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.

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 all great stuff – and so it comes to pass that we also learn fascinating trivia, including the fact that the title story in this volume was written as an excuse to get the eponymous heroine into mediaeval garb. We also get a glimpse of a typed panel by panel script and (reluctantly, on the author’s part) the rough sketch that accompanies it to give Romero a starting point.

It’s fair to say that the theme of this volume is escapism. In The Green-Eyed Monster, the first story to appear, Modesty has the pleasure of hurling a spoiled, drunk and very rude young woman into a South American swimming pool, something I’m sure that all of us have longed to do at some point in our lives. Then the silly girl, daughter of the British envoy, gets herself snatched – and it’s action stations to retrieve her and avert a political crisis for an old friend of Modesty’s. Who else but Willie Garvin would accept the mission of teaching her manners?

Death of a Jester sees Modesty and Willie in a chance encounter with two witnesses to an unusual death – a man in a mediaeval jester’s costume fatally mauled by two lions in the grounds of a stately home. Determined to investigate, they find an unexpected link to Sir Gerald Tarrant which has them infiltrating the castle only to find themselves caught up in the dangerous time-travelling fantasies of its owner, and something even more sinister besides.

The final story, The Stone Age Caper, sees our heroes transported to the depths of the Australian outback after cutting across a business transaction being carried out by their old friend Mr Wu Smith – alongside a particularly ruthless bunch of associates. It’s notable for containing a very brief glimpse of Modesty with no top on, while disguised as an Aborigine – something that sent the Evening Standard subs’ bench into a tizzy at the time, but which seems somehow less exploitative now than all these endless pictures so beloved of Romero of her falling out of negligeés and failing ever to do up more than two or three blouse buttons.

Another great collection and a good read – especially for those moments when all you really want is to get away from it all…

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.

You can spot the handover quite clearly, even without the help of the reprints of Holdaway’s very last in-progress panels in the introduction to guide you. Romero’s Modesty is quite a different creature in the details, far softer in appearance (and with a marked tendency to do up fewer buttons too, although it must be said that nudity is something that has never concerned her overmuch).

So what happens in the strips? In Takeover, the first story, Modesty is subjected over lunch to the doubtful charms of Inspector Brook of the Yard, in search of a favour. She turns him down – but the situation he’s concerned about is soon forced on her attention when she watches a heroic bank security guard mown down during a robbery at the behest of the mafia. She and Willie attempt to take the new crime bosses on – but have they finally bitten off more than they can chew?

From his writing it might be possible to surmise that Peter O’Donnell has a keen interest in the realm of the psychic. And The Warlords of Phoenix is another one of those stories, like Sabre Tooth, that makes you wonder for a moment whether he doesn’t have a few abilities in that direction himself. This time, instead of predicting the invasion of Kuwait, he’s foretold a Japanese millennialist cult convinced they need to prepare for the end of the world. To be fair, they’re not actually trying to cause Armageddon, in the manner of Aum Shinrikyo in 1995, but they’re after the skills of Willie and Modesty to help them train warriors for post-apocalyptic domination. And, until the balloon goes up, they’ve got a hostage to make our heroes play ball.

And here’s a little bit from the book’s introduction:

While this story was running I went off to a little place I had on the Mediterranean at that time, where I often used to go to get started on a book. While there, I had a phone call from The Standard and was told a new group of Japanese terrorists had carried out an airport massacre of the kind one might have expected from my War-Lords of Phoenix. How had I known that such a group existed? I was asked. Of course I hadn’t known. It was just another of those weird coincidences. But I told The Standard I couldn’t reveal my source (if somebody thinks you’re smart, why disillusion them?)

Willie the Djinn is considerably more lighthearted and must have been conceived to let new artist Romero find his métier after the sudden death of Jim Holdaway. And, as Romero’s métier is undoubtedly drawing girls in short skirts, it won’t take a genius to work out what this story’s about. It features a friendly sheik who has sent his harem to secretarial school – how convenient that another should just wander along. Willie should be in his element in this tale – what a pity he’s having to spend his nights playing babysitter instead of enjoying the company…

As well as being an important volume for fans, it’s also an enjoyable one. The first story sees Modesty and Willie being comprehensively out-thought which, as O’Donnell also points out in the introduction, is good for them from time to time. The second story’s dark tone is nicely set off by the more light-hearted third. Another enjoyable and, frankly, rather relaxing read.