A Case of Need

A medical whodunit by the author (writing as Jeffery Hudson): Karen Randall, a young college student, has just bled to death following an abortion. Art Lee, a Chinese-American doctor is accused by her stepmother and thrown in jail. But the man is innocent. He’d seen the girl all right but he’d turned her away on hearing the pregnancy had advanced to 4th month. But then Dr J. D. Randall, Karen’s father, is a powerful man, from a powerful Boston family. And it appears everyone is willing to have Lee pay the price just for having the guts to do some abortions when necessary. It is left to his friend and colleague, Dr John Berry, to take time off work and play detective, trying to find out who did the abortion and so prevent Art’s professional reputation from being ruined by a court trial. He does succeed in the end, but it came at a big cost, of near brain damage following an injury meted out to him by Roman Jones, one of the key players in Karen’s abortion. The racial animosity wrongly aroused by the case—culminating in a mob attack at Lee’s home, burning a cross and throwing stones shattering window glass and injuring Lee’s kids—meant Lee had to relocate back to California after his release.

Dr Berry’s investigation turned up a lot of shocking secrets about Karen and her family: She was a rebellious girl who hated her father; her father had been promiscuous and unfaithful to her mother even before she died; her stepmother Ev was having an affair with Peter, Karen’s uncle; and Peter himself also did abortions, including three for Karen, while Lee once aborted Mrs Randall his accuser. There are a lot of medical terms, and footnotes and an appendix to discuss them and other related issues.

Being written in the sixties, blacks were called Negroes, and the narrator admitted that when he was much younger, they weren’t regarded as people really, more like “musical side shows” (p. 331). There were two notable black characters, Lee’s attorney George Wilson that said whites would see him as an “uppity Negro” (p.278), and Roman Jones, one of Karen’s ex-lovers who eventually forced a nurse to do the abortion that turned fatal.

May 30, 2015. Review initially written in 2012. Novel first published in 1968, this Signet (Penguin Group) edition being published in 1969; ISBN 0-451-18366-5.