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.

As a fan of thrillers, I like a John Grisham novel as much as the next thrill-seeking escapist. Thus I was interested to see the review of the latest on in the New York Times. Here it is (registration/login may be required):

Uncivil Action

Thrillers thrive on villains and heroes, and usually these characters are not overly complicated; writers don’t want to confuse or slow the plot. In John Grisham’s page-turners the villains are corporate titans and their lawyers, and the plucky, idealistic heroes (played in the movie versions by Tom Cruise in “The Firm” and Julia Roberts in “The Pelican Brief”) are renegade lawyers or law students, shocked into action by the corruption they have stumbled across.

Grisham sticks with his formula for the villains in “The Appeal.” But he paints a more complicated picture of the heroes, while making an important point about how the justice system in more than half of the 50 states is increasingly threatened by the kind of big-money gutter politics that have made so many Americans disgusted with Washington.

Grisham’s heroes in “The Appeal” are plaintiffs’ lawyers, the much maligned litigators who represent victims of alleged corporate wrongdoing. Their excuse for taking a third to 40 percent of their clients’ winnings — even if those winnings are in the millions or billions (in the case of mass tort claims against asbestos or tobacco defendants) — is that their little-guy clients don’t have the money to pay hourly fees in advance of a verdict, and that it’s those big paydays that give them the incentive and resources to take on risky cases that deliver powerfully deterrent punishment to those who would otherwise keep committing all kinds of corporate jihad.

It’s an argument, however, that’s been undermined by the spectacle of trial lawyers cashing in on cases where deep-pocketed, well-insured defendants who might not be fully culpable or culpable at all threw in the towel out of fear that sympathetic juries were too easily rewarding any tug at their heartstrings, and by revelations of corruption in recruiting clients and divvying up fees among fellow vultures of the bar who did little more than race to the scenes of tragedies. Read full review here…

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.

2008 reading challenge: book one.

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 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.

The longer books, and some of the strip runs, are dependent on convoluted and highly-intricate plotting, often with some time taken at the beginning to establish the possession of some unlikely new skill like hang-gliding, quarterstaff-fighting or fencing. Therefore it’s interesting to see what can be done when the wherewithal for setting up these intricate stories is stripped away. Our heroes are reduced to single engagements, or dastardly deeds that don’t require them to leave the country, in order to compensate.

Certainly I think the characters and storylines do adapt well to this format, which is the very least you would expect from one of the earliest multimedia creations. It’s good to see variety at the expense of detail, actually, and this is a possible starting point for newcomers to the series - although I’m not sure whether insufficient character background would hamper enjoyment or ruin the stories’ credibility.

Here’s what you get:

• A Better Day to Die - this opening tale in the anthology is the most intense and disturbing of the collection, with more than one echo of Sabre Tooth. Modesty and Willie dash to South America to pay their last respects to a dying colleague from the Network days. but, thanks to an inept mechanic and a militantly pacifist missionary, they get separated and must individually work out how to deal with the ambush by mercenaries that besets them.
• The Giggle-Wrecker explains how our heroes have patiently constructed an identity for themselves behind the Iron Curtain, in times when travel to much of eastern Europe was utterly out of the question. And we find the use they find for that identity to when Sir Gerald Tarrant calls on them to help with a particularly tricky extraction operation on which his own reputation depends.
• I Had a Date with Lady Janet introduces a semi-regular character of whom we see quite a bit more. Despite having plenty enough problems in her own life, this otherwise remarkably sensible and level-headed daughter of a belted earl embarks on a kind-of stable relationship with Willie Garvin, and brings herself no end of trouble as a result. Of which the events in this story are merely the start. Notable for being narrated first-hand by Willie, which means those apostrophes representing glottal stops get a tremendous workout. Also fascinating for what he says - and what he doesn’t say - about the caper in hand.
• A Perfect Night to Break Your Neck re-introduces Modesty and Willie to Stephen Collier and his new wife Dinah (neé Pilgrim). Ostensibly the four of them are enjoying the high life at Cap d’Antibes. But, below the surface, things are not as happy as they look. This story narrates Modesty’s ingenious solution to the Colliers’ problems - and her way of persuading them to accept her help without seeming to offer it.
• Salamander Four - Modesty’s got a thing for artistic gentlemen lovers, with at least three cropping up at different points in the series. Here she’s trying to undo a creative block in a sculptor when some ghosts from her past come to call. And surely it cannot be accidental that, when help arrives to clear up the resulting mess, it introduces itself with the phrase: “Garvin. Willie Garvin.” Can it?
• The Soo Girl Charity is a classically-structured sting-in-the-tale short story and shows as well as anything in the sum or the parts of this anthology how at home O’Donnell is with the genre. A businessman who antagonises Modesty after she’s been persuaded to take on a charity flag-selling assignment turns out to have a dark secret. Or perhaps more than one? A great conclusion to the volume.