The new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries has arrived, bringing with it my long promised review of W.E.D. Ross's Lust Planet (1962), Canada's very first work of science fiction erotica. I found the novel every bit as good as expected.
Collectors of Canadian literature are advised to pick up this France' Book – oddly-named imprint of Hollywood's International Publications – while they still can. As I write, I see just one copy listed for sale online. To those requiring further enticement, I offer this: something I neglected to mention in the review is that Lust Planet features three intriguing illustrations. Intriguing because they have no connection at all with the text.
In addition to the cover and design, Seth reflects on CANADA official handbooks of days gone by (including this one): "I find these books fascinating, in a doctor's office kind of way. They have a sort of sublime dullness about them. A quality hard to put into words. Pleasing. Comforting. Sleep-inducing."
Editor Emily Donaldson not only put the whole thing together, she contributed a review of David Chariandy's Brother.
This issue marks the second time I've shared pages with John Metcalf. Friends will recognize how much this means to me. Coincidentally, it was through John that I first learned of W.E.D. Ross.
Much of this past weekend was spent reading Backstage Nurse, a W.E.D. Ross novel published in 1963 under his "Judith Rossiter" pseudonym. The book is 220 pages long, the print is of good size, and yet I'm nowhere near finished. I'm taking time to pause and consider because Backstage Nurse is my first nurse novel. By great coincidence, it was also the author's first nurse novel. He went on to write fifty-six more.
Rightly or wrongly, I've always associated the subgenre with Harlequin. However, if the back cover of Backstage Nurse is anything to go by, it had some pretty significant competition.
Must say, Jane Corby's Staff Nurse doesn't do much for me, but doesn't Dr. Jeffrey's Awakening sound interesting? And what about Jane Arden, Space Nurse?
Sadly, Avalon is no more; Amazon bought it for its backlist in 2012. Its last nurse novels – Everglades Nurse and Nurse Misty's Magic – were published in 1987, by which point the Harlequin nurse novel was long a thing of the past.
The rise and fall of the Harlequin nurse novel is reflected in this bar graph I put together over the weekend:
cliquez pour agrandir
I do like a good bar graph – "an understatement," says my eye-rolling wife – but this one doesn't give a complete picture. As with Avalon's "NURSE STORIES" – Susan Lennox's Doctor's Choice, for example – not all nurse novels published by Harlequin had "Nurse" in the title. "Hospital" featured frequently, and "Surgeon" sometimes, but the most prominent after "Nurse" was "Doctor."
As I've discovered, more often than not, doctors are the object of a nurses longing.
Interestingly, the first doctor to appear in a book published by Harlequin was a woman; the beautifully-named Serenity Parrish, heroine of Joseph McCord's His Wife the Doctor(1949), the publisher's thirteenth title. No longing nurse in this one, sadly.
The first nurse as heroine doesn't appear until Registered Nurse by Carl Sturdy (Charles Stanley Strong), which was published in 1950 as Harlequin's forty-seventh book.
As far as I've been able to determine, the heyday came in 1961, which saw forty-eight Harlequins featuring nurses as the main character.
The last new Harlequin to feature "Nurse" in the title was Roumelia Lane's Nurse at Noongwalla, which hit the racks in January 1974:
Alex had always been fascinated by Australia and went out there from England to get a job as a nurse.
There she met the autocratic boss of a logging camp, Grant Mitchell, who told her, "There's no padding around in this job, Miss Leighton. Just dust and drought and a twenty-four-hour day."
She would show him she wasn't scared of hard work, or of him!
And she did. She showed him.
Curiously, in the early 'eighties, Harlequin revived several of it's old nurse titles – General Duty Nurse, Queen's Nurse, Resident Nurse, Nurse Barlowe, Nurse Templar, Nurse Aide, Nurse in White, Nurse of All Work, A Nurse is Born, Nurses Are People,The Nurse Most Likely, and Staff Nurse (not Avalon's Jane Corby classic) – in its short-lived Harlequin Classics Library and even shorter-lived Harlequin Celebrates series.
Meanwhile, across the pond, the nurse novel continued on without a hiccup in Harlequin's Mill & Boon imprint. It does to this day in M&B's Medical Romance series. Released just last year, my favourite title is Kate Hardy's Mummy, Nurse... Duchess?:
The duke and the single mom!
Nurse Rosie Hobbes knows charming men cannot be trusted. Visiting pediatrician and sexy Italian duke Dr. Leo Marchetti is surely no exception! Her toddler twins are now the centre of her life, and she expects Leo to run a mile when he meets them. Instead his warmth leaves her breathless!
Not just a doctor, but a duke. Sexy to boot! Looks like he showed her!
Are we on the cusp seeing a nurse novel revival? I ask because select titles in the Medical Romance series have begun appearing in Canada, though only in bastardized "LARGER PRINT" editions.
Yes, bastardized.
Look what they've done to Mummy, Nurse... Duchess?
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
