Reviews: Internes Can't Take Money/Whiskey Sour - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

I often have spells when I can’t summon up the energy and attention span to read novels. One of those spells, combined with the urge to read something by Max Brand (Frederick Faust), one of my favorite authors, served to remind me that I’d never read “Internes Can’t Take Money”, the short story that introduced his famous character Dr. Kildare. It appeared originally in the March 1936 issue of the slick magazine COSMOPOLITAN and was made into a movie starring one of my favorite actors, Joel McCrea.

Dr. Jimmy Kildare is an interne who works at a famous hospital, assigned to the emergency room. As an interne, he receives no salary and actually lives in spartan quarters at the hospital. The only times he gets out are when he occasionally visits a nearby tavern for a couple of quick beers.

However, the tavern is owned by a powerful local politician/criminal, and it’s frequented by gangsters and strongarm men, one of whom shows up one evening with a bad knife wound in his arm that he suffered in a fight with a rival mobster. Kildare happens to be there, so against his better judgment he performs emergency surgery on the yegg and saves the use of his arm, if not his life.

That earns Kildare the respect of these denizens of the underworld, who try to turn him into a mob doctor. This creates quite a conflict for the morally upright but somewhat pragmatic Jimmy Kildare, who’s from a poor farming family and has nothing going for him except his medical talent, which is considerable.

As usual with Faust’s work, the writing in this story is very good. The guy could really turn a phrase. It’s full of colorful characters and the pace barrels along nicely. Jimmy Kildare is an excellent protagonist. I raced through this story and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I had such a good time reading it, in fact, that I immediately read “Whiskey Sour”, the second yarn starring Dr. Jimmy Kildare, which was published in the April 1938 issue of COSMOPOLITAN. In this one, Kildare is still mixed up with some of the same shady characters as in the previous story. When a man comes into the emergency room, or the “accident room”, as Faust calls it, with a gunshot wound, Kildare is plunged into another moral dilemma that’s complicated by the involvement of a beautiful redhead who has a secret. This is another really fine, fast-moving tale with a lot of good lines and some genuine suspense. Maybe not quite as good as “Internes Can’t Take Money” but almost.

These are the only two stories to feature this particular version of Dr. Kildare. The movie adaptation of “Internes Can’t Take Money” mentioned above was made by Paramount, but that was the only story to which they had the rights. Faust sold the character to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and MGM wanted some changes. Faust, being the good freelance writer he was, said sure and rebooted the series beginning with the novel YOUNG DR. KILDARE, which was serialized in ARGOSY late in 1938 before being published as a book by Dodd, Mead in 1940. Faust followed that with five more novels and two novellas about Dr. Kildare. I read one of the novels about forty years ago and recall enjoying it quite a bit, but I don’t remember which one it was. Might be time to just start with YOUNG DR. KILDARE and read all of them, since they’re short and move fast.

“Internes Can’t Take Money” was reprinted in THE COLLECTED STORIES OF MAX BRAND from the University of Nebraska Press in 1994. “Whiskey Sour” hasn’t been reprinted, officially. But you can find both of these stories on-line if you know where to look, and I think they’re well worth reading. Faust’s greatest success, by far, was with Westerns, but I think his talents were very well-suited to contemporary yarns as well, and I’m thinking I might just try more of them while I’m stuck in this novel-reading funk.