We have yet another issue of Adam magazine for you, published this month in 1971, with a cover illustrating Dick Love’s story, “Night Nurse.” Generally the magazine’s covers showed literal scenes from the fiction, but this one is more of a composite, with the nurse superimposed atop a scene of earlier violence. The story is about a cop who’s shot multiple times and almost killed, is nursed to health during two months in the hospital, and upon his release tracks down his almost-killer. It has a present-moment framing device in which, first, a shotgun blast tears open a door he’s standing just to one side of, sending his mind into a long reverie about the earlier wounding and recovery, before returning to him crashing through the door and taking down his quarry. The nursing aspect involves some sexual healing, but isn’t cheesy or obvious. Instead, there are weeks of talking at bedside before the deed happens, and the mood and pacing are generally good. So it’s nice work from “Dick Love,” whoever he or she may have been in reality. We have thirty-plus scans below, and those with sharp eyes and good memories will notice British glamour beauty Susan Shaw in the middle pages and again at the end. More from Adam soon.
