My Weekly Book

2007 Reading Challenge: Book 59

In the entry for book 58, Peter O’Donnell’s eponymous first Modesty Blaise novel, I talked about the series generally and why I thought it was well worth reading. Part of the reason that I didn’t talk about the plot of the individual book so much is because I knew I was going to have to write this entry next. Whereas that was a standard-format paperback novel, this one is a large-format reprint of the actual Evening Standard cartoon strips published by Titan with an introduction by Peter O’Donnell explaining how the series was conceived and brought to print. So basically more in the line of a graphic novel than of a regular book, as you would expect in a Titan publication.

It deals with much of the same material as the novel (although there’s also much that has nothing to do with it) and contains three stories: La Machine, The Long Lever and The Gabriel Set-up, plus a short called In The Beginning which served as an introduction in newspapers that picked up the strip later in its run. The first of these covers the introduction of all the major characters and their relationships to each other and we see Sir Gerald Tarrant and his indomitable assistant Fraser meeting Modesty for the first time - with a superbly-judged psychological flourish that earns him her trust in the short term and her affection in the long term. Willie is merely bored rather than actually imprisoned in this tale and it’s not very long before he shows up to get his share of any action going. The pair are recruited by Tarrant to smash the sinister organisation of the strip’s title by offering themselves as bait and off they go with the words: “It’ll be lively back on the old caper… we’re fools, of course, but I guess it’s the only caper we’re fit for, Willie love.”

In The Long Lever we learn a little more about Modesty’s past in her pre-Network years. Here she and Willie are recruited to help bring home a kidnapped defector who’s been re-taken - only to learn a surprising fact about him that utterly changes her attitude to the job and its outcome - a great example of her instinctive and unshakeable moral code that governs the way she behaves regardless of the consequences to herself.

The third and last story, The Gabriel Set-up, is the one that perhaps has most in common with the Modesty Blaise novel. Here we encounter the super-villain Gabriel - so well-resourced, powerful and determined is his organisation that once, in the past, Modesty backed away from a heist simply because he told her to, after he got there first. And she felt she’d got off lightly. In this case he’s onto a very nice little number with a clinic full of rich and neurotic victims ripe for blackmail just over the Canadian border, which just happens to have already triggered one of Sir Gerald Tarrant’s hunches. Willie’s in the vicinity, ostensibly for a rugged spell of lumberjacking but actually enjoying a spell of rest and recreation with the logging boss’s daughter - so what’s more natural than for them to pop along and disrupt everything? Unfortunately the stakes turn out to be a little higher than everyone would like: “What the hell’s been through here, Mr Barth - an army? Yeah - name of Garvin…”

I think it’s essential to find out what the stories are like in the form they were first conceived. Here O’Donnell doesn’t have the luxury of multiple plots and time for character development which means sometimes things can seem a little forced and perfunctory in comparison to the long-form stories. But the Jim Holdaway versions of the characters are the archetypal ones and the dialogue is to die for. This was a very welcome companion read to the Modesty Blaise novel, one which I think both works gained from, and a great foundation for the rest of the series.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 10:56 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.