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.

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.

Often the introductions to these Titan reprints of complete stories from the long-running Modesty Blaise cartoon strip are among the most interesting bits of the book. That is because the author, Peter O’Donnell generally writes a bit about how he came to dream up the story, about his relationship with artists or publishers or a little about the craft of creating a comic strip.

This is an important volume in Titan’s Modesty Blaise series, and for a sad reason. Almost exactly half-way through artist Jim Holdaway, who had been responsible for originally creating the visuals for Modesty and Willie as we know them, died suddenly. The introduction to this volume contains a tribute to him from Peter O’Donnell and an explanation of how his replacement, the Catalan artist Enrique Badia Romero, came to take over.

This, the penultimate book in the Modesty Blaise series, is most notable for the really striking change of tone that sets it apart from the other volumes – and, purists may say, not always to the good.

A great way to start 2008: having this short story collection read out loud in front of the fire. We’re busy reading our way through the entire Modesty Blaise pantheon (OK, the novels plus those strips that are more accessibly reprinted) and Pieces of Modesty is a first. It’s a short story collection technically bridging the period between the major adventures of The Impossible Virgin and The Silver Mistress but the stories were, in many cases, written earlier and then not published. Many of them were, apparently, even illustrated. And, as the Wikipedia article on this collection points out, some elements are re-used in the newspaper strips.