Collecting Book

Duty Nurse

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1968

Cover illustration by David Blossom

The girl in room 17 was so young and lovely and had so little time left. How could the doctor deny her anything ... even himself? The duty nurse was kind and wise beyond her years. Could she deny her tragic patient anything ... even the man she herself loved?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“She is a woman. That’s the first thing I noticed about her.”

“Probin is like all hospitals, it doesn’t believe in encouraging its interns by overpaying them.”

“The guy has his good points. He’s asked me twice for a date.”

“You had to use psychology if you wanted a date with a girl like Sandra.”

“A man needs the kind of incentive only a wife can give him.”

“Jim Macauley was very immature, even for an intern. And that was saying plenty.”

REVIEW:

It is hard for me to believe that Richard Wilkes-Hunter actually penned this book. Only one solitary reference to a patient’s “firm young breasts” gave any indication that it just might be his work, after all. At book’s open, nurse Sandra Bethune is arriving at Probin Memorial Hospital in San Francisco for her new job. The cab in front of hers also sports a new addition to the medical staff: Dr. Peter Stewart: single, 26, and hot. And he likes the looks of Sandra, too: “When I marry it will be to a woman who looks like her, with a pale olive complexion and black hair that always looks freshly brushed, with a natural sheen of youth and health.” Frankly, I was looking for someone intelligent and kind when I married, but then, a good disposition may be highly overrated. In any case, Sandra is safe for a bit, as Dr. Stewart has planned to wait another two years “before he could afford to marry a girl, in the way he wanted.” These young doctors always talk about getting married like it’s picking up a loaf of bread at the supermarket. But we know how those plans are going to turn out, don’t we?

The two are thrown together right away when they are both caring for a new patient, Ava Sindell, who is 22 and admitted for anemia. We’re just waiting for her to give a cough to indicate that it’s a fatal illness, but Dr. Stewart’s thorough physical exam turns up an enlarged spleen, bleeding gums, and swollen lymph nodes, which will work even better. It’s too bad, because she’s so pretty, and legitimately quick-witted, smart, and sweet—for once a character’s actual behavior coincides with how other people describe her—but she’s got leukemia, which was fatal in those days. Unfortunately, the doctors and Ava’s family conspire not to tell her about it, so as not to destroy her hope or ruin her last month of life. I’m sure she won’t wonder why she needs all the steroids and blood transfusions, or why she keeps passing out.

Early on, Peter toys with the idea of asking Sandra out, but by the time he gets around to it, she’s accepted a date with someone else. Now Peter is certain that he’s lost his chance with her, even though she doesn’t really like this other man, and drops him after he becomes petulant and demanding. “That was the trouble with men, she thought. You went out with one a couple of times and soon he became over-possessive and thought he owned you.” For his part, Peter starts going out with Ava—at first, just to keep an eye on her after she’s been discharged so as to keep her from overdoing it and blowing her remission—but he quickly comes to care for her, and she easily reciprocates the feeling. And Sandra is left thinking that she’s lost Peter, all the while feeling rather conflicted about it, realizing this is her young patient’s only chance for love (cue the violins).

It’s clear from the beginning how this story is going to play out, but it’s told honestly and (I dare to say it) tenderly. Sandra is a strong, clear-eyed, intelligent woman, unlike any I’ve ever met in a Wilkes-Hunter novel, who firmly tells her would-be beau, as he rather nastily pressures her to marry him on their third date (being married to her would help him relax, he says), “It took me years of study and hard work to become a registered nurse and I wouldn’t give that up lightly.” Ava, too, is not so dumb that she doesn’t understand what’s really going on, and even Peter is a nice guy. There’s a bit of humor here, some unintentional (Sandra’s roommate is named Nancy Drew), and the writing is perfectly sound. Again, it is really hard to believe that this book could have been written by the same man who brought us the D-rated Resort Nurse, not to mention his seven other books of varying shades of C, because I have never seen even a hint of sensitivity or feeling in any of the other books written by him that I have read. But fluke or ghost-written, this is a lovely book.

Nurse of Polka Dot Island

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.

San Francisco Nurse

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

As a nurse, Bret Ames had always dreamed of marrying a doctor, yet when handsome Dr. Nels Larson proposed, she began to have her doubts. Strong, yet gentle, he was the kind of man a girl could lean on. But that was just the trouble. Was he too self-sufficient? Somehow she found herself irresistibly drawn to Dick Travers who needed her care and her love, but who belonged to another woman.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“He’s under sixty and male—that makes him just your type.”

“Half of you is twice as much as any other woman.”

“I won’t deny your husband’s obvious charms, but charms were meant for bracelets, not marriage.”

“Why is it that the unhappy people of this world hold so much power over the happiness of others?”

“How those smashing waves and rough rocks must be torturing his tender stumps!”

“I didn’t lose my head, just my legs.”

REVIEW:

I’ve waited a while for a nurse novel as campy as this one—and camp is something I hold quite dear. So it is with disappointment that I must declare that as much as I wanted to adore this book, the story line just couldn’t match the zingy one-liners. Besides, I was disappointed that a novel called San Francisco Nurse gave us little apart from a dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf—where only tourists venture—of that fine city.

When Chief of Nurses Bret Ames first claps eyes on Dick Travers, he is a “sour apple.” In for a nephrectomy after stones destroyed his kidney, he is as mean as they come—and now, with just one kidney, “only half a man,” he despairs. But she has a way with these types, and so she gladly takes on the challenge of trying to perk him up. Darn it, though, he is just so stubborn! “Look, Little Miss Sunshine,” he snaps at her, “you can save the routine for vaudeville, it may come back some day and you’ll need it.” You can see why after just a couple of minutes of his bitterness, she’s ready to throw in the towel, and not just because “she felt piqued at being so thoroughly ignored. There was no admiration in those dark eyes when he looked at her tall, well-distributed figure.” The nerve!

She soon finds out what his problem is—it’s Virginia Travers, Dick’s malevolent wife, who drove him to the brink of bankruptcy, left him for a wealthier man, and then nearly ruined his reputation when she found out he was in love with one of his graduate students. Her sugar daddy played out and the grad student long frightened away, she’s returned to Dick’s side, insisting he take her back. “I know now what his trouble is—a she-devil wife,” Bret concludes.

Under the terrible strain of his loss of manhood and the return of his evil wife, Dick refuses to smile for Bret. She eventually loses her cool with him, calls him—to his face!—an “ungrateful sour apple,” and then surprisingly kisses him full on the lips. “Dear God, I’m in love with him! Completely, crazily in love!” Bret thinks to herself. And so we have yet another dopey heroine falling for a man who has been nothing but mean to her. It isn’t too long before he’s taking her in his arms and kissing her, but given the Mrs. stomping around the hospital on her stilettos, those scenes are few and followed by guilty quarrels, as Dick sees no way out of his marriage.

So, in an attempt to cool her jets, Bret oddly decides to go visit Mrs. Travers at her home on the Berkeley campus of State University (and times have certainly changed; she drives across the Bay Bridge at 35 mph and is not killed, and the toll is 25 cents—now it’s $6 during rush hour). There, she tells Mrs. Travers that she is going to marry Dr. Nels Larsen, a fabulous doctor and all-around swell guy. “Self-possessed, he needed no one’s reassurance or approbation,” she thinks of Nels on their second date. “She would never lose her identity as Nels’ wife. He would not demand that her every waking thought be devoted to him—he did not need that kind of reassurance.” Sounds like a peach! Naturally she’ll never be able to love him.

When Dick finds out about this, though—and Bret is oddly shocked and furious that the Mrs. should pass along the 411 about the engagement to her spouse—Dick turns right back into that sour apple. He’s nasty, cruel, and shows up at Bret’s engagement party to slap her with the news that he got divorced four days ago—it apparently not crossing his mind to let her know before the announcement party—and chews her out for not waiting for him, when he gave her no reason whatsoever to do so. He also dares to say that “Nels will never give you the chance to be yourself,” when this is the opposite of what Bret had thought of him. “Nels needs nothing from you to make him a man!” he claims, and then clubs her with his parting shot: “I became a man for you. But I overrated your courage by asking you to be a woman for me.” Whatever that means, it completely overlooks his effeminate lack of kidney.

But now all we have left is to undo the engagement between Nels and Bret and all will be right. For your further enjoyment, there’s a side plot about a young man whose legs had to be amputated after a car crash, his engagement to a nurse friend of Bret’s, and his insistence that he cannot marry Sue unless he, too, can “be a man,” even with mere stumps for legs. I’m not sure what all this manliness is all about and why it’s so important to the gents in this book, but it really doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble for them or for their lady friends.

I was also not impressed at the way Nels is built up as a great guy in the beginning of the book, only to be depicted as a completely different man when Bret needs to dump him. His character change lets Bret off the hook too easily; she should have to man up herself, acknowledging the simple truth that she can’t marry Nels because she loves someone else, regardless of what an ass that man is, and not pretend her fickleness is due to any alleged flaw Nels possesses. She neither has to make any effort to go after Dick, because the very second she decides that she’s through with Nels, Dick’s hand drops on her shoulder. So while the zingers are hilarious fun, and these alone make San Francisco Nurse worth reading, the plotting just doesn’t have the backbone to carry this book to the top of the mark.

City Doctor

By Thomas Stone
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1951

Sometimes working with Philip was more than Jane could bear. She admired him as a doctor; she loved him as a man. But Philip preferred women like Cynthia—Sin for short. So Jane worked with him day after day, while his nights belonged to Cynthia, until that night when Jane found herself in desperate trouble, trouble that would smear her over the front page and wreck her career. No one could help but Philip, and to help her she must make him see her as a woman. … Here is a dramatic, behind-the-scenes story of the medical profession—the private lives of some of those men and women in white.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“His patients practically never had the bad manners to die on him.”

“I play no favorites,” Phil sometimes said, when a woman asked him if he preferred blondes, or what. “All I demand of my gals is that they know how to hold their liquor, mean that come-hither look in their eye, and that I’m the one man in their life, as long as I’m holding them in my arms.”

“San Francisco is my first and truest love. But the old city is really quite a trollop, you know. She was conceived in abandoned sin. The miners came in Forty-Nine, the gals in Fifty-One. And when you think of the lovers she’s had since—show me a two-fisted, hard-drinking man who hasn’t loved San Francisco—she’s really quite the scarlet hussy. And still going strong, after nearly a hundred years.”

“Mrs. Lambert does so enjoy being ‘examined’ by you.”

“Too many casual dates leading up to a casual week-end was the most effective way to turn an efficient nurse into a darned nuisance.”

“I think women who go in for being reforming influences in other people’s lives should be drowned at birth, don’t you?”

“Every attractive woman should take time out for love now and again. It keeps you young, helps the circulation, and it’s very broadening. Don’t you want to be broadened?”

“Her hold on him was like the hold liquor gets on a man. The more you had, the more you wanted.”

“You’d be surprised how fast a lady can turn into a tramp.”

“Haven’t I told you your little iceberg of a nurse could be had, if you put your mind to it?”

“I’m not sure you’ll rate so high as a lover, without a few shots of liquor to start you off. Look at you tonight—about as passionate as an ossified oyster.”

“The women men respect are usually dull, stolid creatures with low blood pressure.”

“That breath of yours is strong enough to wipe out a Nazi division.”

“You make a lover sound like these one-a-day vitamin tablets they advertise on the radio. Are you feeling low, depressed, suffering from an energy deficiency; is it hard for you to get started in the morning; are you exhausted when night comes? Then take a lover a day, and you’ll be astonished at the quick pick-ups. Lovers are priced very reasonably and you can find one at your nearest corner drug store.”

“Youth tears itself apart over things that were very unimportant. But only age teaches you this. Nothing else can teach it to you.”

“Women are all alike, under the skin—all wenches. A man hasn’t got a chance.”

“This is a swell drink, baby. There are a lot of things you don’t understand. But how to make drinks isn’t one of them.”

“The minute a dame gets a hold on a guy, she figures she’s got to start doing things about his life.”

“Oh, it’s love all right, because I’ve lost my appetite. No other man ever did that to me before.”

REVIEW:

It is with great joy that I offer you the best nurse novel I have read all year, and once again loudly proclaim Florence Stonebraker’s genius. Not only is this a picture of a relationship that feels profoundly true at its heart even as it dolls itself up in a campy sequined dress and feather boa, but this hard-boiled yet gentle story is as much a romance with the city of San Francisco. So if you think that fabled metropolis is the greatest on earth, as I do, you will be greatly pleased by all the references to local landmarks as well as passages such as: “Phil got up and walked to the window. He lit a cigarette and stood there staring down into the steady drizzle which sprayed the city below, wrapping it in mist. It looked beautiful. Rains, sun, or fog—San Francisco was eternally beautiful. It was forever a dream city.”

Jane Walters is a 24-year-old nurse who has worked for two years in the office of Dr. Philip Hastings, located on Sutter Street. (In real life, Florence’s husband William also had an office on Sutter Street, in 1933, just before he left his second wife and ran off to marry Florence. But that’s another story.) Philip has a high-profile and profitable practice of “wealthy idle women whose ailments, in a sense, were one of their sources of amusement.” They summon the good doctor to administer a nightcap when they can’t sleep, wink, wink. Philip is, in other words, a slut.

His problem, as the book opens, is that “he was sick of it, to his soul. He was sick of money that he hadn’t really earned. He was sick of the kind of life he’d been living; being a fashionable, high-priced doctor by day, a playboy by night.” Worst of all, he’s been rejected by the Army because he has gastric ulcers, brought on by too much drinking. “It wouldn’t, of course, be some sturdy, he-man disease that could kill a fellow off, something he needn’t be ashamed of, but ulcers,” he says of his diagnosis. This rejection has made him dwell on past failures, such as how he was drummed out of a career in—what else?—surgery, due to a little confusion about his relationship with his mentor’s wife, a situation in which he was, for once, actually innocent.

So, maudlin and full of self-pity, he ventures back to the office after a five-day bender that included extended visits to Dizzy Dick’s and several fistfights resulting in a black eye, and tells Jane to tell Mrs. Lambert with the liver condition, who thinks she’s “turning yellow all over,” to “change her brand of whiskey.” Jane, though she recognizes that her boss is not quite right, adds to his misery by telling him that she’s leaving his employ, because “there’s work to be done in the world these days. Real work. I can’t go on any longer playing at work.” Jane’s not cruel, she’s just sees what he really needs: “Pity would be the worst thing in the world for him. What he needed most was to be prodded into standing up to reality and doing a little grappling with it.” So she gives him a few straight facts about himself, and instead of firing her, he asks her to lunch, the first time he has shown any personal interest in her. “You’re the first woman who ever talked to me like that,” he tells her. “You’ve been like a tonic to me.”

They go to lunch in Chinatown, he begs her to stay, she accepts. We spend a long afternoon eavesdropping on their conversation, and Phil tries to tell Jane, in a clumsy, honest way, that he’s fallen in love with her. But their new-found romance isn’t going to be so easy. Phil’s most frequent “lovely” is Cynthia Bolton—Sin for short—“a black-chiffon-negligee type of gal,” married to a famous war pilot who was blinded in battle and is now recovering in Palm Springs. She has taken Phil “as a lover,” which is unusual in that these novels very rarely ever give anyone a sex life. And in this case, Cynthia “had more stark physical attraction for him than any woman he’d ever kissed.” But now that he’s found Jane, “there was something flat to it. Somehow, it wasn’t as wonderful as it used to be.” He tries to break it off with Cynthia, but she refuses to go quietly, and tells him that she will tell her husband that she wants a divorce to marry Phil, which will splash his name all over the papers—especially after that incident a few years back with the surgeon’s wife, who named Phil in her suicide note before she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge—and he will never work again. Never! So Phil’s stuck with Cynthia for now, but still seeing Jane—they spend the night together in a rented bungalow in Carmel, a first for any VNRN heroine I’ve met.

They have an interesting argument about Phil’s growing jealousy of Jane’s work, which takes her into an aging neighbor’s house in the evenings. Phil hints that Jane is a “tramp,” which the book repeatedly holds up as the worst thing a gal can be, but then he apologizes: “I hate having to share you with other people,” he says. “I hate having to share you with your work. I want you—I want all of you. Men are like that.” Jane responds, “Either your love for me means something, and it includes understanding and friendship and a willingness to share me with the things that are important to my life, including my work—or it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s just another phoney.” Phil is angered by Jane’s response: “If just this once she’d come to him in the meek humility and surrender of love,” he thinks. But she does not! Instead, she quits! Then there’s another little misunderstanding, when Phil finds Jane in the arms of the surgeon who she believes been squelching Phil’s application for a job in surgery at the hospital, which seems like it might be the end of Phil and Jane, but it is Cynthia, oddly, who lets slip a bit of information that puts everything to rights between them. Phil passes his Army physical, and Phil urges Jane to enlist as well, saying, “Between us, the wounded soldiers will be pretty lucky guys. I’ll fix up their busted legs, and you can touch their fevered brows.” Even the ending of this book is cute.

I am immensely pleased with this book. It has it all: humor, camp, good writing, and a heartfelt story. I urge everyone out there to dig up a copy, fix yourself a frosty cocktail, and settle down with this siren in your lap for a glorious evening.

A Nurse Comes Home

When lovely, blonde Elizabeth Lane returned home to San Francisco, she thought she could take up her life just as it had been before. But in the three years the young nurse had been away—years spent as a prisoner of the enemy in Asia—grave changes had taken place. Handsome Doctor Marsh Carson, who had sworn to marry her, now was engaged to the ravishing, yet strangely sinister Karen Russell. Barney Jordan, who had helped Elizabeth survive her harsh captivity, now claimed a debt she felt she could never honestly repay. Then there was the rugged young newspaperman, Scott Alexander, with his probing questions and disturbing attractiveness. And Elizabeth quickly discovered that she herself was no longer the same girl who had gone away, as she struggled to find out what this new person who bore her name should do.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“So you’re a good nurse. Ineed you as a woman. The woman I love!”

“I meant to get down to Dr. Carson’s shindig yesterday, but we had an unexpected polio case brought in, and I was all day on the telephone locating another iron lung.”

“It was Aunt Wilma’s firm conviction that none of this world’s ills struck too deep to be at least mitigated by hot tea and cinnamon toast.”

REVIEW:

As some VNRN authors induce fear and loathing (I’m looking at you, Jeanne Bowman), others land in your lap like a light blue box from Tiffany wrapped in a white satin ribbon. Jean Webb, writing as Ethel Hamill, is most definitely one of the latter; he can write circles around almost everyone else out there. The very first page serves up little prose gems to admire, such as when Nurse Elizabeth Lane is cruising into San Francisco Bay: “San Francisco … She said the name over to herself for perhaps the thousandth time that morning, taking comfort from the syllables as old ladies were supposed to take comfort from a cup of hot tea.”

She’s coming home after two years in a prison camp in Korea to be reunited with Dr. Marsh Carson (one of my ongoing quibbles with VNRNs is the ridiculous names they give to the love interests). Like most fickle fiancés, though, in her absence he’s become engaged to the svelte minx Karen Russell. But the man whom she leaned on during her internment, Barney Jordan, is standing by her side—maybe a little too close for comfort, as he soon professes his deep love for her, leaving her with two fellas to contend with. Actually, make that three—as she steps off the boat, famous photographer Scott Alexander snaps her picture, which is broadcast on front pages across the country. He’s now hounding her for an expanded profile piece with lots of pictures to go with it, so he’s hanging around too. For a malnourished, emotionally scarred wreck, she sure is irresistible to the boys.

Of course, every one of them has obstacles. Marsh is, of course, engaged to someone else, but he does seem to get awfully jealous of the other boys in Elizabeth’s life. “I’m hanged if I’ll let Barney get away with stealing my girl!” he fumes to Elizabeth, totally oblivious the fact that he abandoned any claim he ever may have had on her when he proposed to Karen. Speaking of whom, his fiancée is quite a cat, and she uses her armory of claws to full effect to keep a grip on her man. Part of her efforts in this direction involve uncovering the fact that Barney, before he went to Korea, was a bank robber who skipped out on his parole and has a little prison sentence waiting for him back in Chicago. She is on the verge of spilling this little tidbit—where else?—at Elizabeth’s welcome home party, but Elizabeth cuts her off and announces that she and Barney are engaged, thus saving Barney from jail: As long as Karen’s competition for Marsh’s affections are engaged elsewhere, she’ll keep her lipsticked moue closed. In the meantime, the old judge, who is a longtime friend of Elizabeth’s family, is working to get Barney pardoned in light of his heroics at the Korean prison camp, but it will go a lot easier with a standup nurse like Elizabeth willing, by marrying him, to vouch for his character and to keep him on the straight and narrow.

Scott, meanwhile, is playing the part of the wounded suitor, and though Elizabeth is torn by her feelings for him, she just can’t seem to bring herself to explain the truth of the situation to him and insists that she must go through with the sham marriage to Barney. Everything gets wrapped up tidily in the end, of course, with a crashing finale in the pool cabana that leaves Marsh in a coma. It’s pretty good stuff, but not quite as fabulous as it could have been, I have to say.

Part of the fun for me is the fact that this book is set in San Francisco, the greatest city on the planet. There are references to the usual landmarks, of course, but some surprised me, to wit: “They cut along the edge of Union Square, past a yawning mouth to that amazing underground parking garage for which the whole Square had been torn up and set down again just before the second World War.” All the times I passed by, it never occurred to me to consider that garage with anything akin to wonder.

I also appreciate the fact that after returning home from years of deprivation and torture in the prison camp, Elizabeth and Barney are not laughing and dancing and partying it up. They are haunted by their experiences—and though this is brought up regularly, it is not rubbed in our faces, sensationalized, or irritating. It’s just a fact of their lives. If the complicated web of Elizabeth’s love life is a bit overwrought—and I’m not a big fan of the I-have-to-marry-this-man-even-though-I-love-someone-else plot—the writing is excellent and the characters are well-drawn (with the exception of Elizabeth, who is the weakest of the lot). The most depressing thing about reading this book is that it means I only have four more books by Ethel Hamill left to read.