Vets in the Belfry

Vets in the Belfry is like its predecessors … very funny indeed.’ The Catholic Herald



Vets in the Belfry is the third in this entertaining series of books by Alex Duncan based on the hilarious exploits of a vet who was practising in London and the Home Counties in the 1950s and ’60s.



At last, Michael Morton means to settle down as a partner in his uncle’s Knightsbridge veterinary practice and marry his snake-charming fiancée, Julia. But his plans are suddenly disrupted – Julia goes down with appendicitis a day before the wedding, and when Michael is summoned urgently to New York by the Duke of Alanspring, whose horses and greyhound Grey Rainbow are among his clients, Julia insists that Michael’s professional interests must come first. 



This is America, 1959, the most advanced country in the world and the world’s leading economy, but Michael is shocked to find that it is also a largely insular, even puritanical nation, a society of conservative moralists ‘stranger, more outlandish than the remotest parts of Europe… I did feel an alien. It was a new sensation, puzzling, disturbing yet always intriguing.’ 



No more so than among the rich American pet owners who offer nuptial rites as part of a breeding programme and dream up the Decent Animals Federation, a society dedicated to clothing millions of naked animals throughout the world. The real-life Society for Indecency to Naked Animals was launched on NBC's ‘Today Show’ by Clifford Prout on May 27, 1959, and tens of thousands of pet owners signed up, one contributing $40,000 to the venture.



When Michael is commissioned by the Duke to set up his new American wife’s  dog-training school in opposition to the Federation, he soon realises he’ll not be taking the plane back to Julia and his London practice any time soon, particularly after the Duchess’s elegant daughter Vera enters upon the scene. 

 

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



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 companion for elderly ladies. 



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.