Steamy Saturday
"Nurse Sue Conner . . . was desperately in love with the man her sister had come home to win!"
"Sue was the serious and sensible type. . . ."
". . . no man would look at her twice while her sister was around."
". . . all those doctors and not a single one for her!"
"Yet everything changed when handsome David Wakefield came into their lives."
"If only she could stop thinking about him."
"Oh, David, please, don't marry Marsha!"
In Nurse Sue's Romance, by the prolific American romance novelist Arlene Hale (1924-1982), published by Ace Books in 1964 (ours is a 1975 reprint), plain Sue Conner is always playing second fiddle to her absurdly glamorous sister Marsha, particularly in matters of love. The sisters return together to their hometown of Point Pleasant and spend the rest of the novel competing for the affections of Marsha's old flame David Wakefield, whose wife Sandra has recently and conveniently died. Who will win the day? There's really not much of a plot here, and of course the title itself already tells you how this is going to end: "'I love you Sue Conner. I sometimes think I've always loved you, even before Sandra -- even when I thought it was Marsha. . . .' 'Oh David -- . . . Home is here in your arms.'" Yawn.
Arlene Hale herself never married and died young. But she was a workaholic and churned out over 100 romance novels, most in the nurse romance genre. She wrote three to four novels a year and was disciplined about it. "When I write, I begin at 8 o'clock and quit at 5," she said. She tried to write one chapter per day, five days a week. Maybe that's why Nurse Sue's Romance, while pleasant enough, has no zest. It does have semi-hot cover art by American illustrator Uldis Klavin (b. 1935), however.
View other nurse romance novels.
View other pulp fiction posts.
