Country Doctor is a 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. (To Be A County Doctor , It's A Vet's Life, A Vet Has Nine Lives, Vets in the Belfry, Vet in the Manger, Vet in a State, Vets in Congress, Vet Among the Pigeons, The Doctor’s Affairs All Told.)
Born Elisabeth Magda Herzog in 1919, Alex Duncan was the daughter of an Austrian police officer and lawyer who later moved with his family to Wiener Neustadt, close to Vienna. Her parents perished in World War II and she emigrated to England, working as an au-pair and as a companion for elderly ladies.
After the end of the war she met her future husband, 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 authored more than 40 books under various noms de plume (Madelaine Duke, Alex Duncan and Leslie Heron) from biography and historical novels to crime, short stories and humour.
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.
