Lillian O'Donnell, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetLillian O'Donnell
writer
Date of Birth: 15-Mar-1926
Place of Birth: Trieste, Friuli–Venezia Giulia
Date of Death: 02-Apr-2005
Profession: novelist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Pisces 
About Lillian O'Donnell
- Lillian O'Donnell (March 15, 1926 – April 2, 2005) was an American crime novelist notable for being one of the first to introduce a female police officer as the lead character in a book series.She was born in Trieste, Italy but spent most of her life in New York.
- She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, New York and her first career was in the theatre - as an actress on stage and television and as first female stage manager on Broadway.
- Until 1954 she worked as a director and stage manager of summer stock packages for the Schubert Organization.
- In 1954 she married J.
- Leonard O'Donnell. From 1960 she published ten stand-alone novels.
- They varied from fairly stock murder mysteries to novels of psychological suspense.
- Only one, The Face of the Crime, was a police procedural.
- In 1972, her first book with Nora Mulcahaney The Phone Calls was published.
- It brought back characters from her earlier police novel, but with the addition of the female lead.
- In total, 17 books were published in this series, the last in 1998.
- Each book focused on a single major crime and Nora's concerns about her personal life were intertwined with her working life. In 1977, 1979 and 1980 she tried an interesting idea in a separate series - a protagonist, Mici Anhalt, who is an investigator for a Crime Victims Compensation Board.
- In 1990, she moved with the times, following other women who had begun series centered on female private detectives.
- In total she published four books with lead character Gwen Rammadge, a genteel woman turned private investigator to pay the bills.One of the Norah Mulcahaney books, No Business Being a Cop was filmed for TV as Prime Target, starring Angie Dickinson, Joseph Bologna and David Soul.
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