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Following the initial success of the newspaper strip, O'Donnell was approached in the fall of 1964 with an offer to transfer his characters to the movie screen. O'Donnell wrote an original screenplay, but the motion picture that was ultimately released in 1966 - several rewrites and a couple of changes in production companies later - bore little resemblance to his original creation. Modesty Blaise, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Italian actress Monica Vitti, is today considered to be somewhat of a camp classic. Leonard Maltin's Movie And Video Guide has this to say about it: "Director Losey ate watermelon, pickles, and ice cream, went to sleep, woke up, and made this adaptation of the comic strip about a sexy female spy." For a long time, it was difficult to see the movie, at least in North America, because it simply wasn't available. That situation changed in July 2002 when Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film on DVD in anamorphic widescreen. Unfortunately, as far as most viewers were concerned, the film lived up (or down) to its reputation. While most fans will probably want to see it out of curiosity, few will be willing to repeat the experience.

To tie-in with the theatrical release of the film, O'Donnell was asked to write a novel about Modesty and Willie. He originally planned to write a completely different story, but, with time at a premium, he turned to his completed screenplay and used that as the basis for his manuscript. The novel, also titled Modesty Blaise, was published in hardcover by Souvenir Press in 1965, and in paperback by Pan Books in 1966. As it turned out, the screenplay had been rewritten so many times that the novel and the movie didn't have too much in common after all.

The book was a success in its own right, so O'Donnell began a second career as a novelist, while continuing to write the daily newspaper strip. Sabre-Tooth was published in 1966, I, Lucifer in 1967, and A Taste For Death in 1969.