My Weekly Book

A bittersweet moment, this. After an intense spell of working through the entire series of Modesty Blaise novels that started at the end of last year, with the help of a devoted fan who was kind enough to read the whole lot out loud,this signifies the end.

There is, of course, Cobra Trap still to come. You may know already that this series of five short stories was written by O’Donnell in 1996 and brings things pretty conclusively to an end, as well as filling in a few other loose ends and interesting bits of background. At the time of writing we haven’t moved onto this volume and it is arguable whether we will. Instead we’ve picked up a different series completely.

Dead Man’s Handle does give the series a strong send-off, in our opinion. The book has many of the elements that have made Modesty’s and Willie’s adventures such fun to read - a plot that hinges on an initial amazing coincidence, a set of villains as grotesque as any in I, Lucifer or The Silver Mistress, plenty of action from the old Network days. And, perhaps most importantly, a strike against the central construct of the series - the relationship between Modesty and Willie Garvin. Without revealing the ending it is fair to say that the master-criminal who takes them on has failed to fully appreciate the depth of this relationship and the consequences of trying to disrupt it.

There are weaknesses too. Modesty Blaise made her first appearance in print in 1965 and this book was published two decades later. The world changed in unimaginable ways during that time and yet in the book only a brief few years have gone by. In real life, girls in short skirts, Hyde Park penthouses and idle sojourns on luxury yachts have given way to power suits, the brutal sink-or-swim meritocracy of the Thatcher years and unprecedented international co-operation against criminal gangs dealing in drugs, money-laundering and people-trafficking. And yet, little in the novels has changed. Attempts to introduce into the preceding novel, Night of Morningstar, a tauter thriller-style plot which better reflects the new realities is arguably rather uncomfortable, even for a series which has never tried to gloss over the realities of its heroes’ trade.

The last of the books can also sometimes read like a greatest hits of everyone who has ever appeared in the Modesty Blaise universe and here we get the Colliers, a decent showcase for Weng, Network veterans Krolli and Danny Chavasse plus Tarrant’s agent Maude Tiller. It may be a personal failing of mine, but the Colliers are among my least favourite characters in the series. Stephen I find abrasive and irritating while plucky little Dinah, battling bravely on in the face of blindness, miscarriage and the curse of her psychic talents, always strikes me as painfully needy in a series unusually well-supplied with strong, self-sufficient female characters. The more appearances this pair have made, the more they have annoyed me, so their rather unnecessary last hurrah in this book made me positively grind my teeth.

But these are minor complaints in the face of a cast of beautifully-drawn characters, the superb use of humour to defuse tension (keep an eye on the bottom half of Molly Chen’s bikini for an illustration of this) and a story that manages to combine pathos, horror, comedy and epic action in a highly readable narrative. The gladiatorial combat that it will not be a spoiler to mention, since it is pictured on the cover of almost every copy, is arguably one of the greatest set-pieces in the series. A series that we’ve had a great time reading and are sorry to have come to the end of.

Tags: caper fiction, Modesty Blaise, Peter O'Donnell, thrillers

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under 2008 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.