Holiday for a Nurse

By Joanne Holden, ©1965

Cover illustration by Mort Engel

Valerie Wyndham, R.N., was looking forward to a few weeks of relaxation at a mountain cottage. But Valerie was far too pretty to escape attention, and too much a dedicated nurse to deny a request for help. That was how she found herself involved with the darkly handsome Adam Balin, owner of the famous Balin estate. But the charming young doctor, Ted Meredith, hated Adam and wanted Val to himself. And there was someone else—someone who had made it clear that Valerie was unwanted, and would stop at nothing to get her out of the way …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“I think it is my duty to reprove you—or maybe kiss you.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Valerie Wyndham is headed for the Berkshires in Massachusetts for vacation, to stay in the lakeside cottage of a fellow nurse. Her arrival, however, is anything but relaxing—she finds a surly, apple-eating teenager ensconced in the place, so arrogant that she doesn’t even bother to split the scene when Val shows up and reprimands her for the damage the youth has inflicted on the owner’s treasured collection of salt and pepper shakers. Val quickly identifies the girl as Peggy Balin and pops into the old Balin estate to have a word with Peggy’s older brother, Adam, who is her guardian, as their parents are deceased. There she finds him, tall, dark, arrogant, unpleasant, and baleful, not excessively willing to take his sister to task for her crimes, and Peggy stomps out after tossing what is apparently meant as a cutting blow, a comment about how limited the Balin family vocabulary seems to be. Shows them!

In what is de rigueur  in VNRNs, the vacationing nurse stops in to say hello to the local GP, Dr. Meredith, who talks about his dream to create a medical center so cushy and resort-like that busy executives wouldn’t mind coming for medical treatment, checking in with their wives for a few days of R&R and prostate exams. Also de rigueur, the next night Val is out on a date with his son, Ted. After he drops her off, she finds an intruder in the kitchen—this one an ugly hobo who makes to attack her, when Ted hears her scream and reappears in time to save her. It’s a gratuitous blip in the story that ends there. I’m not sure what attempted sexual assault was meant to demonstrate in these stories—titillation? setting up the boyfriend as a hero?—but in any event, the offhanded treatment of such a grave issue is more than a little annoying, if not disconcerting.

The next morning, Adam Balin calls to apologize for his rudeness and to invite her over to tour his historic house. While there, Christabel Wheeler, a female acquaintance of Adam’s, drops by, and she’s a beautiful, rich, insulting snob. Val responds by stomping off again, furious at Adam, of all people, feeling that “he had no right to expose her to a situation where she was at a definite disadvantaage as a stranger.” Since Chris had shown up uninvited, and Adam had in fact been angry at Chris for her comments, it’s unclear exactly what he should have done, but try telling Nurse Val that.

Two days later, Val returns from an outing to the village to find the house vandalized again, and an apple core in the sink. But she decides against going to the police because nothing had been broken, and “all she would accomplish would be to put herself on record as a fault-finding, ill-natured termagant.” She decides to go talk to Adam, as she’s now decided that “Peggy needed help, not censure.” The pair hits on the glorious plan of putting Peggy in charge of a bus full of old women coming to tour the Balin house. Needless to say, on the day of the tour, Peggy is nowhere to be found, justifiably dubious about spending the day with Mrs. Regina Abernathy and the Woman’s Culture Club. Not to be thwarted, Adam and Val next plan to drag poor Peggy on a hike, but Peggy skips out on that adventure, too, and Chris shows up in her stead. The outing is a complete fiasco, with Chris spraining her ankle and leaning heavily on Adam the whole way back. Val becomes increasingly irrational, deciding, “that was the type of person he wanted to marry,” though Adam has shown nothing but irritation with Chris the whole day.

For the next crisis, Val is out driving one evening when she comes to a bridge and finds a crowd: Peggy Balin is out on the other side of the railing, and a crowd below is urging her to go for it. So Val shimmies up the girders and psychologizes the poor kid into climbing down. Afterward, as Adam tries to talk to Val about how to manage Peggy, Val goes psychotic and starts fuming about how he should ask Chris Wheeler for her opinion. Adam is rightly confused: “Who says I was going to marry her?” he asks. “No one,” Val is forced to admit. Adam surprisingly agrees to see Val the next day, the last of her vacation, to talk about Peggy. Val cries herself to sleep: “Not a word to show that he cared whether Val Wyndham went or stayed. He had made it plain he didn’t care.” So she pulls the classic seventh-grade mind game and “forgets” that she’s agreed to meet Adam, instead driving out of town with Ted, who’d proposed marriage a few days earlier. She has not yet given him an answer, but refuses him as they are starting their date, and then kisses him later on. I have to say I am not very fond of Valerie Wyndham.

Adam tracks her down that night, as she’s arriving home, and the two discuss sending Peggy away on a cruise ship school, giving Adam’s house to old Dr. Meredith for his wacky health resort idea, and—finally—getting married. Accustomed to nutty women, living with his sister and friends with Chris Wheeler since childhood, Adam is rounding out the trio with Val, the poor man. Though the character of Ted Meredith injects some humor into the book, overall this story is stupid and maddening, and the heroine, as I have previously mentioned, is a dopey nut job. This book may be a holiday for a nurse, but it won’t be one for you if you bother to read it.

Nurse of Polka Dot Island

By Jeanne Bowman, ©1966

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

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nurse Missing

By Elizabeth Kellier, ©1961
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

When Anne Leatherington, a young R.N., accepted a private case at Craigash, an isolated ancient estate in the Scottish Highlands, she found herself confronted by one mystery after another. Suddenly, a torrent of questions overwhelmed her as she became a victim of her own curiosity. Why was her patient, the seemingly harmless, senile Mrs. McGray, terrified of her own stepson, Charles, the brooding owner of Craigash? And why was his past such a grim secret? But the darkest mystery of all was what had become of Anne’s predecessor, the previous nurse who had disappeared in curious circumstances. As Anne glimpsed the terrifying answers she would realize that the truth could destroy her and the man she had come to love.

GRADE: C

REVIEW:

Some novels are overly contrived, and this, I am sorry to report, is one of them. Anne Leatherington (speaking of contrived, how about that last name?) is a bit of a cipher as far as characters go, just sort of drifting along from one situation to another. Though she demonstrates an avid interest in interrogating everyone, she takes little actual initiative beyond that, right up until the end, when a frenzy of uncharacteristic action brings the whole mystery to a tidy close, only about 100 pages later than she should have.

Anne’s been hired to care for the elderly Mrs. McGray, who is a withered creature residing at a manor in the wilds of Scotland. En route to her new post, she’s thrust into mystery by the taxi driver, who tells Anne that the woman who previously held her position disappeared about two years ago, and hints that someone at Craigash manor “had something to do wi’ it.” Our strong, intrepid heroine is immediately overcome by the sensation that “some heavy, unseen door over at Craigash swung back reluctantly and waited for me to enter a fear-infested room that I might otherwise have escaped. Then, however, I was unaware of Fate’s stealthy hand shifting the course of my life, except perhaps as an icy finger pressed swiftly against my cheek, leaving me with a sense of uneasy anticipation and a tremor of fear which swept down my spine like a flame.” This, dear readers, is what we call over-reaction.

When Anne arrives at the manor, Martha Perryman the housekeeper perfectly channels Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca, displaying a cold and solicitous manner, severe bun, thin mouth, cold gray eyes, and monosyllabic sentences. She’s ridiculously devoted to Charles McGray, the owner of the manor, who is 30, arrogant, and rude to Anne at their first meeting. He’s involved with Stella Cunningham, a beautiful young woman with a fondness for horses and a well-shaped head—but we know that’s not going to last!

We find out the missing nurse was a friendless orphan named Gerda with a difficult German last name, but the more we learn, the more mysteries bloom: If Gerda had left the manor that cold and stormy Friday night, how did she get away from the remote spot? If someone drove her, who was it? Why did she not come for her last paycheck? What’s so difficult about the name Schwarzenberg? And then the housemaid reveals that Gerda was going to have a baby … and a photo of the missing nurse is found in Mrs. McGray’s drawer … and it’s exactly like a half-finished painting that Anne came across in an unused  room down the hall … and Mrs. McGray seems so frightened of her stepson that she tries to jump out her bedroom window one evening just to get away from him …

Suddenly, in the book’s greatest mystery, it is revealed that Anne is in love with Charles; since he has been nothing but cold, remote, and all but nonexistent in her life to date, the reason why is completely unfathomable. And shortly after that, we learn that “he was a man like the country which had nurtured and surrounded him, strong, stark, yet with sudden unexpected touches of sensitive gentleness that could catch at a woman’s heart”—touches that have not at all been evident to us. Though he does smile at Anne once; I guess that’s what she meant. Soon he’s kissing her, but through a very oblique slip so mild that only the leading actors in a VNRN would pick up on it, she reveals that she knows that he painted the missing nurse’s portrait, and now he avoids her altogether, because this is clearly dangerous and offensive information.

To fill the hours Anne goes out with local playboy Paul Harrison, who is cash-strapped and makes no bones about it. In her usual ham-handed way, Anne attempts to pump Paul for information and ends up revealing more than she learns, that she thinks Charles murdered the nurse because she was pregnant with his child. A gleam springs to Paul’s eye and he begins to speak of blackmail—and soon he’s paid off his car, which he had been on the brink of losing to the repo man!

Her career as an interrogator in shambles, Anne turns detective. She departs from Craigash on the convenient excuse that her patient has died, and heads for the nursing agency, obtaining the address they had on file for nurse Gerda. The folks at that address, it turns out, had bought the house from a Miss Schwarzenberg—but the sale occurred after Gerda had left Craigash! So Anne heads for the realtor’s office and begs for a copy of the bill of sale, which has another address for Miss Schwarzenberg. This clue is too much for our delicate Anne, and she instantly faints dead away. As soon as she recovers, however, she sets off for this new address, where she is led to Miss Schwarzenberg’s room and finds the alleged murder victim in a dressing gown reading magazines!!!

Their conversation is held off-stage, but the next scene opens with Gerda and Anne heading back to Craigash for a happy reunion between all the relevant parties. Well, maybe not so happy for some, as the guilty party snaps, “You’re more successful at amateur sleuthing than keeping your patients alive, Nurse Leatherington!” It’s a valid point. A lot of tidying up has to be done between quite a few of the characters, so as to straighten out all the loose ends and red herrings, but eventually it’s done, and all that’s left is for Anne’s man to claim her and we can close the book.

At 190 pages, this story is much too long. The slooooow revelation of the various clues in the first half makes for fairly dull reading, as the author tries to build a suspense about an issue that it’s really difficult to care about. There’s little life to the characters or the writing, almost no humor to speak of, no camp, and nothing, even with this many pages, to pin up under the Best Quotes section. Too many of Anne’s musing (but not amusing) questions pepper the story: “Was the gossip true?” “What about that portrait, anyway?” “How long would she go on?” “Had Charles ever loved any woman properly?” “Had Paul’s nonchalant remarks touched a spring that had unlocked the hidden door of truth or was I simply being rash and imaginative?” By the time I finished this book, I never wanted to see another question mark again. If it had been shorter and a little less forced, and endowed with a heroine with a bit more spine and a love interest who had at least some minor charm about him, it might have been a relatively pleasant book. But that’s a long list of ifs, so perhaps it would be best if we just acknowledge that this book doesn’t have much to recommend it.

Nurse on Location

By Virginia Roberts, ©1958

When Five Star Pictures decided to shoot Island Intrigue on location on a beautiful Pacific island, Nurse Pat Taylor was put in charge of the health of the glamorous stars. To young Pat, this was a dream come true. But barely had Pat set up her tiny hospital when she met a strange young American doctor, John Stewart, mysteriously hiding himself in this remote tropic outpost, and found that by giving succor to a dying native girl, she had broken an implacable tribal law and aroused the primitive anger of the native chieftain. Here is an adventure which might happen to any nurse if she was nurse on location.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“Who but a movie star could walk right up and ask a man for a date? Here she was reluctant even to phone Catherine’s friend, Dr. John Stewart. It did seem aggressive.”

“A fascinating woman. Beautiful. Mysterious. Everything that intrigues a man.”

“Suddenly she thought of the scene at Los Angeles Airport, just before the plane left. He had clutched his wife and two children as though he thought he was never going to see them again. He must have some sort of complex.”

“What a real, down-to-earth attitude movie people have.”

“Young women. What a batch of champagne bubbles you all are.”

“Most people think that an anesthetist is some jerk who flips a vacuum over your nose and yells to breathe deep.”

“Later that afternoon, when Pat returned to the hut, she found Vivienne weeping with as much fervor as though she were being paid $5,000 a week to emote.”

“You’ve got to stop worrying about other people, and start relaxing. If you don’t, you’re apt to swell up like a blimp.”

“His specialty is mental disturbances. He might take one look at you and pop you into a sanitarium.”

“Haven’t you learned yet a girl has to flirt a little if she wants to catch a man?”

“If it’s a career you’re after, always remember it’s never more important than a woman’s appearance.”

“It’s never good technique to keep a man waiting—too long.”

“Advice is cheap when you’re giving it out.”

REVIEW:

Pat Taylor has completed her nurse’s training and is about to embark on her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins to become a nurse anesthetist, but she has a few months to kill before school starts in the fall. Through the intervention of a former preceptor, she has scored a dream job: traveling to Fiji for the summer with a film crew that is making a major motion picture. She’s been asked to drop in on the preceptor’s old friend, John Stewart, who is a doctor doing some unspecified research into “mental diseases among people far away from civilization.” Needless to say, Pat is instantly smitten with Dr. Stewart: Though their telephone conversation is purely small talk and lasts less than a page, it results in his politely asking her to dinner, and after hanging up, she thinks, “I shall look forward to tonight more than any other night I can remember.” Though their date confirms Pat’s opinion of him as “the most fascinating man I’ll ever meet,” his career is put forth as something of a mystery: Though her friend has told her what he is studying, he doesn’t really talk about it (but she doesn’t ask, either), and she starts jumping to all sorts of wild conclusions: “Who are you? What are you? Why are you? Was he running away from something?”

As it is soon revealed, this propensity for wild flights of imagination is one of Pat’s major characteristics. Shortly after she moves into her clinic, a local boy carries in a very sick young native woman, who dies hours later of perforated appendicitis. Pat overhears the crew discussing how “those dumb natives are trying to put the blame for that girl’s death on poor Pat. … No telling what they’ll do.” From then on, the poor Fijians, previously described as warm, welcoming, and civilized, are viewed by Pat with increasing hysteria: They’re ferocious, angry, “mean and secretive and suspicious”—words that really could be used to describe Pat’s own attitude. Again and again, she’s freaking out because some local person happens to be behind her or is looking at her when she walks down the street. On virtually every other page there’s some nasty thought of hers about how when they speak to each other in their native tongue they are saying something “ugly and obscene” and how at any moment “the natives might strike.” If they ever did, I’d be inclined to jump in and help.

                                                                

She voices her paranoid opinions to John Stewart, who manages to stay seated for the remainder of their date. Later, he tells her he loves her—but that he has no right to woo her. Pat’s delusions immediately take flight again: “Was he engaged? Married? What was it that suddenly caused a mountain to spring up between them? Why should he choose to remove her, at the flick of an eyelash, from his life?” Someone has been seriously skipping their meds. Eventually her time in the Pacific winds to a close, and there’s nothing but a luau between her and the plane ride home when she is asked to tend to another native child, this one a mere toddler, with an infected foot wound. She angrily agrees to see the child, and we are told that “here again was a mercy call she could not refuse and be true to her profession”—though it’s hard to see how Pat’s overwhelming fear and brusque treatment of the patient and his family could be called mercy.

Two days later, John Stewart shows up, for the first time since he told Pat he loved her but couldn’t see her any more, to let her know that the child had an allergic reaction to the antibiotics she had given him and had almost died. He helpfully reveals that it had taken every bit of his skill to convince the local chief not to “take matters into his own hands. Or did you know what those drums meant? The drums were for you, and it wasn’t a celebration in your honor.” Thanks, John. But now the natives love Pat, showering her with gifts and flowers when she's out and about, and we’re treated to a ghastly description of the natives as “a paradoxial people, teetering between savagery and civilization,” again, a description better suited for Pat herself. All that’s left is for Pat to be anointed princess of the island at the luau—the villagers all drop to their knees and shout, “Long live the white princess!” as, wearing a crown made of ferns and flowers, she ascends a podium to her throne—and we are hard-pressed to retain our lunch.

But wait, there’s more! Guess who is the white king of the island? Guess who relents and asks Pat to marry him? Guess who tells her, “You can forget about being a stuffy anesthetist. I’m the one who needs you”? Guess who instantly chucks her career aspirations and sighs, “No girl was a real woman until she possessed the love of the right man”? Guess who finally loses her struggle and throws up?

                                                                                                       

You’d think I’d learn by now that if there is ever anyone brown on the cover of one of these books, the interior is almost guaranteed to be filled with hateful racism. It’s really too bad, because if the prejudice had been edited from this book, it would have been quite pleasant: The writing is generally enjoyable, the author has a fine sense of humor, and the minor characters, anyway, are well-drawn and interesting. Unfortunately, the plot is thoroughly saturated with bigotry, not just against the Fijians but also, at the end, women as well. If you can manage to take an anthropologic view, examining the relics of a bygone era with a detached eye, you might get some enjoyment from this book, but the author just doesn’t make it easy.

Disaster Area Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1965
Cover illustration by Uldis Klavins

The thunder roared and crashed about them—but Nurse Lynn Lawrence felt that the wildness of the storm was rivaled by the frantic racing of her own thoughts. She cast a glance at her fiancé, Greg Avery. Beside him, huddled helplessly, was the pretty Dawn Evans. There was no doubt that Greg was paying a great deal of attention to comforting Dawn—too much, Lynn thought. But there was another in the group of flood-marooned strangers. He was handsome, and smiled at Lynn in a way that sent the heart fluttering. Surely things would right themselves once they got back to civilization. But in a disaster like this, a short time could lead to a broken-hearted eternity.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m not very hot for hardware.”

REVIEW:

I had assumed that Lynn Lawrence would be a public service nurse who manned the battle stations during a disaster, à la Disaster Nurse, but no, Lynn is actually just a nurse who gets caught in a disaster. She and her fiancé Greg Avery are taking a bus to Lynn’s rural home, where Greg is to finally meet her parents—and he is none too happy about it, either—when ferocious rains cause the rivers to flood, stranding Lynn, Greg, four other passengers, the bus driver, and a passing motorist at a nearby farmhouse. Completely surrounded by water, the motley crew tries to make the best of things. Well, not all of them: Greg is whining and crabby at the outset. Actually, Greg’s downfall is not entirely unsuspected, as he’s one of these boyfriends about whom few compliments can be paid even from the opening pages, where he is billed as intense, nervous, skeptical, impatient, and resentful. One can easily see why Lynn wants to marry him.

He’s not the only one who can’t keep it together: Poor little Dawn Evans spends most of her time shrieking or sobbing, and only Greg seems to be able to comfort her. When Dawn is unable to get to her bedroom alone, it’s Greg who accompanies her, while Lynn watches, “an alarm bell ringing in her head.”  When Lynn follows them a few minutes later, she finds Greg holding the weeping Dawn in his arms, puts Dawn to bed with a glass of water and an aspirin, then hauls Greg off by the ear for a few words. He just seems pleased that she’s jealous. “Sometimes you’re so self-sufficient, I wonder what you can see in me,” he tells her. Uh oh.

Hypocrisy soon unfolds in spades when the motorist they’re stranded with, Marshall Davis, starts trotting around after Lynn, grabs her in the hallway and only lets go when Lynn insists—but soon he’s back, kissing her and telling her that he’s in love with her, which is certainly farther than Greg has gotten with Dawn. Though she feels “she was already throwing her pride to the winds where Greg was concerned, almost begging him to concentrate on her, to forget another woman,” at the same time when Marshall corners her again, “this time when he kissed her she was too tired to fight him.”

As this love quadrangle is unfolding, the 7-year-old daughter of the couple who live in the farmhouse, little Diane Wilson, has inconveniently decided this is the time to come down with appendicitis. Lynn attempts to “scatter the infection” with cold packs to the abdomen and the four remaining aspirins in the house (too bad she wasted one on the hysterical Dawn!), but those of us with a nodding acquaintance with modern medicine will not be surprised to learn this doesn’t work. Eventually Lynn, who has been keeping mum for some bizarre reason about the seriousness of Diane’s condition, confesses to Marshall how sick the child actually is, and Marshall sets about building a boat so as to go for help. Needless to say, his desperate voyage is made in the pitch black of night and involves encounters with large floating trees and a ducking or two, but soon a helicopter is landing in the back yard to take the girl off to the hospital. The next day the boats come to rescue them, and back in civilization, Lynn and Greg decide to end their engagement—but not to worry, by the time the day is over, there are two new ones to announce.

This book isn’t terrible, but the double standard Lynn operates under is just perplexing. I was sorry that our heroine, an outstanding surgical nurse (are there any other kind in a VNRN?), didn’t just do the appendectomy herself, like in Wings for Nurse Bennett, but our heroine isn’t that strong. The marooned-on-an-island plot has lots of promise—just ask any of the innumerable books, movies, and TV shows that have done well with it—but Arlene Hale is too pedantic to score any real success with it. The story unfolds automatically, with little suspense or excitement, so there’s really not much to be gained from reading it. With a title as fantastic as Disaster Area Nurse, the disappointment is all the worse.

Wings for Nurse Bennett

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1960

“Office-dressing” … That, Sarah thought wryly, was exactly what she had been as nurse to the handsome and successful Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter. Looking wand-slim and elegant in her white nylon uniform, her heaviest duty had been to stand by serenely while Ralph administered to the imaginary needs of some fawning, simpering female. And now she was suddenly in the wilds of Alaska, newly appointed stewardess of the Alaska Passenger and Freight Airlines, about to board the frighteningly small and flimsy-looking plane for her first trip. But at least, she assured herself, here she could be useful. And perhaps, in this new land, she would get a new perspective on her life. Because she had to make up her mind about Ralph. She had to decide whether she could marry a man she loved—but didn’t respect.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“ ‘Can you imagine a man ever wanting to go to bed with Miss Davenport, darling?’ Ralph had asked her once when, miraculously, the waiting room was empty. ‘She’s a good nurse—the best in Dayton, barring not even you, but ugh.’ He had kissed her. ‘Don’t ever let yourself get fat and frumpy, sweetheart.’ ”

REVIEW:

Sarah Bennett is working as a flight attendant on a small Alaskan airline (apparently in the old days flight attendants were nurses as well; in any case, she is one). She’s taking time away from her job working for Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter, who is just as he sounds: A pompous, society doctor who panders to neurotic wealthy women, and who plans to marry Sarah and turn her into one.  She’s desperately in love with Ralph and can’t wait to marry him, she says, but is constantly thinking things like how great it was to be a flight attendant, “a member of the team, just as she had been at the hospital, as she had not been, not really, in Ralph’s office.” But she’s managed to tear herself from his well-groomed side for a few months to step onto the plane, subbing on the job formerly held by her old friend and wife of the pilot Paul Fergis; Jenny Fergis is pregnant, and so grounded. It’s Sarah’s third day on the job when this particular flight takes off from Killmoose to Tanacross, and not half an hour into the flight, one of the passengers steps into the cockpit with a revolver and knocks out Al Malcolm, the co-pilot.

Back at air control, the radio is blasting reports of three men who crashed a stolen Cessna near Killmoose and haven’t been seen since. The men are wanted for questioning in the attempted sabotage of one of the United States’ Distant Early Warning bases in far northern Alaska—these would be the bases where, during the Cold War, people sat around and watched the skies for incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, so they could call home and say goodbye before the missiles arrived on American soil. The air traffic folks instantly recognize from the descriptions that these guys are on Sarah’s flight!! Now everyone is combing the Alaskan wilds, but it’s a lot of ground to cover, so things are looking grim…

Meanwhile, the gun-toting head basher puts the plane down in a clearing hundreds of miles off course and hustles everyone except his two co-conspirators off the plane, then takes off again. So now the story’s narrative jumps from the worried air controllers listening to the news, to the passengers trying to survive in dilapidated miners’ cabins in the woods, to Paul Fergis and a passenger who have set off through the Alaskan winter to try to find help. As the passengers trap rabbits and build bedding out of spruce boughs, Al Malcolm is increasingly warming the cockles of Sarah’s heart, though she tries again and again to remind herself that “she was in love with Ralph, she was going to marry him—to her Al Malcolm could be no more than Paul Fergis’s co-pilot.” But there’s just the small problem that Ralph is a philandering ass, and is never set up to be anything but, even to Sarah: “Sarah wished she could think of Ralph Porter without something unpleasant nudging into her mind,” she thinks before we’re a quarter of the way through the book—“Why did she keep thinking of Ralph? Remembering things that made her slightly sick at her stomach.” I wonder how everything is going to turn out?

Of course, the passengers that the bad guys have been kind enough to abandon rather than simply murder outright are prone to all sorts of health issues.  Needless to say, everything turns out swimmingly for the stranded passengers, who have the capable Sarah to steer them through their medical crises, though she is inclined to a hysterical interior monologue: “Oh, God, Sarah thought. Suppose something is going wrong?” she wonders when she’s delivering a baby, which despite her fears—“Oh, God! Was the baby stillborn? After all this—” is perfectly healthy, only now she’s got to concoct something else to worry about, like the baby catching “pneumonia, here—” But it doesn’t, so on to the next emergency: One man, unfortunately named George Jefferson, develops right lower quadrant pain and “Sarah’s breath caught in her throat. Not appendicitis! Please, God, don’t let it be appendicitis.” But it is, and now we have pages of watching George’s temperature rise: “Four-tenths in an hour? Oh, God!” But she convinces Al Malcolm to assist her with the surgery, which she pulls off effortlessly in 43 minutes. Now she’s worried that she’ll go to jail: “What would they call it, practicing surgery without a license? Or—or criminal negligence?” For crying out loud, someone get this woman a Xanax!

Eventually the two men wandering the wilderness are spotted by a rescue plane, the party in the woods is whisked back to civilization, George Jefferson recovers easily and reveals that he is actually an FBI agent assigned to nab the bad guys who hijacked the plane—not a very good one, it seems—and the bad guys, not being very good pilots, are discovered to have crashed the second plane as well and killed themselves in the process. Sarah finds she’s not going to jail or lose her job, and that she does not love Ralph after all. Not to worry, though, someone else is waiting to offer her marriage on the last page, and then—oh, God!—we can finally close the book.

Nurse in Las Vegas

By Jane Converse, ©1975

Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Lana was never sure if she had taken the Prince case because of the lure of Hollywood and Las Vegas, or because Dr. Gil Whitaker had practically forbidden her to get involved. But what started out as an uncomplicated case and a chance to be near the doctor she loved turned into a nightmare. Her patient, famed comedian Reggie Prince, decided he wanted a closer relationship with Lana than medical rules required. And he certainly was a charming host, surrounding her with the glamour of TV, nightclubs, and posh estates. But nothing seemed to work out right. As Reggie’s attentions increased, Gil seemed to content to drop out of the picture. Was she doomed to lose the man she loved over a one-sided flirtation with a Hollywood Romeo…?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“A thing doesn’t hurt any less because it’s trite.”

“If this is what the doctor ordered, I’m ready to cooperate.”

“She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, a sultry siren-type who had taken on pounds along with years and was now desperately trying, with the aid of cosmetics and an expensive, hopefully slimming pants suit, to fight the battle against middle age.”

REVIEW:

Our heroine, Lana Stafford RN, is a dope. She’s in love with Dr. Gil Whitaker, who operates a specialty practice, treating patients who are movie stars, writers, and television personalities. He’s gone to lunch with her a few times and once to the movies, but he just hasn’t demonstrated any real interest, damn the man. Then Lana learns of a private duty job caring for one of his patients, fading comedian Reggie Prince, and decides to apply for the job, just so she will be able to see Gil from time to time … and, just maybe, “in a glittering atmosphere, not hushed and subdued and miserable, where she wasn’t overworked empathizing with a dying patient, he would see her in a different light.” Gil takes her to dinner in an attempt to talk her out of the job, calling her childish and naïve to think that caring for this allegedly glamorous personality will be anything but hell on wheels. But she insists until, “half irate,” he agrees to take her to meet Reggie Prince to see how awful he really is.

At Reggie’s monstrous, Grecian-style mansion, the Prince puts on quite a show, screaming at his employees and discussing the merits of rose-hip tea and ocean kelp diets with Gil. The doctor, the only one in the room with any sense, suggests that instead of dieting, Reggie should stop drinking, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, and popping benzos, but Reggie seems less than interested in this advice. So naturally Lana decides to take the job, because “it would be fun, going to Vegas, being around during the filming of a TV special,” even though Gil is livid that she has disregarded his advice. Maybe not the best way to win his affection, but that’s just my opinion. Curiously, Lana seems bewildered that Gil doesn’t kiss her goodnight when he drops her off.

On the job, she finds she has little to do except lie around the pool and unsuccessfully attempt to persuade Reggie to stop drinking, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, and popping benzos. Despite his utter disregard for her advice, and his increasing regard for her figure, Lana adopts a protective attitude toward him, suggesting to his ex-wife and current girlfriend that Reggie is “wound up like a clock spring,” and doesn’t need them “hassling him about whatever it is that’s annoying you.” This does not win her any friends, needless to say, and it’s also rather inexplicable, as there is really nothing at all in this character to arouse pity.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the story involves watching Reggie wind himself and his staff into increasing frenzies as they prepare for the taping of a TV special that they are writing and producing. Reggie is in dire straits, it turns out, and the special is intended to revive his wilting career. Lana feels increasingly sorry for him, despite his abusive and self-destructive behavior, and continues to feel puzzled and hurt that Gil is cold and distant. Neither of her attitudes toward these men is in the least bit comprehensible, which makes the book seem a lot longer than it actually is.

Eventually Reggie and his motley staff head for Las Vegas to tape his show. Given the hysteria Reggie has worked himself into, it is small wonder that the show is a complete flop. Lana, oddly, lies to him and tells him how great he was—she’s traded in the role of nurse for that of major enabler. Then Reggie starts gambling heavily with three vicious-looking sharks, and when the big loss comes, Reggie literally hustles Lana out the back door onto a private jet that takes them to his ranch in Texas. The rest of the gang catches up a few days later, scared and pissed off, and Reggie’s business manager has been beaten to a pulp to boot. Turns out Reggie’s in the hole for $150,000 and has 48 hours to pay or he’ll be fish food—but naturally he’s in debt up to his bloodshot eyeballs and can’t come up with the dough. When the thugs finally track Reggie down, they’re not too happy, and one of Reggie’s party is murdered. Lana is kidnapped so they can “dispose of the witness”—though they could have just killed her on the spot—but before they have a chance to do her in, the cops track them down, shoot up the car, and rescue Lana, miraculously unhurt. Reggie is carted off to the psychiatric ward, and Lana has two pages at the end to admit how wrong she was to not do as Gil had asked. And listen to his admonishments: “Like, when you promise to love, honor, and cherish, that’s not the end of the line. You’ll have to listen to my advice. When I think I know what’s good for you, you’ll have to pay attention,” he tells her, and not at all smugly, either.

Jane Converse does enjoy the over-the-top Hollywood character, but Reggie is just an abusive ass, unpleasant to read about. Lana’s inexplicable concern for him and immediate enlistment as enabler-in-chief makes the book even less enjoyable. Jane Converse will always occupy a tender place in my heart, largely for her magnificent Surf Safari Nurse, but this was just not one of her better efforts, and I suggest that you leave Las Vegas behind.