The Black Pearl (Modesty Blaise)

The Black Pearl is a Titan Press collection of four of Modesty Blaise’s comic-strip adventures by Peter O’Donnell. They all date from the 1960s, the period when Jim Holdaway was providing the drawings.

The Black Pearl is the most interesting since it gives us some of Modesty’s backstory. The Magnified Man is also interesting, with some crazy gadgetry used by the bad guys. The Jericho Caper offers us a glimpse of Modesty’s love life, which she is always trying to keep separate from her professional life. Her boyfriends have a tendency to want to help but Modesty has no desire to allow amateurs to get in the way and endanger themselves. Modesty has a strange emotional life. She likes to keep control of her love affairs and she’s reluctant to allow them to get too serious.

Modesty likes men, but you get the feeling that the only man she really respects is Willie Garvin. And, for complicated reasons have to do with both her past and his, she and Willie can never be more than professional partners. They never sleep together. But they are professional partners with a strange intense emotional bond.

In The Black Pearl Modesty has a debt to pay, to a holy man who saved her life in the Himalayas years earlier. To repay the debt she has to find the Black Pearl and take it to where it is needed. The problem for Modesty and Willie is that they have no idea what the Black Pearl actually is. Maybe it’s an actual pearl, but apparently it’s difficult to transport so it probably isn’t an ordinary pearl.

You’ll have to read the comic to find out what it is, but it certainly comes a surprise to Modesty.

This adventure gives us a hint as to the origins of certain mental abilities possessed by both Modesty and Willie. These are not paranormal powers. They’re simply abilities that have been developed by intensive mental training. In Willie’s case it’s his uncanny ability to know when something is going to go wrong. In Modesty’s case it’s her ability to shut down parts of her mind completely in order to endure unpleasant experiences. It’s the reason she is able to endure torture.

It’s a reasonably supposition that a holy man from the Himalayans may have helped them to develop these abilities.

The adventure itself lands Modesty in the middle of a confrontation between guerrilla fighters and Chinese soldiers. It’s a fun story.

The Magnified Man is a heist story, with some slightly science fictional touches (to reveal what those touches are would constitute a spoiler).

It starts with Willie making a serious mistake. He greets an old girlfriend in a bar, but the girlfriend is an agent of the Deuxième Bureau and she’s on an operation and he’s just blown her cover.

Somehow Modesty and Willie will have to get that girl out of the mess that Willie has landed her in, and in doing so they find themselves in the middle of the operation on which she was working - which means they will have to foil a very elaborate heist conspiracy.

Willie will also have to deal emotionally with the possibly disastrous consequences of his mistake. That’s one of the interesting elements in this story - Willie rarely makes mistakes but we find out that he’s by no means infallible.

In The Jericho Caper Modesty has dropped out of circulation for a while (as she does from time to time) and she’s staying in a remote South American village, having a love affair with a blind sculptor. Everything is rosy until bandits arrive and kidnap three of the village girls. The bandits are from a neighbouring state which is a kind of bandit state.

The local priest wants to avoid bloodshed, which puts him at odds with Modesty. Modesty is not exactly an apostle of non-violence. She will have to find a way to rescue those girls and deal with the bandits without running up too high a body count.

She solves the problem using some biblical inspiration. First she has to lure the bad guys into an old Inca fortress, then find a way to make the walls come a-tumbling down just like the walls of Jericho. As you might expect, knowing Modesty Blaise, her solution is not entirely non-violent. Modesty isn’t bloodthirsty but she can be ruthless when she feels it’s appropriate.

The fourth adventure, The Killing Ground, is an oddity. It’s a very short adventure O’Donnell had to whip up to keep Scottish newspapers supplied with Modesty Blaise adventures while the series was on hiatus in England due to a printer’s strike. It’s another variation on Richard Connell’s famous 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, with Modesty and Blaise finding themselves the hunted rather than the hunters. O’Donnell later adapted this comic into a novella which was included in the final Modesty Blaise short story collection The Cobra Trap.

I’ve been a fan of O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise novels for quite a while and I’m now becoming a serious fan of the comics as well. They’re stylish grown-up comics and they’re extraordinarily entertaining.

The Black Pearl is highly recommended.