Book Review : Case of an Impostor Doctor Provides Rx for Suspense

A Paper Mask by John Collee (Arbor House: $16.95; 232 pages)

Drive with particular care next time you’re in Gloucestershire, because the emergency room at Bristol Hospital could be even riskier than the M-5 roundabouts at rush hour. Just plausible enough to keep skepticism at bay; succinct and compelling, “A Paper Mask” is the first-person account of a glib young orderly who manages to impersonate a doctor long enough to do considerable damage.

Matthew Harris is a middle-class drifter looking for a short-cut to success. As he says early in the narrative, “I had grown up with the burden of a promising childhood,” but long before the novel begins, he’d dropped that burden to work at a succession of odd jobs; watching his contemporaries outstrip him, realizing that he could never catch up without going back to square one and starting over. Unwilling to take that arduous step at the age of 27, Harris settles for an orderly’s pittance and amuses himself by trying to outguess the doctors. He’s contemptuous of most of them, but one young resident earns his reluctant admiration. Simon Hennessey is less arrogant than his colleagues; confident, relaxed, witty and casually friendly to Harris, who fantasizes that he could be in Hennessey’s position if “things had gone differently.”

Excellent Credentials

One foggy autumn day, Hennessey is killed in a motorcycle accident and Harris is given the sad job of collecting the young doctor’s few possessions. There’s not much--clothes, textbooks, stethoscope, school and family photos, diplomas, his medical license and a couple of envelopes that Harris unhesitatingly opens. One is an invitation to Dr. Hennessey to interview at a Bristol Hospital; the other is Hennessey’s unmailed reply canceling the appointment because he has decided to take a short sabbatical from medicine to act in a play. A copy of Hennessey’s impressive resume is conveniently included among these personal effects.

In that instant, Matthew Harris decides to “become” Simon Hennessey. He writes to say he will come for the interview early in January, correctly assuming that the officials of the Bristol hospital will not have been reading the London obits. By the time he appears before the committee, he has memorized Hennessey’s C.V. Though his answers to their cursory medical questions are hesitant, the excellent credentials assuage their doubts and the examiners hire him as attending emergency room physician without checking references any further. They haven’t exactly been inundated with applicants.

Closely Watched

Telling his one friend at the London hospital that he’s taken a job on a yacht bound for the Caribbean, Harris spends his last month in London absorbing all the medical information he can, diligently studying Hennessey’s textbooks. For the first time in his disordered life, he has a goal. He gives away his only valuable possession, a gold cigarette case with his real name engraved inside, discarding everything else that might identify him as Harris, keeping only his passport, birth certificate and driver’s license. As soon as he arrives at his assigned quarters in Bristol, he tapes these incriminating documents to the wall behind an armoire, hidden even from himself, and takes up his new life.

Fortunately, the Bristol emergency room is staffed with conscientious and competent personnel. Harris quickly ingratiates himself with the most capable of the nurses, who is delighted to be so appreciated. One way and another, absolute disaster is temporarily averted, though there are some terrifyingly close calls. Aloof and evasive, Harris reveals little about himself even after he and the nurse become lovers.

But even with the best of luck, an emergency room will eventually live up to its definition, and one day the impostor makes the inevitable fatal error. There is an inquest and though Harris is technically absolved, he’s watched closely from that point on. The romance with the nurse cools, and he can no longer depend upon her to cover his mistakes.

Simultaneously, Harris discovers that he has not eradicated his past quite as thoroughly as he had thought. Desperation leads to attempted murder, and when that fails, to murder itself. Superbly paced, the story mounts to a riveting climax guaranteed to make all but the most reckless readers vow to insist upon a second opinion, no matter what.