Peter O'Donnell
| Peter O'Donnell | |
|---|---|
| Born |
11 April 1920 Lewisham, London, England, UK |
| Died | 3 May 2010 (aged 90) Brighton, Sussex, England, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Area(s) | Writer |
| Pseudonym(s) | Madeleine Brent |
|
Notable works
|
Modesty Blaise |
| Awards | RoNA Award |
| http://www.modestyblaiseltd.com | |
Peter O'Donnell (11 April 1920 – 3 May 2010) was a British writer of mysteries and of comic strips, best known as the creator of Modesty Blaise, an action heroine/undercover trouble-shooter. He was also an award-winning gothic historical romance novelist who wrote under the female pseudonym Madeleine Brent, in 1978, his novel Merlin's Keep won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.
Born on 11 April 1920 in Lewisham, London, O'Donnell was the son of Bernard O'Donnell, a journalist on the Empire News, and was educated at Catford Central School.
He began to write professionally at the age of 16. In 1938 he joined the British Army, and during the war served as an NCO in mobile radio detachment (3 Corps) of Royal Corps of Signals in the 8th Army. He saw active service in Persia in 1942, after which his unit was moved to Syria, Egypt, the Western Desert, and Italy, and he was with forces that went into Greece in October 1944. After the war, O'Donnell returned to civilian life and began to script comic strips, including an adaptation for the Daily Express of the James Bond novel, Dr. No. From 1953 to 1966 he wrote for Garth, and from 1956 to 1962 Romeo Brown (with Jim Holdaway as an artist).
In addition to the comic strips and graphic novels based on Modesty Blaise, O'Donnell published two collections of short stories and twenty novels. He wrote a play that was widely performed in the 1980s, Mr. Fothergill's Murder, and wrote for television and film. He wrote for women's magazines and children's papers early in his career. His most famous creation, Modesty Blaise, was first published in 1963 in comic strip form. For the first seven years, the strip was illustrated by Holdaway until his death in 1970. Enrique Badia Romero then became the artist, and except for a seven-year period (1979–86) he drew the strip until it ended in 2001.
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