For more than 35 years, she's dodged assassins' bullets while outsmarting international villains bent on world domination. And, unlike her male counterpart, James Bond, she usually brings down foes with hand-to-hand combat instead of flashy gadgets. She is Modesty Blaise, and next month, her creator, Peter O'Donnell, will succeed where all her foes have failed, as he publishes her 13th and final adventure, Cobra Trap (Souvenir Press).
Cobra Trap, a collection of five short stories, is the first Modesty Blaise mystery in 16 years. While British fans had an earlier taste when Cobra Trap was released in the U.K. five years ago, American fans are just getting a peek now. In an unusual move, rather than selling the American rights to a U.S. publisher, O'Donnell's longtime U.K. publisher Souvenir decided to reprint the hardcover and issue it in the U.S. through the Chicago-based Independent Publishers Group.
The American publication coincides with O'Donnell's decision to end his 38-year-old comic strip. "I finished writing the scripts of the strip a few months ago and the final strip happens to fall on April 11, which is my 81st birthday," O'Donnell told PW. "It wasn't planned. But it's a coincidence that rather pleases me."
In the Beginning
When O'Donnell's daily comic strip, Modesty Blaise, premiered on May 13, 1963, it introduced the world to a revolutionary heroine. From the start, Modesty was nobody's damsel in distress; she was resourceful, quick-thinking, sexy and lethal. At 26, Modesty was already retired with a vast wealth accrued from her eight years as the head of an international criminal organization known as The Network. She and her platonic partner, Willie Garvin, lived together in penthouses, villas and pied-à-terres around the globe. Always hungry for adventure, the duo is continually lured out of retirement to help British Intelligence, which is hindered by having to operate within the constraints of the law.
"I think the reason people have been fond of Modesty for almost 40 years is she's honest, straightforward and compassionate," said O'Donnell. "One doesn't normally think of this type of person as being compassionate. What Modesty and Willie do is not for themselves but for other people."
Sexually free, Modesty is anything but modest concerning her body, often stripping for a deadly fight or using seduction to gain information. Modesty and Willie communicate almost telepathically and although their relationship is not sexual, each is the other's most important link. Both prefer to incapacitate rather than kill, and their acrobatic fighting skills utilize lightning-fast moves and encyclopedic knowledge of the human body and its weak points. As for high-tech Bond-like weapons, O'Donnell is firm: "I don't like them to have wonderful gadgets. I like them to improvise with what's there and be ingenious. Let them work things out with a box of matches and a bent pin. Which is demanding but very enjoyable." Apparently it is a strategy that keeps the fans interested.
The novels originated in 1965 after O'Donnell was approached to write a screenplay for a motion picture version of the strip. His script was rewritten to the point that O'Donnell claims the final film contained only one line from his original draft. ("Imagine if the only filmed Bond was Casino Royale and you have the missed opportunity, botch-job that was Modesty Blaise," wrote Mike Paterson in Crime Time.) As a tie-in for the big-budget film, O'Donnell was asked to turn his screenplay into a novel. The film flopped, but the novel was a success. Thus began O'Donnell's second career as a novelist.
"Writing a novel is far more satisfying because the strip is a very concentrated thing where you can only touch the ground in spots," said O'Donnell. "There is much more elbow room in novels to go into people's heads, expand on the dialogue, flesh out the situation and enhance the characters. The novels are more psychological than the strip. Although, I'm not a cerebral writer. I write from the gut. I write the way I feel."
The first five Blaise novels (Modesty Blaise in 1965, Sabre-Tooth in 1966, I, Lucifer in 1967, A Taste for Death in 1969 and The Impossible Virgin in 1971) were released simultaneously in Britain by Souvenir Press and in the U.S. by Doubleday. American fans of the remaining seven novels (Pieces of Modesty in 1972, The Silver Mistress in 1973, Last Day in Limbo in 1976, Dragon's Claw in 1978, The Xanadu Talisman in 1981, The Night of Morningstar in 1982 and Dead Man's Handle in 1985) had to rely on pricey imports until Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press bought the U.S. rights and began publishing them in 1984.
"The Modesty Blaise novels stayed in print in the U.K., but there was a decade where they weren't published in the States," recalled Penzler, owner of Mysterious Books in New York City. "We imported the British paperbacks for our bookstores and they were constantly in demand. The success of those British paperbacks made me buy the rights when I started my [publishing] line."
Penzler is still a fan of the books. "They're wonderful, great fun," he told PW. "People loved that Modesty was a very strong female lead character in these terrific, rousing thrillers."
Edgar Award—winning novelist Jan Burke (whose newest novel, Flight [S&S], is dedicated to O'Donnell) told PW, "I meet women all the time who tell me they love the Modesty Blaise books because here is a woman who can do anything. Being female was not an issue that kept her from doing as she pleased and getting involved with danger."
Final Caper
Burke has a copy of Cobra Trap but the final story in the book is still unread. "I've set it aside because I think I need to wait until I've read the last of the strips and then I'll read it," she said. "I'm not ready to let go of her yet—cowardly as that is for me to say. But I do think it's marvelous that the author had the courage to take control of the characters and control their ending."
O'Donnell had no qualms about bringing Modesty and Willie's story to a definite close. "I didn't think it would be right to just stop and leave them in limbo without any final conclusion," he said. "Because they're characters I'm very fond of, I didn't feel they should end up in an old folks' home. I wanted them to have a full life, so I moved the story about 25 years into the future."
Cobra Trap's short stories offer a panoramic view of the duo's career, with the first story opening with Modesty still running the Network and the final tale finding a 50ish Modesty putting her life on the line to save old friends caught up in an uprising in South America. "I think the final story showed them up in their best colors," said O'Donnell. "They're still ingenious in what they did, still have a great rapport with each other, and I brought in characters readers have met over the years in various books. I don't have a regret at all."
Retire?
When the strip ends next week, O'Donnell will be officially retired. His rest seems even more deserved when it's discovered that he also wrote novels under a pseudonym for 15 years. The prolific O'Donnell wrote 10 romance novels under the name Madeleine Brent (beginning with Tregaron's Daughter in 1971 and concluding with Golden Urchin in 1986). His identity remained a secret (even after Brent won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romance Novel of the year award for 1975's Merlin's Keep) until 1991. "Once you go through all the Modesty Blaise books, there's this whole new set on young independent heroines in the Madeleine Brent novels," observed Burke. "Like Modesty, the heroines in these novels are innovative in the face of all sorts of adversity."
"I don't want to do anything more at my age that has a deadline to it," said O'Donnell. "I could not again face the long task of writing a novel, which takes nine months to a year to write." But that doesn't mean he has stopped writing. Unburdened by a deadline, O'Donnell has already completed six short stories. "They have nothing to do with Modesty Blaise at all," he said with a laugh. "They're tales with a twist at the end, like the O. Henry stories with an element of fantasy. I may investigate adapting them to a TV series." Some of Modesty and Willie's best adventures didn't begin until they had retired, and their creator seems to be following their lead.
