O'Donnell was invited to write a novelization of the 1966 film. The novel, released a year before the film itself and based on his original screenplay for the movie, fared considerably better than the film. During the following decades he would write a total of eleven Modesty Blaise novels and two collections of short stories. Several of the short stories either adapt comic strip stories, or would later be adapted into comic strip stories themselves. Characters cross over between the two media. Except for "Pieces of Modesty", the books were originally issued in hardback and have subsequently gone through numerous paperback editions.