Carry on Quack

Lower Malden - a village typical of contemporary rural England - is Chris Wilt's traditional setting for his wickedly funny, debut comic novel, CARRY ON QUACK. Country doctor Edward Thomas, has flaws that beat even Mr Bean's well-documented eccentricities and the wild improbability of hotelier, Basil Fawlty. Chauvinistic, egotistic, Edward, is married to long-suffering Elizabeth, who has so far tolerated her husband's complicated OCD issues dominating their family life. But Elizabeth reaches breaking point when she discovers her husband dressed in her underwear - and her Manolo Blahniks - if only he get them on! Edward is characteristically unrepentant and Elizabeth moves back to Mother, leaving her husband to supervise their two odd-ball and opportunistic teenage children, Neville and Jessica. In Elizabeth's absence, 14-year-old Neville soon indulges his puerile fantasies and nineteen-year-old Jessica drops college to become a model. As the three abandoned Quacks struggle to come to terms with separation and looming divorce, charismatic, handsome hypnotist Guy Westlake steps in to seduce Elizabeth. Edward hits the bottle and whilst under the influence, is framed by his vengeful secretary, Mrs Willoughby, who lands her boss with a voluptuous, man-eating blonde. Having been deprived of meat for umpteen years by veggie Elizabeth, Edward puts up only a token struggle. Meanwhile, into this cocktail of romps and regrets, strides the long arm of the law, smoothly outwitted by a vicious goat and left to the mercy of canine predator, Lucifer. Other topics thrown into this heady concoction are alternative therapies, the occult, and Freudian slips that have nothing whatsoever to do with underwear. Or perhaps they have everything to do with underwear...a conundrum resolved by the ubiquitous Adolphus Hunt, private-eye-extraordinaire, whose efforts at extortion and knack for grasping the wrong end of the stick, makes him the perfect foil to the plot of Chris Wilt's surprisingly insightful and endearingly humorous, comedy of errors.