Carole Nelson Douglas (November 15, 1944 – October 20, 2021) was an American writer of sixty novels and many short stories.
After graduation, she worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area.
During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louie to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view.
The cat found a country home but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later.
The late director/playwright/novelist Garson Kanin, a pleased interview subject, took her first novel to Doubleday and it sold shortly after.