEW:
Rich girls have all the luck. They’re beautiful, everyone is in love with them, and they get to do whatever they want with your life. Even be a nurse. Of course, their beautiful society mothers are always going to be nagging them to give it up and get married, but they just move out into their own apartments. Some handsome doctor is always trailing around after them, begging them to get married, but they tell him no, kiss him a little, and send him home. Such is the life of Patricia Lloyd. She’s not ready to settle down, but Dr. Bill Gregory, who has loved her since she was in elementary school, will hang around until she is.

And then Dr. Jeff Wayne, age 48, the new chief of staff, moves to town and picks Patricia above all the other nurses – though she never even applied for the job – as his nurse. Pat’s longtime friend Donna, who has had nothing her entire life – her father left her mother for another woman, she had to hold a job all through high school to support her family, her mother committed suicide, and every man she’s ever loved has loved Pat instead – finally snaps and begins spreading vicious gossip about Pat and Dr. Wayne all over town. Dr. Wayne does show a lot of interest in Pat, inviting her to stay at his house to befriend his five-year-old daughter, Barbara, who has an undiagnosed medical problem that leaves her listless, exhausted, and unable to walk some days, and perfectly healthy on others.

The fiercely overprotective governess, Mrs. MacDugal, gives Barbara medicine that makes her sleep all afternoon, which everyone in the house is aware of except her father. Pat smells paregoric, a narcotic medication, on Barbara’s breath, and Pat’s dog, which Pat frequently brings to visit Barbara, is poisoned. Has Mrs. MacDugal mentioned that she despises dogs? Oh, yes, numerous times. The truth of what is going on here is no surprise, certainly not to the astute reader, who can figure this out by page 40. The real mystery is why no one, most of all the trained nurse, ever speaks to Barbara’s father about their concerns.

Another “mystery” of the book is why Pat does not at all resemble her father, Tom. A letter to Pat’s mother, Ilone, found by Pat’s father and shown to Pat, is mentioned early but never explained. Ilone says her first marriage was for love, but Pat knows that Ilone never really loved Tom Lloyd. Then we have the unexplained attentions of Dr. Wayne, a man old enough to be Pat’s father ...

The book concludes with a double crisis: number one, when Pat finally tells her suspicions of Mrs. MacDugal to Dr. Wayne, including the fact that sometimes Barbara smells of whisky (news to the reader), and he decides to fire the governess, and number two, when Donna, who has been “heading for a crackup,” finally decides to do herself in. Both these calamities has been bearing down on the reader like slow-moving dump truck for most of the book, yet they somehow manage to zoom past in mere paragraphs, offering absolutely no excitement, surprise, or satisfaction. The book is not badly written, but it has no spark and not a shred of humor or camp. You can do a lot worse than Doctor’s Nurse, but you can certainly do a bit better.

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.

Psychiatric Nurse

By Fern Shepard

(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1967
Cover illustration by Armand Weston

Nurse Tracy Ross had many reasons for going home. Her mother needed her … and she needed a rest from the terrible strain she had been under. But her welcome was marred by the shocking realization that you can’t go home again. The problems she fled were neither as immediate nor as difficult as the ones she faced now. Back in her home town, she found herself working with a doctor with whom she had once been violently in love. That was hard enough in itself … but even more difficult was the terrible secret she carried within her breast. Ethically, she could not reveal it … but if she kept it hidden, many lives were doomed to tragedy!

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“And why shouldn’t it rub him the wrong way to be informed in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t the six-foot bundle of perfection which he seemed to believe he was?”

REVIEW:
Once again, we find that Florence Stonebraker has teased us again with her title. Tracy Ross is actually working in pediatrics, but she used to be a psychiatric nurse. It was then that she first met Fern Wilson, a volunteer at the hospital who appears more than a little unbalanced. She tells a seven-year-old girl dying of leukemia that she is going to burn in hell after she dies, and when a mysterious fire erupts outside of town, most people think it was started by “a bunch of juvenile delinquents,” but Tracy knows better. Unfortunately, her professional oath prevents her from alerting the town to the fact that there’s a nut job in their midst.

Fern (again, as in College Nurse, Florence has named a character after her pseudonym) is doing well since Tracy last saw her; she is now engaged to widower Dr. Bert Brooks, the hospital chief of staff. But she’s not taking well to Bert’s daughter, Cathy, who is seven. She accuses Cathy of having stolen a photograph of Bert’s deceased wife out of his study and burned it, and Bert locks Cathy in her room for an entire day because Cathy says it was actually Fern who took and burned the photo.

Tracy knew Bert when they were children, and had been hopelessly smitten with him, crying during his wedding for the wrong reasons. Now she’s not sure how she feels about him. Bert is suave, handsome, “ambitious to attract wealthy patients and cash in on his work,” and would have “done wonderfully well as a con man,” as many of his aging women patients fall under his spell and leave him a bundle after their deaths, and never mind about that little conflict of interest in someone whose profession is purportedly to keep people alive. But her long-standing relationship with him puts Tracy in a unique position to be able to try to set Bert straight. She tells him that though he may be successful professionally, he’s “a failure as a person” and “a spoiled, irresponsible mama’s boy.” Needless to say, he isn’t exactly brought around to Tracy’s way of thinking about himself or Fern.

In the meantime, Tracy has Dr. Larry Sizer on her side at the hospital. Larry agrees that Fern is a lunatic, since the leukemia patient was his, but Larry doesn’t have a lot of influence with Bert, who is trying to get Larry kicked out of the hospital because he occasionally uses hypnosis in his treatments. So even though her ethics have kept her from spilling the beans about Fern to Bert, there she is, before the book is half over, telling Larry about how Fern was brought into the psych hospital “dangerously berserk,” but after shock treatments and analysis, she underwent a miracle cure and was dismissed from the hospital as cured. Larry’s take on this is that Tracy is still in love with Bert and is jealous, even though he thinks Fern is a “vapid-faced … first-class idiot.” So she and Larry fight a lot, then literally kiss and make up, then fight some more.

Eventually Fern drives Tracy to the outskirts of town and tries to shoot her, but Tracy calls on her training and uses a “trick she had learned through practice, how to twist and hold helpless the arm of a deranged patient,” pitches the gun out the window, clubs Fern on the head and escapes on foot back to town. But Fern has beaten her there and told Bert that it was Tracy who was the attacker. She has also told Bert that she was admitted to the asylum—to research the treatment of the insane for a book she was writing, and she was just pretending to be a lunatic while she was there. In the meantime, Fern has planted stolen jewelry in Cathy’s room and helped Bert find it, so Bert has concluded that his daughter is “pre-psychotic” and needs to be committed. He tells this to Tracy when he meets her after the attack, and suggests that Tracy herself needs to check in for a little rest.

That night, Cathy runs away to Tracy’s house, having escaped out the window from her room, where Bert has locked her again. Larry scoops up Cathy and Tracy and carts them off to his cabin in the woods, which many VNRN doctors seem to own for the sole purpose of sheltering persecuted nurses until their would-be assassin tracks them down there just minutes before the hero walks in and saves her. Psychiatric Nurse runs true to the form, except that Fern unexpectedly lights herself on fire and burns to death rather than be caught: “Daddy, I’m on my way,” she screams as she sprints for her stash of kerosene outside. “You always said I’d burn in hell for being so naughty, and here I go!” This may well be the most magnificent VNRN stage exit to date.

We know this is a book about psychiatry because it is packed with technical jargon: little Cathy is “seriously deranged,” Tracy fears she is “cracking up,” Larry worries he is “going nuts,” Bert believes Fern was never a “mental case,” Bert’s housekeeper thinks Bert has “lost some of his marbles,” Tracy recalls the basic rule from psychiatric training, “never let a psycho know you are afraid.” Tracy is not the most endearing heroine, as she regularly turns peevish on Bert and Larry, and even Fern, in the role of beautiful evil vixen, isn’t what she could be. The plot holds promise, but it just wasn’t executed all that well. The writing is nowhere near Florence’s best (consider that I could only find one decent Best Quote), and just grinds through the story without inspiration or even much interest. Sometimes Florence has got it, and sometimes she doesn’t. In Psychiatric Nurse, not so much.