Modesty Blaise was not the first kickass action heroine in fiction but she was a very early example of the breed. She was not only one of the most successful such heroines, she is also one of the most interesting.
The Modesty Blaise comic strip first appeared in the London Evening Standard on 13 May 1963. The comic strip ran until 2001. She appeared in eleven novels and two short story collections between 1965 and 1996. There were film and TV adaptations.
Peter O’Donnell seems to have known from the start that he was onto something special. He spent a year developing the character before the first comic strip appeared. He wanted to get her just right and he wanted her to be not just a comic-strip heroine but a complex and fascinating woman.
La Machine is very much a setting up the characters story and O’Donnell therefore keeps the narrative fairly straightforward. Modesty, in retirement after her successful criminal career, is persuaded to take on a job for the British security services. As will become usual it is a shadowy figure in the British Secret Service, Sir Gerald, who offers her the assignment. But Modesty is a freelancer. She is never under any obligation to accept an assignment.
The mission in this case is to expose and destroy an international murder racket known as La Machine, a kind of Murder Inc operation. Modesty’s plan is to tempt the racketeers into seeing her as a potential client. She will have to go further than that, and she lands herself in a very tricky situation. Her motives are suspected and La Machine marks her down for execution.
In this story O’Donnell succeeds in telling us a very great deal about Modesty, about how she operates and how she feels.
In the second story, The Long Lever, the KGB snatches a scientist and the Americans want him back. Sir Gerald hopes to pull off a coup - using Modesty and Willie to beat the Americans to the punch. It’s all a matter of British pride.
The third story, The Gabriel Set-Up, taps into themes that were very much in tune with the early 60s zeitgeist - brainwashing and mind control. Super-criminal Gabriel (who has clashed with Modesty in the past, is running a clinic for neurotic rich people. It’s part of a racket dealing in blackmail and industrial espionage, but Gabriel’s plans extend much further than that.
Modesty of course turns up at the clinic as a patient. Considering her past the idea of letting people play with her mind is rather frightening but Modesty is always prepared to endure unpleasantness in order to carry out a mission. And controlling Modesty’s mind is quite a challenge.
The first thing to be said is that Modesty is not a Honey West clone or a Cathy Gale clone. She is also not James Bond in a skirt. She is in some ways more like a female Simon Templar. Like the Saint she has made her fortune from crime. Like the Saint she feels no remorse whatsoever. Again like Simon Templar she figures that she has more than paid back society through her crime-fighting and counter-espionage activities so she has no need to feel any guilt. Like Simon Templar, but to a much greater degree, she is a bit of an outsider. But there’s a lot more to Modesty Blaise.
Modesty knows nothing of her origins. At the end of the war she was a kid in a displaced persons camp in the Middle East. Her dossier in the files in the British security service mentions that she is just very slightly Eurasian in appearance. Modesty speaks several languages and probably doesn’t know what her mother tongue is. She is a British citizen by marriage.
One of the things that makes Modesty interesting is that she’s psychologically damaged. She want through Hell when she was young and she still bears the scars. She has been able to put herself back together again but the damage is still there. It has made her both tougher and, oddly, more vulnerable.
Modesty’s missions always seem to put her in situations in which it’s an absolute certainty that she will be captured, physically abused, tortured and humiliated. And she puts herself in these situations deliberately. She’s not a masochist as such, she doesn’t enjoy it, but she does seem to get a certain amount of satisfaction out of proving that she can take it, and proving that no matter what is done to her it won’t really hurt her because she has developed techniques to switch herself off completely. There’s always a sexual element involved in these situations but Modesty has also trained herself to switch off from that, so that these events never warp her thoroughly natural enjoyment of her sex life.
Another cool thing about Modesty is that she doesn’t just have the usual accomplishments (firearms and unarmed combat skills). She has some psychological tricks she developed in order to survive her nightmare childhood and these tricks often give her an edge over an opponent.
Of all the kickass action heroines of the past sixty years I find Modesty Blaise to be the most convincingly female. She’s an intelligent, resourceful, tough and capable woman, but she is always a woman. As I said earlier, you’ll never mistake her for James Bond in a skirt. She’s also by far the most psychologically and emotionally complex of kickass action heroines. She really is a fascinating woman.
Modesty Blaise is a comic strip for grown-ups. There’s plenty of action and excitement but it offers some subtlety and it explores surprisingly complex themes. Of course these themes, and Modesty’s fascinating personality and motivations, are explored in more depth in the novels but the comic strips have just a bit more depth than you might expect. Highly recommended.
I’ve reviewed several of the Modesty Blaise novels, including the first one and the excellent Sabre-Tooth as well as one of the later entries in the series, Last Day In Limbo.
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