NANOWRIMO and COLUMN 25 REDUX!

Figure 1 - NaNoWriMo Crest
Figure 1 – NaNoWriMo Crest

Sorry to dump this on you so suddenly, but I literally just a couple of days ago realized that NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month) is upon us again, and I haven’t finished my second novel yet! Which means that I’m going to be writing fiction all this month, and will do a Dave Barry; i.e., I’m going to fill in with old columns—but with all-new graphics. Depending on how long you’ve been reading my column, this “old” may be new to you. It seems that I have two different writing muscles: fiction and non-fiction—and I haven’t yet learned how to mix them. So for the last couple of years, I’ve written only these columns, and no new fiction, even though I started my second novel a couple of years ago! So please, bear with me, and I’ll let you know how the fiction writing is going for me. I also take NaNoWriMo pledges—check out their website for how that works by clicking the link above. It’s non-profit, so you can feel good about it (not sure how that works, either). The title of my second novel about Tom Smith is called Tom Smith and His Electric Time Velocipede. Wish me luck! And now, on to Column 25 Redux!

!Figure 2 - Monica Vitti as Modesty
!Figure 2 – Monica Vitti as Modesty

We science fiction and fantasy people are generally an eclectic bunch; by that I mean we don’t just read the stuff, we generally read comics, go to movies, collect stuff related to our interests and so on. And we often don’t limit ourselves to straight sf/fantasy; a very large number of us are also readers of mysteries, detective novels, adventure novels and thrillers. (Not only the readers, but also the writers: an amazing percentage of sf/fantasy writers whom I know personally are great fans of mystery/detective (also called ‘tec) and thriller writers and writing, not only professionally but personally.) Even John D. MacDonald, one of America’s greatest adventure/’tec writers, wrote science fiction (Ballroom of the Skies; Wine of the Dreamers; The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, plus a number of terrific short stories). To me, some of the best and most enjoyable of those kinds of writing also have a strong fantastic component. Two of my favourites are Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir’s The Destroyer, and Peter O’Donnell’s (and Jim Holdaway’s) Modesty Blaise.

We won’t go into The Destroyer much now, but those of you already familiar with the character and/or the series know that Remo Williams/Master of Sinanju Chiun and the organization known as CURE have sold millions of copies of paperbacks and had a Marvel comic magazine as well as a TV pilot and a movie (Remo Williams: The First Adventure) made, despite being almost pure fantasy from beginning to end. But it’s fantasy with a strong action/adventure bent (and a very sardonic sense of humour), and that kept it out of our genre as far as booksellers were concerned. So it ended up next to Tom Clancy and the like on the bookstore shelves. As did the focus of this week’s blog entry, the woman known as Modesty Blaise.

 Figure 3 - Character sheet by Jim Holdaway
Figure 3 – Character sheet by Jim Holdaway

Modesty Blaise is the creation of a comic strip writer named Peter O’Donnell, who had worked on a number of strips before a wartime experience gave him the seed of an idea for his own action strip. He wanted a female action hero that could do all the things that James Bond and the other male action heroes were doing, but he wanted it to be plausible. He remembered that—and if you’ve read any Modesty (either book or strip) you’ll find this very familiar—in 1942 he and some Army colleagues were camped by a stream in in the north of what was then Persia (now Iran), up near the Caucasus Mountains, when a young girl of about 12 showed up at the edge of their campfire, dressed in ragged clothing, with a stick with a nail through it hanging from her neck. She was wary, but not afraid of them, and they managed—through a combination of motioning and talk in a kind of pidgin—to get her to take a couple of cans of food and a can opener. After eating she gave them a smile that “could have lit up a village, and she walked away; she walked like a little princess….” and they never saw her or heard anything about her again. This encounter is described in (I think) the first book; the fictionalized girl became Modesty.

O’Donnell tried working on his new strip with Dan Dare artist Frank Hampton, but was dissatisfied with the results; he ended up partnering with Jim Holdaway. The new strip debuted in 1962; this partnership lasted until Holdaway’s death in 1970, and the strip continued until 2002 with various artists; however, many people still think of (and prefer) Holdaway as “the” Modesty Blaise artist. In 1963, the first Modesty Blaise book was published, titled Modesty Blaise—what else? It was followed by a ‘60s-style “pop” movie starring Italian actress Monica Vitti as Modesty (Figure 2), Terence Stamp as her friend and “sidekick” Willie Garvin, and Dirk Bogarde as the villain Gabriel. The movie more or less followed the storyline of the book, but was pretty lame—for one thing, Willie and Modesty were lovers in this movie, which would never happen in the books or strips. For another, Vitti spoke no English and had to learn her lines phonetically and, finally, the whole movie was made in a ‘60s “pop” style, which was at odds with the actual storyline. (Mimes? Really?)

The salient facts on Modesty are these: a young girl, age unspecified but about 10 years old, in 1945 found herself in a DP camp (displaced persons) in Greece, along with an elderly Jewish scholar named Lob whom she had met in her wanderings through the post-war Middle East, North Africa and Mediterranean areas; she knew nothing of her past or her parents, and was . She did not remember anything from her short past, and had survived the war on her own, learning to survive any way she could. Lob became her friend and tutor, teaching her reading and writing in several languages, plus anything else she might need to survive. He named her Modesty; she chose the last name Blaise, from Merlin’s tutor in the Arthurian legends. After several years Lob died when she was still a pre-teen; Modesty continued wandering and surviving—at one point she was adopted by an Arab tribe—until she became part of the Louche gang in Tangiers, finally taking over the gang when Louche died, renaming it The Network. The Network dealt in criminal matters—never touching drugs or slavery, because Modesty (called “mam’selle” by her underlings) was against them.

Figure 4 - Modesty Blaise movie poster
Figure 4 – Modesty Blaise movie poster

During the post-Louche years she met Willie Garvin, adventurer and petty thief, but, she saw his potential and offered him a job. He became her right-hand man in The Network, also becoming Modesty’s dearest and most-trusted friend. They maintain a strictly Platonic relationship, fearing that any sexual element might destroy what they have between them. He is the only man who is allowed to call her “Princess” (save the Arabs, who call her “el sayyid,” which means the same). After they retire from criminal work and turn The Network over to one of Modesty’s underlings, they move to London; Modesty attained British citizenship some time before from a “marriage of convenience.” With plenty of money—Modesty buys a penthouse apartment in Mayfair; Willie fulfills a lifelong dream and buys a pub (“The Treadmill”)—they soon get bored with their sedentary lifestyle and begin a relationship with Sir Gerald Tarrant of the British Secret Service, which brings all kinds of adventure into their lives, much of it involving oddball and unlikely villains.

 Figure 5 - Modesty Strips by Holdaway
Figure 5 – Modesty Strips by Holdaway

Those are the bare facts; it would take pages and pages to describe the strips, the books and the movies—two of which have been made so far (and a TV pilot set in Los Angeles; it was forgettable at best)—the aforementioned Monica Vitti thing and a more recent (2002) film starring Alexandra Staden as Modesty, and set in the Louche casino in Tangiers—no Willie Garvin in this movie (See Figure 7). It’s a better movie—Staden is a better actress than Vitti, who could “speek no Inglis” when she made her movie, and had to learn her dialogue phonetically—but still not satisfying, partially because neither actress resembles Blaise physically. She is described as “Eurasian,” and Jim Holdaway’s Modesty (see Figure 3) is what most people think of when they think of her. As you can see from Figure 2, Monica Vitti was made up to resemble Holdaway’s Blaise; but neither has the acrobatic body or personality given us by the books and strips.

I confess, though, that I am not as big a fan of the strips as I am of the books. There are twelve novels and a thirteenth collection of short stories. I started reading Modesty in the mid-1960s after seeing the movie while I was in the US Navy, and didn’t see the strips until nearly twenty years later. Since Peter O’Donnell died in 2010 at the age of ninety, and he purposely killed both Blaise and Garvin in the last book he wrote—Cobra Trap (1996)—any new adventures will have to take place, according to O’Donnell, before that last book. This was O’Donnell’s attempt to keep the series from continuing under other, possibly worse, writers. (Some Modesty fans refuse to read that book, arguing that if they don’t read it, Modesty and Willie can’t die.)

Another big fan of the books is Quentin Tarantino, who allowed the Staden movie to be released under the “Quentin Tarantino Presents” label, although he had little or nothing to do with it; if you saw the movie Pulp Fiction, you will remember the scene where John Travolta was reading the American hardcover (Figure 6) in the toilet while waiting for Bruce Willis. Tarantino has said he wants to make a Modesty Blaise movie for years—even Diana Rigg wanted to star in a Modesty Blaise movie, but that too never came to fruition—but after the Vitti movie O’Donnell bought up the film rights and steadfastly refused to let another one be made; he said he saw screenplays by ten or eleven experienced writers, and said none of them captured the characters correctly.

 Figure 6 - Vincent Vega (John Travolta) Reads Modesty Blaise First Edition
Figure 6 – Vincent Vega (John Travolta) Reads Modesty Blaise First Edition

As with John D. MacDonald’s characters Travis McGee and Meyer, one gets to know Modesty Blaise, Willie Garvin, Sir Gerald Tarrant, Willie’s sometime lover Lady Janet Gillam, Weng the “houseboy” and other continuing characters, and to like and admire them. They are all increasingly well rounded from book to book; even lesser characters like Stephen Collier and his blind wife Dinah, who uses ESP to find things out. (And as I write this, I’m getting some kind of déja vu that says I’ve seen the scene where Willie rescues Dinah in a movie, though I can’t find that anywhere on a Google search. I wish I knew what movie that was!)

Why does Modesty Blaise fit in the sf/fantasy category, you ask? Well, for one thing, Modesty’s talents (not to mention Willie’s) are somewhat superhuman—I defy you to show me a real person who’s as competent at so many things as she/they are; they are also nearly telepathic in how well they mesh during a caper. For another many of the villains use psychic powers (much like Willie’s squeeze, Lady Janet)—“Lucifer,” in I, Lucifer, has the psychic talent of knowing, from nearly any distance, who in a given list of people is going to die soon. Maybe the elements aren’t as fantastic as in, say The Destroyer, where a practitioner of Sinanju (the “sun source” of all martial arts) can do anything, including running over water, falling from an airplane without a parachute, breaking a tank with his bare hands, etc., but the fantastic is never out of reach. From a very early age, I have liked books that had that fantastic element to them, leading me to read some very odd books. Fortunately, I don’t call these two series odd.

Another thing I like about Modesty Blaise the character, besides her remarkable abilities, is the fact that she’s a well-rounded, very human character; she has sexual relations, but only on her terms and with men she both likes and respects. She’s not a bed-hopper like James Bond, but she’s not celibate either—she enjoys sex. But, as mentioned, never ever ever with Willie Garvin, which is just one of the things the first movie got wrong. (She is also not above using the male-female thing as a weapon: one of the tricks she uses when entering a roomful of heavily-armed male opponents is to strip to the waist—she calls it “The Nailer”—to distract them for those few crucial moments needed to gain the upper hand.) I should ask some female fans if Modesty’s character is attractive to them as well, or if things like “The Nailer” are offensive.

 Figure 7 - My Name Is Modesty DVD Cover
Figure 7 – My Name Is Modesty DVD Cover

I should also mention that Modesty’s adventures have been dramatized on BBC radio; there are three I know of. In 1978, Last Day in Limbo was produced as an audio drama; in the 1980s, O’Donnell wrote a radio short story called “I Had a Date With Lady Janet,” which was good, but reminiscent of one or more of the books (I’d have to listen again to pin it down); and in 2012 the book A Taste For Death was produced in 15-minute segments for BBC radio.

All the books and movies are available from your favourite online retailer; but I suggest you try your local brick-and-mortar store first for the books—very few places carry older movies, unless you get lucky in a “bargain bin.” I know I’ve looked in places like Best Buy and Wal-Mart (yes, bad me, I know) for these, but had to settle for buying the movies online. There are also online retailers, but I won’t mention any, so I don’t play favourites. The books are (in order): 1965 – Modesty Blaise; 1966 – Sabre-Tooth; 1967 – I, Lucifer; 1969 – A Taste for Death; 1971 – The Impossible Virgin; 1972 – Pieces of Modesty  (short stories); 1973 – The Silver Mistress; 1976 – Last Days in Limbo; 1978 – Dragon’s Claw; 1981 – The Xanadu Talisman; 1982 – The Night of Morningstar; 1985 – Dead Man’s Handle; 1996 – Cobra Trap. Some are better than others, but I have to say that I enjoy them enough to reread often. I was fortunate enough to get an autographed copy of Cobra Trap, the very last book (and O’Donnell made sure of that).

As stated, I’m not a giant fan of the strips, but you can find them online as well for purchase, both collected in book form, or as singles, I think. Probably—since the books and strips do not generally share storylines—I will end up buying all the collections just to have new Modesty to read. She’s addictive that way!

Please comment on this week’s column if you have anything at all to say, even about my taking time off for NaNoWriMo. You can comment here, once you’ve logged in; or you can comment on my Facebook page, or in the Facebook groups where I publish a link to this column. I welcome all comments, good or bad. Don’t feel you have to agree with me to post a comment, either. As always, my opinion is my own, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Amazing Stories or its owners, editors, publishers or other columnists. See you next week with another brand-new old column!

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