Customer Reviews

A Case of Need

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book won the 1968 Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year. An obstetrician has been accused of performing an illegal abortion in Boston in the late 1960's. A pathologist discovers that the girl, who died in the emergency room of a hospital, wasn't even pregnant. He sets out to clear his friend of the charges. Although some of the discussions on abortion may seem dated, this is still a good mystery. Michael Crichton originally published this book under the pseudonym Jeffrey Hudson. Some earlier reviewers have suggested that he did this because of the controversy generated by the topic of abortion. While this undoubtedly was a factor, we also have to recall that this was his first book and Crichton was a medical student in Massachusetts at the time he wrote much of this book. I'm not sure if his faculty would have been too keen on having a student devote a significant fraction of his time to writing a novel instead of to his studies, had they known. But, I may be wrong. Some other reviewers gave it a low rating because it contained too much jargon. Of course, that is a trademark of this category of books; however, I seem to miss the jargon in this novel. Perhaps I missed it but "A Case of Need" seems to be the least technical of Crichton's books.

Sci-fi wizard Michael Crichton wrote this novel when he was still in medical school. In fact, he wrote many such novels under pseudonyms to pay his way through college. Then, this book won an Edgar Award, and everything changed!

'A Case Of Need' is a medical thriller along with a murder mystery thrown in. The story revolves around Dr. John Berry who works in a Boston Hospital. His best friend Dr. Arthur Lee is arrested and charged with murder caused by an abortion gone wrong. The deceased is the daughter or Dr. J. D. Randall, one of the most prominent doctors in town. Was it deliberate murder? Was it accidental malpractice? The police are under a lot of pressure, and finally slap charges on Dr. Lee. John Berry is convinced that Lee is innocent. He sets out on his own investigation into the matter.

It's a fast-paced mystery with the hero uncovering shocking secrets about the girl's life. Of course, it isn't as good as other mystery writers. After all, this was Crichton's first attempt at such a topic, and hardcore mystery fans may not find it much exciting. But the fact that Crichton is a doctor himself, makes up for this. The book has quite a few medical details about surgical procedures and the functioning of hospitals and also a lot of arguments on medical ethics.

Quite reminiscent of Robin Cook's medical thrillers but with a very different writing style, the story moves quickly, and seems to have lots of unexpected twists. All in all, it's a superb novel, combining elements of mystery and authentic medical detail making it one of the best books of it's kind.

Any fan of Crichton should not miss this book. Originally written under the pseudonym of Jeffery Hudson, this one's a rightful Edgar Award winner. Michael Crichton deserves all the praise he gets. Don't miss this one!

I thought this was a good book, which was dated, yet dealt with an important topic yesterday as it is today; abortion. It was well written and easy to read. Actually had trouble putting it down. If you are strictly anti-abortion you may not like this book, if you're able to put that aside you may like it. I did slam nurses though and I didn't like that aspect of the book. Given the times when it was written, nurses were really looked down upon. Unfortunately many of those stereotypical misconceptions from the point of view of the doctor still carry over today 37 years later. Also brought up the unwritten law of medicine, never to turn against your brother MD no matter how incompetent and dangerous they practice. Another code still largely unbroken today.

There is always a tough mental block when reading a book that is really outdated. This book deals with a doctor connected to a death through an illegal abortion. A small portion of this book deals with why abortions should be legal, and why there should be pity towards the doctors that perform illegal abortions. Of course, in today?s time, abortions are legal and the point becomes deadened quite a bit.

In this book a doctor is accused of killing a woman through an abortion. Another doctor tries to clear his friend by investigating the case thoroughly. Without giving too much away, this book details how the doctor investigates the woman and her well connected family through interviews, spying, medical records, and autopsies.

While it is a good mystery novel, Crichton doesn?t deliver his normal brilliance. Unlike the Great Train Robbery, the reader is not totally immersed in the setting. Unlike Sphere, the reader doesn?t get trapped in the suspense and mystery of the situation.

A good, quick, and mildly exciting read, it?s out of date and not up to the extremely high standards that I expect from Michael Crichton.

A Case Of Need : by Michael Crichton 4½ Stars It has been three decades since the release of this captivating novel written by Michael Crichton. Originally, in 1969, this breathtaking novel was so 'hot', it was originally written under the alias of Jeffrey Hudson. Today, millions of readers acknowledge Crichton's mastery that begun long ago with this novel. Stephen King himself praised the novel as "Fantastic...I loved it!". I thought was a little confusing so that's why I gave it the last half star. Other than that the, plot was exhilarating and kept me going until the very end. I recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in stories about medical thrillers and constant suspense. Crichton most probably wrote under the pen name Jeffrey Hudson because he anticipated a mixed reaction from the public. At the time, as it is today, abortion was a very controversial subject that raised many eyes. In this book both opinions of the matter are represented in different characters. The ethics of Art Lee can be matched with someone who believes for abortion while the strict opinion of the public at the time believed against it.- Carlos Encalada

ISBN 0451183665 - The story isn't terrible, the writing style is pretty bad, though. Michael Crichton, aka Jeffery Hudson, has more than made up for this book and if you're a Crichton fan, you might want to read it just for the "read them all" thing, but don't expect too much.

It's the late '60s. Abortion is illegal, and Art Lee has the misfortune to be a Chinese abortionist in Boston when the young member of a prominent family dies from a botched abortion. His friend, pathologist John Berry, has plenty of reason to step up and prove Art's innocence. For one thing, Art is actually innocent of killing Karen Randall. For another, John has been helping Art cover up the abortions he HAS done for a long time. The Randalls use their power to speed up the trial date and John doesn't have much time to put together a puzzle with pieces that just don't fit.

There are so many annoyances in this book, it's hard to detail them all. I tried to overlook the medical footnotes, much the way I overlooked the use of the words Negroes and niggers - it's the '60s. Those words would have been commonly used and there was no CSI, meaning the average reader might not have had a clue without the footnotes. Still, Dr. Berry ditches work for a week without apparently reporting to anyone, to play detective. One sentence near the end mentions that he used to be a cop, as if that explained everything. There are several typos throughout, for which the editor gets the blame, but the one that drove me crazy was the medical chart page in the beginning, dated 11/15 or 10/15 - either way, it can't be right. The chapters are dated, starting with October 10th (the date Karen Randall died) and ending October 17th. Typos are little things, but one like that makes me certain they re-issued the book just to capitalize on Crichton's fame and didn't actually care. Suspense novels depend on details, and date of death would be one of those things that ought to matter!

- AnnaLovesBooks

I found MC's new introduction to his earliest breakthrough novel, A CASE OF NEED, quite interesting. He talks about the controversy the book stirred when it came out, and how his pseudonym -- Jeffery Hudson -- was used so that nobody in the medical world would know who wrote it. He never planned to be a writer -- he was in Harvard Medical School at the time and needed cash (so he turned out paperback spy stories about the cold war) -- but when he won an award for the novel, he had to accept it in person and his so-called secret was out.

If you enjoyed JURASSIC PARK, SPHERE, RISING SUN, or any of MC's other truly fabulous novels (I've read 'em all along with thousands of other classical and modern works of literature), you'll love this oldie from the late 60s. It's like reading a film noir -- told in first person perspective, it's about a doctor investigating the murder case of a fellow employee of a local hospital who has been arrested for aborting a young girl's unborn child and, in turn, unintentionally killing the girl later, after she suffered blood loss from the operation.

But did he really do it? That's the question that our protaganist tries to solve -- and the outcome of it all is so simple, and yet also so stunning. As the final page turns, you'll wonder how you never solved it beforehand.

It has its flaws. Michael Crichton's early work shows signs of minor problems he would solve later -- whether it be plot mistakes or simply story flow. Plus, I doubt whether a doctor would turn himself into Sherlock Holmes quite so well as he makes the character in this book.

That all doesn't matter, because you'll absolutely love this novel, especially if you're a fan. If you're new to Crichton, I suggest JURASSIC PARK, the first novel of his I read (and which totally took me by surprise). But if you're a fan, or you want a good medical thriller from the creator of ER, check this out. It's one of Crichton's better quick-reads.

This is one of the very few books that I have enjoyed that is written in the first person. The story is about a doctor named John Berry. His coleage is arrested for an abortion gone wrong that ended in murder. So Dr. Berry plays detective and tries to get his buddy out of jail. The book takes place during one week and has an ending that I did not expect at all.

This was one of Crichton's first books, and the profit off this one sent him through medical school. The book is full of medical terms and has a lot of footnotes that make you constantly have to move up and down pages. Although this isn't Crichton's best, I didn't even use a bookmark because I never put it down.

Dr. John Berry is a pathologist who's been covering for a colleague's policy of occasionally providing abortions. The colleague, Dr. Arthur Lee, truly believes that failure to provide medical care - in the form of a safe hospital procedure - constitutes malpractice, morally speaking. He bases this belief on the number of women who, when refused such a procedure, end their pregnancies anyway by methods far more dangerous.

Now Art Lee is in jail, charged with an abortion that John Berry believes he didn't perform. The patient, daughter of a prominent Boston surgeon, died. According to her family, Karen Randall was a saintly young woman who's been foully murdered. According to Karen's friends and other associates, though, she was anything else but saintly. The same thing goes for her outraged father, and for most of the other people Dr. Berry winds up investigating as he desperately searches for the truth about Karen's death. Who actually did perform the abortion that killed her? That's the only information sure to free Dr. Lee before his case comes to trial, and a trial all by itself - even if it ends in acquittal - will kill his career, in this medical and social world of the late 1960s.

Michael Crichton's first novel, originally published under a pseudonym, is an amazing piece of work for so young a writer (he was 26). It's an intriguing detective story entwined with a stinging commentary on social hypocrisy and medical ethics, that 40 years later had the power to put me back in the world of my own adolescence. A world where unwed motherhood automatically branded the woman as at worst immoral, at best grossly immature; and where the laws of most U.S. states made termination of pregnancy in a hospital all but impossible, except when physicians like the fictional Art Lee and John Berry falsified the patient's diagnosis to provide a D&C for apparent "medical necessity."

Brrr. That world's memory scares me all by itself. The surprising thing about this book, though, isn't its "message" (it ought to be required reading for any woman who's grown up knowing she had control of her reproductive capacity from menarche onward). It's the look backward into the time and place that shaped this successful author, and then realizing - if you've read as many of his books as I have - how hard it was for him to let this world go, in creating the characters and plots for his later works.

Crichton focuses his microscope on the medical profession in this story of a butchered abortion performed on the daughter of a prominent Boston physician. John Berry is a Boston pathologist who has been helping to cover up the illegal abortions performed by a Dr. Arthur Lee. When Lee is arrested for murder, Berry has to unravel the case before the consequences of his own actions catch up with him. There's a lot of the technical medical terminology that Crichton has made popular on the hit TV show "ER", and a lot more of the serious analysis of the moral dilemmas that face medical practitioners in the real world, particularly as they relate to abortion. Like "ER" this is not science fiction, but a very compelling story (actually a murder mystery) informed by substantial scientific knowledge. (Crichton was a medical student at the time this novel was written). As such, there is no speculation here, just the facts as Crichton sees them, in the context of a juicy potboiler that includes licentiousness and loose living among the rich and privileged. The end result is a thoroughly compelling can't-put-it-down page-turner that seems certain to please a mass audience.

The down side is that apart from the (admittedly even-handed) discussions on abortion, there really isn't any substance to this novel. The characters are pretty generic, and only the hero really manages to make any claim on our sympathy. Mystery lovers are sure to enjoy this book, as are fans of "ER", but science fiction fans should not be expecting to find any far-out ideas here. Very entertaining, but not mind-boggling, this book will raise your consciousness about the abortion issue. Just don't expect a whole lot more from it.