Peter O’Donnell's Modesty Blaise: Mister Sun

This volume contains three Modesty Blaise comic-strip adventures written by Peter O’Donnell with artwork by Jim Holdaway.

Comic strips published three frames at a time in daily newspapers were once immensely popular. It’s a format that is now more or less extinct. These were almost always aimed at kids and younger readers. What made Modesty Blaise revolutionary when the strip debuted in 1963 was that it was aimed much more at grown-ups.

In fact, as is evident in this collection, Modesty Blaise was definitely for grown-ups. It wasn’t just the occasional nudity. The tone could be quite dark and even grim. In the worlds of crime and espionage people get hurt. Good people get killed. Straightforward happy endings are not guaranteed.

Mister Sun is a very early Modesty Blaise adventure, from 1964. A few years earlier Modesty had unofficially adopted a young Vietnamese boy named Weng and paid for his university education in Hong Kong. Now he has become involved with organised crime. It doesn’t make sense. He’s not that kind of kid. Apparently he was trying to get hold of a great deal of money very quickly, for some undisclosed purpose. But if he needed money Modesty would have given it to him gladly.

And Weng has no idea of the trouble he’s landed himself in getting involved with the sinister crime lord Mister Sun. And Mister Sun and Modesty Blaise have clashed before so Modesty suspects a particularly sinister purpose behind Mister Sun’s recruitment of Weng.

There are lots of unexpected ramifications and lots of plot twists to come. This is a rare Modesty Blaise story that involves current events (in this case the war in Vietnam), something that O’Donnell was later careful to avoid. Mister Sun is a suitably dangerous villain and he controls a vast criminal network. It’s a good story.

The Mind of Mrs Drake is unusual in having hints of the paranormal. There is a woman who earns her living as a psychic and she may or may not have some actual psychic abilities. She also happens to be a spy. Her psychic abilities make her very effective at recruiting agents - she knows their dirty little secrets and their weaknesses and their fears, all the things that can be used to manipulate them.

British counter-intelligence have sent in Modesty’s young friend Jeannie Challon as bait. This is Jeannie’s first counter-espionage assignment.

Mrs Drake has an accomplice, an osteopath, and while he lacks her special skills he is much more ruthless and much more dangerous.

The danger for Jeannie Challon is that Mrs Drake’s psychic abilities may have put her one step ahead of her adversaries. Jeannie’s cover could be blown and she would have no way of knowing it.

Modesty dislikes having to kill people but when she decides that someone really does need killing she puts her scruples to one side. This is one of the stories in which that ruthless side of Modesty is in evidence. A very good story.

The Killing Ground is a very brief story that O’Donnell and Holdaway had to produce in a hurry to fill a publication gap. It’s yet another retelling of The Most Dangerous Game. It’s OK but it is obviously a filler story.

Mister Sun and The Mind of Mrs Drake are top-tier Modesty Blaise adventures making this a very desirable purchase.

I’ve reviewed three other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up, Warlords of Phoenix, The Black Pearl and Uncle Happy, as well as the first five novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth, A Taste for Death, The Impossible Virgin and I, Lucifer.