Vets in Congress

Vets in Congress is the fourth in this entertaining series of books based on the exploits of a vet who was practising in London and the Home Counties from the 1950s.

Vet Michael Morton and his strikingly attractive wife Julia (introduced in It’s A Vet’s Life and herself a natural with animals, snakes especially) are looking forward to a rare moment alone, as their two boys have been whisked off for a holiday to the Scottish Highlands. But when they look in at a veterinary conference in London and become involved with a family of Arabs and their menagerie of animals, matters take a surprise turn. 

Ten years on from Book 3 (Vets in the Belfry), this is London in the summer of 1976, the hottest since records began and the moment when, you may remember, it was so hot that there was a plague of ladybirds on the city’s pavements. Insects play a leading role in Vets in Congress, but so do alligators, monkeys and king snakes. For this is also the time when exotic pets are a must-have fashion accessory for the very rich, in particular Arabs at the height of the West’s dependence on Saudi oil. 

Soon, however, and with characteristic inevitability, Vets in Congress brings us back to the rural home of Morton’s earliest adventures, the quintessentially English village of Craftley in Surrey, where the world’s problems find their own special resonance, and – as ever – Michael keeps the community spinning on an even axis through his good humour and down-to-earth integrity.

 

Some reviews of Alex Duncan’s classic tales –


‘The fast and furious pace never conceals a hard core of veterinary experience.’ The Countryman


‘Lots of laughs and lots of fascinating animal revelations (and a few human ones too).’ She Magazine


‘The author will have you in stitches.’ Sunday Pictorial


‘Highly intelligent animal lore and canny moralising.’ The Countryman


‘Like its predecessors – or even more so – very funny indeed.’ The Catholic Herald of Vets in the Belfry


‘Animal in every sense of the word: it is easily the most original animal book I have read, and quite the funniest in years.’ The Countryman of It’s A Vet’s Life


‘[Alex Duncan] …A sort of P G  Wodehouse with the eyes of a Samuel Pepys … a discovery indeed.’ Bookman



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Before her medical training at St Andrews and Edinburgh Universities (BSc, MB, ChB), Alex Duncan was born Elisabeth Magda Herzog in 1919, in present-day Chernivtsi. She was the daughter of an Austrian police officer and lawyer who later moved with his family to Wiener Neustadt, close to Vienna. There she lived during her childhood and teenage years, until early 1939 when she emigrated to England to escape the Nazi terror. Her parents perished in the war. Completely on her own, she managed to live through the war mostly working as an au pair and as a ladies companion. 

After the end of the war she met her future husband, Captain Alexander MacFarlane, a medical doctor from Glasgow, and completed her medical training. Back to England, the couple lived and practised in Sussex, where she also started her career as an author. She has written under various noms de plume more than 40 books, from biography and historical novels to crime, short stories and humour. Her pen names were Madelaine Duke (‘Duke’ being the English word for ‘Herzog’), Alex Duncan and Leslie Heron. 

Once her husband retired in the early 1980s, they moved to southern Spain (near Gibraltar), where they remained until the end of their lives; she died in 1996, one year after her husband’s death.