Modesty Blaise
He
calls her “Princess,” and that, it turns out, is the consummate expression,
for him, of their relationship. She calls him “Willie love,” but that,
for American readers, is misleading: they aren’t lovers. For readers
in their native Britain, however, “love” here represents not fevered
ardor but a kind of familial affection, and that is an almost complete
description, to her, of their relationship. To me, Modesty Blaise and
Willie Garvin are a literary pair that ranks to rank with Damon and
Phintias. Or Roland and Oliver. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza. But Modesty and Willie are a greater literary
achievement than these more celebrated duos: they are more fully rounded,
more human. Their personalities have depth and nuance. They live. For
a potboiler pair, that’s a notable feat. Peter O’Donnell concocted Modesty and
Willie as characters in a comic strip of stylish cloak and dagger intrigue
for a London newspaper. The strip followed the clandestine adventures
of the voluptuous and superbly athletic Modesty, a retired and fabulously
wealthy erstwhile leader of an international crime network who now devoted
her considerable talents for lethal undercover work to helping the British
secret service, which she did with the able assistance of her comrade
in arms, Willie Garvin. Modesty and Willie were also incarnated
in 13 novels and two collections of short stories where their personalities
were more fully fleshed out than in the strip. In the early spring of
2001, the comic strip ended after almost 38 years, 10,183 individual
daily strips. And O’Donnell had said, with the publication of the book
The Cobra Trap in 1996, that he would write
no more novels about Modesty Blaise. But that is scarcely the end of
Modesty and Willie. Like any other literary creations, they will live
on in the works that gave them life. The novels are still on shelves
in bookstores, waiting to be purchased and read. And Comics
Revue started re-running the strip in December with issue No. 188.
(Subscriptions are $45 for 12 monthly issues from Manuscript Press,
P.O. Box 336, Mountain Home, TN 37684.) I first heard of Modesty Blaise in
the mid-1960s, right about the time the movie starring Monica Vitti
appeared, I suppose, which would make it 1966. By all accounts from
Modesty fans, it was a terrible movie. O’Donnell said it gave him a
nose bleed. Vitti, a blonde Italian actress, insisted upon remaining
a blonde in the movie; Modesty has dark hair. And there was ample other
silliness. Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide says this about it:
“Director Joseph Losey ate watermelon, pickles, and ice cream, went
to sleep, woke up, and made this adaptation of the comic strip about
a sexy female spy.” From the ballyhoo about the movie, I concluded that
Modesty Blaise was a female James Bond. And when, subsequently, I heard
about the comic strip, I assumed, from what I heard, that its main attraction
was that Modesty was often nude. Like another notorious British comic
strip, Jane. In both of these notions, I was mistaken.
The movie makers may have sought to capitalize on the popularity of
the Sean Connery flicks by claiming Modesty was a female version of
Ian Fleming’s 007. But Modesty Blaise is a much more complex and fascinating
character than James Bond ever was. As for the charge of nakedness—overwrought.
Modesty sometimes strips to bra and panties when she’s caught in a dangerous
situation while attired in ordinary street clothes. But that doesn’t
happen often. Usually, she goes into action deliberately, seeking out
some dastardly villain she’s been alerted to. And for such forays, she
dons a black jump suit that covers her from head to toe. No, the attraction—what holds me enthralled
still—about Modesty Blaise is neither nudity nor Bonded sex change.
Instead, it is the ingenuity of O’Donnell’s plots—their inventiveness,
their twists, the tenterhooks upon which O’Donnell suspends his readers—the
intelligence of his stories and their devices, the novelty of his characterizations,
and the transcendence of the partnership between Modesty and Willie,
their romance without romance. I own all the novels, but I haven’t read
them all. I have deliberately put off reading the last couple that I
bought because I know that after I read them, there will be no more
freshly minted novels to read. I’ll have exhausted this rich vein of
adventure stories. And I want to postpone that unhappy moment as long
as I can. Perverse of me, I know. But love is about longing as well
as consummation. By the time all of the stories about
Modesty Blaise begin, she has been retired for some time from her previous
occupation as the head of an international criminal organization known
as the Network. The Network specialized in theft. Modesty, who was orphaned
as a child in the aftermath of World War II and survived a hard-scrabble
hand-to-mouth existence through the sheer ferocity of her determination,
refused to deal in vice or drugs: she loathed human degradation and
those who dealt in it. When Modesty first saw Willie Garvin,
he was a gutter-bred bitter self-hating rough-neck hoodlum. But she
saw in him not only prodigious physical abilities but impressive mental
prowess and, presumably, a kind of innate stalwartness. She rescued
him from his thug’s lowlife and gave him the opportunity to make something
of himself. And in six months, a new Willie Garvin emerged—a man of
cheerful confidence and sharp intelligence with all his former criminal
skills enhanced by his knowledge that someone believed in him—Modesty.
On the day they met, when Modesty bought him out of jail, she seemed
a “Princess” to Willie; and he has called her “Princess” ever since.
Through the six years they worked together
in the Network, “they schemed, fought, bled, tended each other’s hurts,”
and, in effect, became halves of a single personality, so attuned that
each knew what the other was thinking and would do under any circumstance.
And then, having piled up a small fortune apiece, they retired. Modesty
split up the Network among her lieutenants and bought a penthouse in
London; Willie took possession of an old-world pub by the River Thames.
But they were not content with their new humdrum existence, and so when
Sir Gerald Tarrant of British Intelligence needed some unorthodox help
in an enterprise that was, for him, illegal, he turned to Modesty and
Willie. They helped Tarrant on that occasion and liked the work well
enough to take other assignments as they cropped up. And those comprise
the Modesty Blaise oeuvre of Peter O’Donnell. Until Modesty came along, most of O’Donnell’s
writing was in comics. He sold his first story in 1936 when he was sixteen
to The Scout, one of many
magazines manufactured in England for young readers. He became a staff
writer for the publisher of such magazines in 1937, turning out stories
for both serious and humorous “picture stories” (comics). His career
was interrupted for six years by World War II, in which he served as
a radio operator. Upon discharge in about 1945, he became a book publisher
for a few years and then, in 1951, returned to freelance writing, producing
many stories for the magazines of Amalgamated Press (the forerunner
of Fleetway Publications). In 1953, an Amalgamated editor recommended
O’Donnell as a substitute writer for a newspaper comic strip called
Belinda. While he was doing
that, he was invited to take over writing Garth, a science fantasy strip that had slipped in popularity. O’Donnell
revived it, and soon after starting on it, he was also doing Tug Transom, a strip about the skipper
of a tramp steamer and his crew. During the 1950s, he also wrote a couple
of other more humorous strips—For
Better or Worse (about a married couple, Jack and Jill) and Eve (another Jane)—and
short stories for women’s magazines. Then at the end of 1956, the Daily Mirror lost the artist-writer of
one of its most popular strips,
Romeo Brown. In England, newspaper strips are produced for individual
newspapers, not syndicates; popular strips may be circulated to “provincial
papers” by the London papers that own them, but not always. Many strips
appear only in their “home” newspapers where they were born. I don’t
know if Romeo Brown appeared anywhere except in the Daily Mirror, but when the Daily
Sketch lured Alfred Mazure (“Maz”) away, the Mirror needed someone to write
Romeo Brown and someone to draw it. O’Donnell was invited to write
it, and to draw it, the Mirror
hired the man O’Donnell would thereafter always refer to as “the great
Jim Holdaway,” the artist who would, later, give Modesty Blaise her
glamorous appearance. Romeo Brown was a blundering comical
detective out of P.G. Wodehouse, but the strip’s “main idea,” O’Donnell
said, “was to get girls’ clothes off in the nicest possible way.” Later,
O’Donnell learned that Holdaway was plunged into despair when he found
out what Romeo Brown was about. “He went home and
said to his wife, ‘I can’t do this—I can’t draw girls.’ He had been
drawing westerns for a long time and thought that he could draw only
cowboys and horses!” It soon developed, however, that Holdaway
could draw pretty girls very well. Sexy, beautiful girls. Well enough
that when O’Donnell invented Modesty Blaise—a beautiful, sexy heroine—he
wanted Holdaway to draw her. Initially, the publishing newspaper tried
another artist, but that individual “totally misunderstood” the character.
“It was a disaster,” O’Donnell said. He promptly recommended Holdaway,
and Modesty was, forthwith, given visual life. Modesty
Blaise began in the London
Evening Standard on May 13, 1963, but O’Donnell’s heroine had been
lurking in the back corridors of his imagination for many months prior
to that. After a decade of producing stories for he-men like Garth and
Tug Transom while also writing romantic fiction for female readers,
O’Donnell had started thinking about combining the two somehow in “a
super woman who could have the kind of adventure the big, super male
heroes had been having all this time—that was the beginning.” Said O’Donnell:
“You let these things simmer. You don’t consciously think about them
very often. But gradually the yeast seems to work, and a character emerges.
I would say that until you actually start to write the characters—to
put dialogue in the mouth and to activate the strings of the [puppet]—they
don’t come to life. Not for me at any rate. I can only get so far in
thinking about a character, and then I’ve got to start working them
out—writing pages and pages of dialogue and action just to get the blood
flowing through the veins—and then they’ll begin to take on life for
themselves and sometimes surprise me with what they say or do.” In imagining such a “super woman” as
Modesty, O’Donnell had to give her a background, a history, that would
make her plausible. “I don’t think you could take a girl from behind
a counter in a shop and turn her into a Modesty Blaise. It had to be
born in the blood and the bone.” He remembered, then, an incident from
his army career. As he has told it frequently (try http://www.cs.umu.se/~kenth/Modesty/podint.html),
he was with a mobile radio detachment in northern Persia in 1942, eating
his dinner out of a mess kit beside a small stream when “this child
suddenly appeared. She was alone, she was barefoot, she wore a rag of
a dress, she had all her belongings tied up in a blanket on her head,
and she had a cord around her neck with something hanging on it. She
sat down at some distance away, on the other side of the stream, and
started gnawing on something she removed from her bundle.” O’Donnell and his comrades offered
the girl food, and she finally took some, warily. O’Donnell saw that
the object on the cord around her neck was a piece of wood with a long
nail lashed to it—“a weapon, which she obviously needed.” O’Donnell “surmised that she was a
refugee from somewhere in the Balkans, and she had been on her own for
some time because she was unphased, she was her own person, this little
kid,” and after eating from the mess kit she’d been given, she washed
the utensils in the stream, using sand to scour them. “She stood there
for a few seconds,” he continued, “and then she gave us a smile, and
you could have lit up a small village with that smile, and then she
said something and walked off into the desert, going south, and she
was on her own and walked like a little princess. I never forgot that
child. And when I wanted a background for Modesty Blaise, I knew that
child was the story.” But Modesty is an extremely knowledgeable
and sophisticated woman of the world, and for that aspect of her character,
O’Donnell put the refugee girl in the company of an old man, a Hungarian
professor, whom the girl protected. And he educated her. After he died,
Modesty was 16 or 17, and she heard about a casino in Tangier and went
there to work. There, presumably, she acquired some social polish and
learned much about the shadowy underworld, and when her boss was killed,
she took over his operation, eventually forming the Network. “Once Modesty had fully emerged,” O’Donnell
said, “the totality of Willie Garvin followed thirty seconds later.
He is an essential part of her.” The Modesty Blaise novels began with
the Losey movie. Initially, the idea was to promote the movie, and O’Donnell
simply adapted the screenplay he’d written. But the final screenplay
was re-written several times, leaving only one line from O’Donnell’s
script; so the first novel, Modesty
Blaise (1965), is no longer anything like the film. O’Donnell found
more satisfaction in writing the novels. In writing the strip, he produced
crudely drawn thumbnails of the panels so he would know how much space
the words were taking—and, conversely, that sufficient room remained
for the artwork. But the novels were solo performances with the writer
in complete control. Moreover, in a novel “there’s elbow room to give
more nuances of feeling and to say what’s going on inside your characters.” The novels also more fully explain
the relationship between Modesty and Willie, supplying an answer to
the question O’Donnell has been plagued with more than any other. From Sabre-tooth: “Modesty ... by some strange magic had stripped away
the veneer and liberated Willie Garvin from the gnawing demons who rode
on his back. For this liberation, the new Willie Garvin had made himself—not
her slave, for she would not allow that, but her eternally faithful
follower. And though she had raised him up to become her right arm,
he still sat at her feet. And there was no loss of masculinity in this....
Willie Garvin was wholly convinced that sitting at Modesty’s feet set
him head and shoulders above any man alive—even those few who had known
the gifts of her splendid body.” To suggest, as some did, that there
was something sexual between them embarrassed Willie “as a devout believer
might be embarrassed by a friend’s unwitting sacrilege.” Said O’Donnell: “It’s a relationship women understand better than men.”
By 1973, Modesty Blaise was published in 76 newspapers in 35 countries. The
strip appeared in the U.S. in 30-40 papers at the time the Losey movie
ran. All but the Detroit Free
Press dropped the strip soon dropped it, saying the stories ran
too long, 16-17 weeks. U.S. papers wanted O’Donnell to cut back to 12
weeks, but he refused. To do so, he said, would cut the meat out. “You’ll
end up with no depth of character, no humor, none of the fleshing out
and asides that, to my mind, are vital parts of the success of the Modesty
Blaise/Willie Garvin setup.” O’Donnell and Holdaway met once a week
when the artist delivered the week’s worth of strips to the writer at
his Fleet Street office. O’Donnell would look over the strips, and if
“amendments” were needed, Holdaway would make them. And then they would
deliver the completed batch across the street to the Standard
offices. Writing later of these encounters, O’Donnell said he never
knew quite what to expect on the day Holdaway was to appear. “Sometimes
the door would open an inch, and a voice would order me to throw out
my gun and come out with my hands up. Sometimes he was the gas-meter
man with a falsetto voice. Sometimes his hat would be thrown in, and
sometimes the first I knew of his arrival was when clouds of cigarette
smoke would come wafting through my old-fashioned office letter-box..” They worked well together, O’Donnell
believed. “We enjoyed and respected each other’s contribution and worked
together in the greatest harmony.” Then in 1970, in the midst of their
18th Modesty story together, the great Jim Holdaway died. Struck down
by a wholly unexpected heart attack at the youthful age of 43. Fifteen
years after Holdaway’s death, O’Donnell would write: “Jim Holdaway was
a small man with a gentle manner, an immense talent, and a lovely sense
of humor. I still miss him.” The Standard editors held try-outs for a replacement, and they and O’Donnell
finally settled on a Spaniard, Enrique Badia-Romero. Thereafter, the
production of the strip was conducted mostly by mail, which made a detour
at the Standard offices for
O’Donnell’s scripts to be translated into Spanish. Romero left Modesty in 1978 to concentrate on a strip of his own, Axa. He returned in the fall of 1986 and
continued to draw the strip for the rest of its run. During his sabbatical,
Modesty was drawn briefly by John Burns,
then Pat Wright, and, finally, Neville Colvin from late 1980 until Romero’s
return, a total of 15 stories. Colvin’s work seemed to O’Donnell to
be closer to Holdaway’s than any of the other successors; and I agree
although he was closer at the beginning than at the end of his tour. All 95 of the Modesty Blaise stories
(and the 12 back-story strips about Modesty’s refugee life) have been
reprinted in one place or another. Titan Books in England published
23 stories in eight 9x11" paperbacks which present the highest
quality reprints, nearly pristine reproduction of every line no matter
how fragile. Ken Pierce of Illinois published another 21 stories (only
three of which duplicate Titan’s) in eight 7x10" paperbacks. The
quality here, too, is virtually perfect but the strips are smaller than
in the Titan volumes. All of Holdaway’s work can be found in either
Titan or Pierce. The rest of the canon has been published by Comics Revue, sometimes in special Modesty
Blaise issues that contain whole stories, sometimes serialized in the
regular monthly magazine. The quality of reproduction here, however,
is very uneven—due, doubtless, to the source material, which, apparently,
is not always printer’s proofs. Modesty
Blaise was one of the last great adventure strips, and it is arguably
the most literate adventure strip ever. And the novels are better than
the strip. The books have an advantage over newspapers’ serial mode:
their emotional content is cumulative not diffused over intervening
days and therefore builds toward greater impact. In the last of the
books, the short story collection The Cobra Trap, O’Donnell arranged the
retirement of his dauntless pair. They die. They die gracefully, in
battle, as befits such legendary soldiers of fortune. O’Donnell brings
down the curtain with his usual finesse, easing Willie into the afterlife
on the last page of the title story. This tale takes place 20 years
“in the future,” so Modesty and Willie are in their fifties. In last
spring’s final strip story, “The Zombie,” they are still in their thirties
and have twenty more years of exploits before them. At the end of the last strip adventure,
Modesty announces that she is tired of villains and secret service work
and wants to do something “crazy—just for fun. We’ll take a little break,
Willie love,” she says, “just you and me.” Says he: “Best bit of all,
Princess.” And they sail off in a yacht. The strip ended April 11, 2001. It
was O’Donnell’s 82nd birthday.
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