Alex Duncan

Alex Duncan is the author of the original bestselling vet books, four of which are currently available on Amazon as e-books: It's A Vet's Life, A Vet Has Nine Lives, Vets in the Belfry, and Vets in Congress.

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.