Donald James Wheal, better known by his pen name, Donald James, was a prolific, best-selling author who began his career as one of a select band of screenwriters instrumental in shaping popular British television drama in the 1960s and 1970s.

He won his first commission in 1964, with a script for No Hiding Place, ITV’s bestknown early police drama. Over the next 15 years he went on to work with many of television’s top producers, including Lew Grade, Monty Berman, Gerry Anderson and Brian Clemens, penning more than 250 scripts for iconic shows such as The Avengers, The Saint, Space: 1999, The Champions, The Persuaders!, Department S, UFO and Mission: Impossible.

A fascination with the history and politics of post-war Europe, engendered by a visit to France in 1946, offered Wheal a change in direction when, in the late 70s, American drama imports began to replace home-grown series. He wrote his first, highly acclaimed thriller, A Spy at Evening in 1977. An immediate success, adapted and serialised by the BBC, it revealed the consummate talent for tight storytelling, sharp dialogue and political insight that distinguished a host of his subsequent best sellers. Shadow of the Wolf (1978), offered a “factional” account of the conspiracy surrounding Hermann Hesse’s flight to Britain in 1941; The Fall of the Russian Empire (1982), anticipated the end of Soviet communism with uncanny prescience. More recently, he returned to the best-seller lists with the acclaimed crime trilogy, Monstrum, The Fortune Teller and Vadim (1996-2000). Set in a future Russia where totalitarianism rules once more, the novels feature perhaps his greatest creation, Inspector Constantin Vadim.

He was also a respected non-fiction writer, the author of the Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich and a contributor to A Dictionary of the Second World War, but he showed his surest storytelling touch in two powerfully moving volumes of memoirs, World’s End and White City.

World’s End (2005) is a vivid evocation of London in the late 1930s and early 1940s, told through the story of his family’s struggle to survive the Second World War. He was nine when war broke out, part of a tight-knit, hard-pressed working family in Chelsea's grimy, poverty-stricken World's End. In 1944, when he was 14, he survived the bombing that destroyed his childhood home, killing many of his friends and neighbours.

In the follow-up volume, White City (2007), Wheal describes his coming of age amid the austerity of post-war London, a story shaped by his father’s determination to overcome the family’s social disadvantages and help his two sons to fulfil their potential. He succeeded. Both he and his younger brother Keith won places at Sloane Grammar School, becoming the first in their family to be educated beyond the age of 13. Wheal went on to win a scholarship to read History at Pembroke College, Cambridge; his brother became European Managing Director of a major multinational corporation.

After National Service and Cambridge, and now married with twin daughters, Wheal returned to London to work in PR, as a supply teacher and at the Daily Telegraph library, before his break into television.

The warmth, humour and honesty that characterises his autobiographical writing also defined his private life. He was an irreplaceable friend, mentor and supporter not just to his large, extended family, but to many friends and colleagues all over the world.

Wheal had just completed his latest political thriller when he died unexpectedly at home in London.

Donald James Wheal, screenwriter and novelist, was born on August 22, 1931. He died on April 28, 2008, aged 76