When The Devil Was Sick

[from inside flap of Grosset & Dunlap dj]

Trumbull's nerves were shot to pieces and his doctor had prescribed a sea-trip. But Trumbull didn't want to go. His interests were centered on a young lady in the Adirondack Mountains. Trumbull engaged his old classmate Trask to go in his place. And so begins this mad masquerade. If he was to impersonate a sick man, he'd really be sick. He'd fool doctors and nurses alike.

The day comes when Trask gets tired of the sham. He wants to get well. He wants to walk the decks and dance with the adventure girl. But hovering over him is the brawny might of his male nurse, the ex-prize fighter Keller. Keeler is gentle, but Keeler is firm.

Imagine all the humorous situations that might arise in such a case, and you won't imagine half that E. J. Rath has put into this story.

Biographical aside: E. J. Rath was the pseudonym of the wife and husband writing team, Edith Rathbone Jacobs Brainerd and Chauncey Corey Brainerd. They wrote a number of light, humorous romance novels in the teens, several of which were made into movies, and died in the Knickerbocker Theatre Collapse of Jan 28, 1922, which remains one of the deadliest disasters in Washington DC history, and the third deadliest structural engineering failure in US History.

All of E. J. Rath's novels I've read so far have been entertaining, with lively, gender-stereotype-defying female (and sometimes male) leads, and a bit of the unexpected thrown in elsewhere. When The Devil, posthumously published in 1926, isn't their best (imo, that would be Sam): it goes on a few chapters too long, and feels like maybe they intended another edit, but it's still fun. The girl who's obsessed with the Great War (wishes she'd been a nurse, romanticizes invalidism) has me wondering whether that was actually a thing? And her state-socialism-supporting dragon of an aunt Mehitebel is a hoot.