My Weekly Book

This is the most recent volume in the Titan reprint series to fall into my hot little hands and, in common with its predecessors, it contains three full stories – The Puppet-Master of the title, With Love from Rufus and The Bluebeard Affair.

It’s fair to say that this is one of the lighter-hearted collections. While O’Donnell’s oeuvre always contains its fair share of violence, brutality, murder and death, its treatment can vary quite considerably. Stories such as The Long Lever or The Mind of Mrs Drake show a darker and more emotional side of the matter, something that cannot really be said about anything appearing in this book.

The Puppet-Master uses a theme which also appears in the last of the novels – but with the personnel reversed. In Dead Man’s Handle Willie Garvin is hit over the head and abducted, only to awake brainwashed and believing Modesty (recast in his mind to resemble his girlfriend Lady Janet Gillam) to have been killed by a fictional female villain called Delilah (who by a process of narco-hypnosis has assumed Modesty’s identity in Willie’s scrambled brain). He has been programmed to kill her on sight purely for the entertainment of the story’s arch-villain, a theme shared with this comic strip.

Only this time around it is Modesty that has been taken in a staged car crash. She awakes in a remote villa on Capri, surrounded by people claiming to be her long-time friends and associates. Has the brainwashing, undertaken by that faithful plotting stand-by an old enemy from The Network days, properly taken effect? Will she shoot Willie on sight after he attempts to rescue her?

In With Love From Rufus O’Donnell saddles Modesty with a fervent teenage admirer – who also has the intriguing attributes of being Inspector Brook’s nephew and a talented safecracker to boot. He’s liable to think that the glamorous Miss Blaise personifies everything he idolises about a life of crime – until he goes too far and finds his own life at risk. Modesty and Willie feel obliged to go off and rescue him – and show him that a criminal’s life might not be exactly what he imagined.

The final tale is perhaps the stand-out of this volume. The Bluebeard Affair features a trio of the kind of grotesque villains in which O’Donnell excels – a fortune-hunting Baron in a frilly shirt (who bought his title from a penniless Hungarian aristocrat, as we are informed) and his two ugly daughters. They must have been particularly painful for artist Romero, well-known for his delight in producing pretty girls, to draw. In one of those astounding coincidences that are also a feature of the O’Donnell universe, the niece of the dapper French intelligence supremo Réné Vaubois has been foolish enough to marry this bounder, and has overheard him plotting her death. Modesty to the rescue!

Sub-plots abound, including a revelation by Willie Garvin about his role as chief elephant-scrubber in a travelling circus and his unfortunate entanglement with a female acrobat possessing an old-fashioned sense of honour and three extremely hefty brothers. All in all it’s got style, adventure and originality and showcases this series at its best, with more depth than the second tale manages and more humour than the first. Although in that one we do see another episode of the long-running joke that sees Tarrant’s secret agent Maude Tiller and Willie fail to fall into each other’s arms yet again.

Not perhaps the pinnacle of comic strip achievement – I think those new to the Modesty Blaise universe might do better to consult either The Gabriel Setup or The Warlords of Phoenix. But certainly a treat for fans and something that plentifully repaid the time I spent on it.

Tags: caper fiction, graphic novels, Modesty Blaise, Peter O'Donnell, Romero

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