Modesty Blaise and graphic storytelling, plus a question for readers

I'm reading Modesty Blaise again, so here's an old post from back when I first read the original Modesty comic-strip stories collected between covers under the title Yellowstone Booty.  Before you read on, a few questions: Would today's readers have the patience for a story told in 126 three-panel installments, having to wait a full day from one installment to the next, as was the case with the Modesty Blaise series? When was the heyday for serial comic strips, especially crime and adventure? When did their popularity wane? And why?

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This one's from back in the days when men were men, women were lethal weapons, and graphic novels were comics.

I'd written about the first Modesty Blaise novel and the godawful 1966 movie, but Yellowstone Booty was my first experience with Modesty's original medium. I already knew about Modesty's platonic relationship with sidekick Willie Garvin and about her beauty, her physical prowess, her ingenuity, and her skill with odd weapons, so I paid special attention in these stories, collected from the "Modesty Blaise" daily comic strip, to author Peter O'Donnell's technique: How did he sustain a longish narrative when he had to tell his story in tiny, daily-comics-size chunks?

Here are lines or dialogue exchanges with which O'Donnell ended some of the 126 installments of the story "Idaho George":

"WHY DID I EVER BECOME A CON MAN?"

"So where's the sting? Who gets conned?" / "That comes later, honey ..."

"Holy bloody smoke ...! The crazy old biddy means it!"

"Get back! No — !"

"Uhh!"

"Ooh!"

Something is always happening, in other words, and that's the strip's lesson in storytelling: Always leave the reader wondering what will happen next.

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Back when I read the novel Modesty Blaise, whose publication followed the comic strip's inception by two years, I wondered how daily newspapers had got around the occasional nudity in the book and some of its sequels. The answer is that they didn't — except in America, of course.

Yellowstone Booty, a three-story collection that contains "Idaho George," also includes a portfolio of Modesty Blaise art by John Burns, one of several artists who drew the strip over the years. Three of the drawings include a topless Modesty.

Yet a Wikipedia article on Modesty Blaise says that "The strip's circulation in the United States was erratic, in part because of the occasional nude scenes, which were much less acceptable in the U.S. than elsewhere, resulting in a censored version of the strip being circulated."

One can only speculate what depravity Americans would have got up to had they been permitted to see a naked cartoon breast from time to time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

R.I.P. Peter O'Donnell, the man behind Modesty Blaise

The Rap Sheet wrote last week about the death of Peter O'Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise, the beautiful, mysterious action heroine who enjoyed a long life in comic strips, novels, and a ludicrous 1966 movie.

I had written about creator and character from time to time, including an observation that Modesty Blaise reminded me of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander.

I also enjoyed a collection of the comic strips as examples of brief, punchy storytelling, and I linked to an excellent interview with O'Donnell in Crime Time that revealed the real-life inspiration for Modesty.

And here's part of my answer to a challenging comment on my post about Modesty Blaise and Frank McAuliffe's Augustus Mandrell:

"What makes her a hero a reader can identify with? She does everything you wish you could do, only she does it better: retired from a successful business she started herself, lives an independent life, has money, has sex and love on her own terms, etc. Maybe my earlier reader's comment about wish fulfillment was more to the point.

"In fact, if I were to expand on my comments (but blog posts are best kept short), I'd have noted all the folklore elements that play into her story: the foundling, the wandering child, etc.

"Re gadgets, I'd say they figure into the plot more than now and then, at least in Modesty Blaise [the first novel]. Remember the exploding tie?

"But maybe there's a very subtle message in O'Donnell's use of gadgets. Yes, he'll have Modesty and Willie use them, in part, perhaps, to lull an audience accustomed to such things from James Bond. But, in the end, the deciding factors are more down to earth: Modesty's body and Willie's knife, especially when Modesty uses her body, say, to distract a sadistic jailer, then whacks him with a concealed gadget."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Modesty Blaise: The original girl who played with fire

I've reached the stage in Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo where Lisbeth Salander is starting to come to the fore. So far she reminds me strongly of another young fictional woman with mysterious origins, a horrible past, a quiet demeanor, and wide-ranging and dangerous talents: Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise.

The affinity is so strong and so obvious that someone else must have remarked on it. Who else has noticed the similarities?

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

God rest ye fairy gentlemen (and ladies), and a comical question

I’m not sure what the rate of inflation has been since the late 1960s, but I’m pretty sure that the comic books for which I paid twelve cents back then would still not cost the $9.99 I just paid for Artemis Fowl: The Graphic Novel. But then, graphic novels have production values that the old-time DC comics could only dream of.

The newer printing processes can produce deeper, much more saturated colors. I suspect that this, as much as any predisposition toward darker subject matter on the writers’ part, is responsible for the look of graphic novels. Why do graphic novelists fill their stories with deep, dark, brooding shadows? For the same a reason a dog licks its … but never mind.

Artemis Fowl: The Graphic Novel, adapted from Eoin Colfer’s first book about a 12-year-old criminal genius, may be particularly well-suited for such treatment, since much of the story happens underground, in the land of the Lower Elements People – fairies, elves and the like. (Fowl’s antagonists and sometimes allies are members of the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance squad, or LEPrec– you can figure out the rest of that one, too. Colfer is, after all, Irish.)

Among this graphic novel’s attractions are the opportunities to see how the characters look and to match them against the mental images one has from the book. The artist and colorist (Giovanni Rigano and Paolo Lamanna, respectively) do a good job, rendering convincing pictures of the hirsute troll that nearly puts an end to Artemis’ butler, the hairy and endearingly amoral dwarf Mulch Diggums, and more. The butler, named Butler, is a tad more gigantic than I'd have pictured, and Butler's sister, Juliet, does not look especially Eurasian, though she is described as such in one of the later novels in the series. Still, the graphic novel looks terrific, if necessarily a bit darker than the novel on which it is based.

Artemis himself looks as one might expect of a boy of such overarching ambition: short, immaculately dressed, his eyes narrowed or shielded behind special eyewear. His eyes widen just once, at a highly appropriate moment at the story’s end.

And now, readers, the question: Artemis Fowl joins Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise as characters who enjoy parallel lives in comics/graphic novels and in crime novels of the traditional, non-graphic kind. Who else has done this?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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"Modesty Blaise," the movie, or, something from the '60s that really sucked

1966, and Batman was on the air, Fellini had turned surreal, and James Bond was all the rage. Joseph Losey's movie version of Modesty Blaise has affinities with all three, combining the worst of each in a pretentious and weirdly dated period piece.

I'm no expert on the Modesty Blaise comic strip and novels, but I did appreciate the first book's low-key humor, its aching portrayal of Willie Garvin's devotion to and chaste love for Modesty, and its occasional touches of chilling cruelty and cold, nocturnal ambiance. Among other things, these features made the novel, Modesty Blaise, something more than a sex-and-gadgets spy caper.

Losey and screenwriter Evan Jones jettison almost all of that and exaggerate the rest. Where author Peter O'Donnell sharpened the humor by applying it sparingly, mostly in the person of a fastidious but irrepressibly wise-cracking assistant to the villain of the piece, the movie hits us over the head with a ha-ha, hilariously clueless government minister, too. Where O'Donnell gives the villains a Bondian hideout in an isolated monastery, Losey turns the sinister fortress into a cheap, swinging-London-style outtake from Blow-Up, a rather better movie released the same year. (A more accurate comparison, though anachronistic by two years, might be a Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In sketch, but without the humor.)

Plot? Modesty is a mysterious character, a war orphan who has retired from a lucrative criminal career until called in by the British government to foil a diamond robbery. But she pulls some tricks of her own. Forget all that, though. It's probably not the main reason you'd enjoy the novel, and you won't be able to make much of it in the mess of a movie.

Four decades on, the most puzzling aspect of this film is that so many big names and, apparently, an at least adequate budget were involved. Amsterdam's streets and canal houses are gorgeously photographed, and just look at some of the people involved in the movie: Losey as director. Monica Vitti as Modesty. Terence Stamp as Willie Garvin. Dirk Bogarde as the villain Gabriel in a role that one might regard as an amusingly camp deviation from O'Donnell's original if it were in the least amusing.

I can't entirely blame the makers and participants of Modesty Blaise. 1966 was probably a heady time, with producers willing to throw money after this and other hip, glamorously decadent projects. I wonder how long it took all involved to regard the movie as they would a bad hangover.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Meet the real Modesty Blaise

Crime Time, source of that excellent interview with translators that I've cited before and will keep citing every chance I get, offers this interview with Modesty Blaise's creator, Peter O'Donnell. In it, O'Donnell recounts his memorable meeting with the child who became his model for that memorable ex-criminal and supremely talented operative, Modesty Blaise.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Augustus Mandrell vs. Modesty Blaise

Back in the days when this blog had readers, I posted a comment about Modesty Blaise, Peter O'Donnell's gadget-toting 1960s super spy. More recently, I've been discussing Frank McAuliffe's books about that non-gadget-toting 1960s super hit man, Augustus Mandrell.

At the time of my Modesty Blaise post, a reader commented that Blaise, James Bond and other popular spy/caper heroes of the time were products of pure wish fulfillment. "I think readers were a lot more naive then, and the heroes and plots of these books impossibly suave," my intelligent correspondent wrote. The first Modesty Blaise novel and the first Augustus Mandrell collection appeared the same year, 1965. Each in its own way seems both a reaction to James Bond and an illustration of my reader's point about wish fulfillment. The differences between the two heroes are at least as interesting as the similarities.

Both are projections of fantasy. Modesty Blaise is impossibly rich, impossibly fit, impossibly talented and impossibly accomplished. Her impossible dexterity in martial arts is supplemented by impossibly elaborate, impossibly miniaturized gadgets cooked up by her assistant, Willie Garvin.

Augustus Mandrell, on the other hand, has impossible sang-froid and an improbable skill with disguises (though the running comments he offers on the practice and the psychological effects of disguise render him a more accessible and less remote hero than is Modesty Blaise. He lets the reader in on his thinking). Mandrell gets by on guts and guile; Modesty Blaise's currency is raw skill.

Blaise works for the forces of good; Mandrell, though his sympathies are usually in the right place, works for the forces of money. Blaise has all the luxury goods that an upwardly aspiring reader in the consumer culture of the mid-1960s could wish for. Her apartment is decorated expensively but with taste, and her liquor is the best. At the age of thirty, having made her pile in ways only hinted at, she has risen above the need to work for mere money.

Augustus Mandrell cheerfully embraces the quest for cash, and his difficulty collecting the fees he charges for his "commissions" are a delightful running theme of all the stories. Could these contrasting attitudes toward money be due in part to the authors' nationalities? O'Donnell was British, McAuliffe American.

And then there's sex. Had Modesty Blaise and Augustus Mandrell ever wound up in the same story, they'd likely have been adversaries who eventually wind up cooperating. They also would have wound up in bed, where both would have performed extremely well. For her, the sex would have been a release of tension, fully enjoyed, expertly accomplished, leaving her prepared to resume her work. For him, it would have been a romp. They'd both have derived pleasure from it, but Mandrell would have experiened more joy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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What's a crime novel? (Modesty Blaise)

Among my haul at Murder One was Modesty Blaise (the novel, not the comic strip). The book is full of evil villains, 1960s-style sex (You know, lots of it, but no dirty words), fiendishly clever secret weapons, and humor. But what made it interesting was a blurb on the back cover.

No, the blurb does not compare author Peter O'Donnell to Ian Rankin. But it does call the Modesty Blaise series "seminal British crime novels." And the blurb comes from Crime Time, so it was not written by some know-nothing reviewer.

I'd have considered Modesty Blaise a thriller rather than a crime novel, so let's call this one more of those salutary reminders that one should not be a stickler for categories. Besides, I am not the only crime/detective-fiction reader who regards Modesty Blaise as a guilty pleasure. A reviewer in Mystery Guide writes: "It's a good thing I don't belong to any mystery fans' associations, because they'd probably kick me out for admitting that I have a secret weakness for Modesty Blaise."

© Peter Rozovsky 2006