Peter O'Donnell

Peter O'Donnell (11 April 1920 – 3 May 2010) was an English mystery and comic book writer, best known as the creator of Modesty Blaise, an action heroine who solves problems in secret. He was also an award-winning writer of Gothic historical romance novels who wrote under the female pen name Madeleine Brent; in 1978, his novel Merlin's Fortress won the Romantic Novel of the Year award from the Romantic Novelists' Association.

In 1965, O'Donnell romanticized his screenplay for a film version (the final release in 1966 used almost none of O'Donnell's source material), which was released as Modesty Blaise. The book was a great success, and O'Donnell would publish a dozen more novels and short story collections by 1996. Kingsley Amis said that the novels were "endlessly fascinating" and that Blaise and Garvin were "one of the great partnerships in fiction, comparable to those of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson."

O'Donnell's wish was that no one else would write future Modesty Blaise stories, but it is not known whether this was ever formalised. With the exception of the adaptation of "The Dark Angels" and the film My Name is Modesty, no new productions relating to the character have been published since 2015. In 2007, working with young female students at Bullers Wood and Newstead Wood schools, O'Donnell set up an official website, Modesty Blaise, Ltd.