Timothy Sheard, All Bleeding Stops, Eventually: A Lenny Moss Mystery, Hardball Press, 2020, www.hardballpress.com
A Review
Harry Targ
Reading Tim Sheard’s latest Lenny Moss mystery, “All Bleeding Stops, Eventually,” is particularly relevant now as we face the coronavirus epidemic. As in the previous eight novels, the reader is presented with a murder mystery in a hospital amid the ongoing efforts of medical personnel and hospital workers struggling to provide the best possible care for patients.
Lenny Moss is a shop steward for a union of hospital workers that do not include nurses and doctors. The health care professionals are reticent to join a union with non-professionals, although nurses come to Lenny Moss all the time to defend their rights as workers and to protect their efforts to serve patients. It turns out that Lenny Moss is the “go-to- guy” for every worker in the James Madison Hospital, recently privatized, because of his unflinching defense of workers, whether they are in the local or not. Moss is also the number one target of hospital administrators who view him as a troublemaker because he skillfully fights back against abuse of workers.
In the current novel, Moss is the key advocate for family leave for a lesbian housekeeper whose partner has just given birth to a child, and a gay worker in the Billing Department who with his partner has adopted a child. Due to technicalities in the union contract, hospital administrators are seeking to deny family leave for the LGBT workers. Moss advises them, gives support, goes to his union legal team, and martials a noon-time rally attended by community supporters and hospital staff not on duty. Lenny’s efforts, union resources, and most importantly the mobilization of hospital workers send a message to hospital administrators that more serious collective actions will follow if the dispute is not resolved.
This Lenny Moss novel, like its predecessors, gives a vivid account of the dedication and impediments to the ability of hospital workers to do their jobs effectively; that is attending to the needs of patients. Administrative staff from the hospital CEO to department administrators to local supervisors, make unfair demands on nurses and non-professional workers, use metrics to control their work output, and use surveillance technology to monitor their every movement and conversation. The most egregious example of the latter is the device nurses must wear all day long around their necks allowing supervisors to listen to their conversations, monitor their movements, and time their nurse/patient activities.
In other words, nurses in the James Madison Hospital are subjected to the time and motion studies that were put in workplaces the first two decades of the twentieth century to measure worker performance so as to better control it. In addition to the time and motion controls, the recording devices are designed to monitor every word a nurse speaks to patients and to co-workers about hospital policy or personnel. If nurses seek help from Lenny they must find a secure place in the hospital where the authorities cannot hear their conversation, and there are very few such spaces.
James Madison Hospital has been privatized and as we learn in earlier novels, greater supervision from administrators is coupled with nurses being required to care for more patients. Speed-up on the line is the source of growing frustration for nurses who do their best to meet the health care needs of every patient. As with most workers, the nurses and non-professional staff are caring, desirous of doing a good job, and generally work together to achieve the goals of the hospital. But often Lenny Moss has to intercede because the priorities of the hospital for profit and consequently administrative control contradict the motivation of workers.
The Lenny Moss mysteries educate the reader about the organization of hospitals and the impediments hospital workers face. They help make sense of the experiences patients encounter as consumers of health care. And they raise questions about whether humane health care can be provided if the hospital itself has to put profit-making first over health care. And finally, the mysteries speak volumes about the need for workers, at all levels of the hospital, to have a union that can represent their interests.
Although these are heavy “political” subjects, each Lenny Moss mystery, including this latest one, revolves around an entertaining story, usually a murder, and a lively presentation of Lenny Moss’s role in solving the mystery while he serves the interests of workers he serves. In the end, the Lenny Moss mysteries entertain us while they educate us. For example, this murder mystery that Moss solves involves a hospital supervisor who abuses nurses in the hospital and his wife at home.
“All Bleeding Stops” continues the description of the trials and tribulations brought to health care by hospital privatization, the ongoing frustration nurses face as they struggle to meet the needs of their patients, the ongoing need to defend the rights of LGBTQ workers, and the power of workers mobilizing together.
Finally, in these heady days of strains on the health care system created by the corona pandemic, the Lenny Moss series helps us understand the work of hospital staff at all levels as they struggle to serve their patients.
Harry Targ blogs at www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
