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.

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.

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.

The problem lies in the 20-year gap between the conception of the series and the writing of this book. The world had changed considerably since the early sixties, especially in the areas of crime and law enforcement. Characters that had started their careers in a world of gentleman (and lady) jewel and art thieves, criminals with strict codes of morality and all the delights of fashionable London society for those of independent means to enjoy now find themselves in a different world entirely.

In 1983 – the year in which The Night of Morningstar was published – Peter O’Donnell was competing for readers with thrillers such as Ken Follett’s On Wings of Eagles, dealing with the events of the Iranian revolution, John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, based on Middle Eastern espionage wars, and John Gardner’s Icebreaker, which features James Bond caught in the middle of a team of agents from the CIA, Mossad and the KGB, all intent on double-crossing each other.

No wonder Modesty and Willie, fresh from adventures with fabled treasures, corrupt Saudi princelings and terrifying English nannies, must now find themselves mixing it with international terrorists, compromised CIA agents, political conspiracies and communist plots. It is arguable, although incredibly sad to have to do it, that the series by this point is simply out of its time. And this may well, in fact, explain why it was the penultimate of the novels and why the ultimate one is such a wholehearted return to the themes of the series’ heyday.

Having said all this, I’d hate to give the impression that it’s a bad book. On the contrary, it’s exciting and tightly-plotted, sends the characters into horrible danger and keeps the tension going right until the very end. The problem is that the feel is so different – there are incidents of really unpleasant violence and much of the book lacks the redeeming humour and transcendent power of human nature which generally make the nastier scenes in the other novels bearable.

If you like Modesty Blaise’s adventures then you’ll probably want to read this just because there’s only a limited amount of reading matter available. And if you like thrillers you’ll probably enjoy it as a pretty good example of the genre. But somehow, in trying to be both, it’s not fully satisfactory as either.