Calling Dr. Kildare by Max Brand

Calling Dr. Kildare is the second in the series from Max Brand. He is best known for his hundreds of Western novels, the most popular being Destry Rides Again. There were eight novels in the Dr. Kildare series beginning in 1940 with Young Dr. Kildare and finishing in 1943.

Kildare was such a popular series, it was made into a long running MGM movies series, radio programs, comics, and the TV series that ran for 5 seasons in the early 1960's making Richard Chamberlain a star.

In Calling Dr. Kildare, he has left his family home to work in a metropolitan hospital with the brilliant Dr. Gillespie who is slowly dying. Kildare has been chosen to work under the irascible Doctor and receive his vast knowledge. Gillespie has looked for twenty-five years for the perfect candidate and he believes Kildare is it. It's a great position, but the stress of it causes Kildare to be a real jerk to everyone, ignoring his family and reducing nurses to tears. He has a hard time looking past the symptoms to the heart of the patient which angers Gillespie and he's fired - demoted to work in the dispensary. Gaining public trust, he is asked to help a young gunshot victim in the cellar of a nearby house. Doing so without alerting the police means losing his license to practice, but he cannot turn a blind eye. How he operates on the patient and returns to the hospital, indeed restoring his name and solving the crime is an enjoyable tale.

I was really impressed with the writing style. Sparse, but with poetic moments I didn't expect. Speaking of the victim's beautiful sister Rosalie, he says "what he had from her was not a visual image but an intangible emotion such as music gives us when the pleasure is remembered but the notes forgotten." There are gems sprinkled throughout out the book that elevate the read. On the other side, his descriptions of giving makeshift blood transfusions made me wince when the needle went in.

Max Brand is the pseudonym of Frederick Schiller Faust, who wrote under about 10 other names. So popular were his Western serials that sometimes a magazine would come out with 4 or 5 of his stories in one issue under different names! In the 1920's he wrote serial westerns, by the late 1930's he was in Hollywood where Warner Brothers paid him $3,000 a week (a normal man's yearly salary).

Besides Zane Grey, the Westerns section of your bookstore is probably packed with Max Brand novels. One of the most prolific writers of all time, he wrote more than 500 novels and many short stories - His literary output is estimated between 25 and 30 million words! New books based on unpublished work and magazine serials are still being published, so that he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Some work by him is reprinted every week, somewhere in the world.

The copy I read was published by Triangle Books in the 40's, with it's tanned pages and pulpy paper, a pleasure to read.

1940 / Hardcover / 223 pages