EXTRACTS: The Modesty Blaise Companion Expanded Edition © 2018 The Book Palace (425 PAGES in Full edition)

Peter O’Donnell’s character made her international debut on Monday 13th May, 1963 in a strip story illustrated by Jim Holdaway and published in London in the Evening Standard. Modesty herself did not actually appear until Strip No. 2 of the story on Tuesday 14th May. Just two years later the first full length novel chronicling her exploits was published by Souvenir Press in London and simultaneously in Canada by the Ryerson Press. Over the following twenty years ten further novels and a volume of six short stories appeared. A second volume of five short stories was published in 1996. The illustrated strip stories appeared more or less continuously in the Evening Standard from 1963 until they were finally brought to a close with Strip No. 10,183 on 11th April, 2001, which was, incidentally, Peter’s eighty first birthday. In the course of writing ninety five full length and two short strip stories, ten novels, eleven short stories and an illustrated short story in the Modesty Blaise canon, Peter O’Donnell has created more than two thousand human characters large and small, a number of organisations, almost all of them of a criminal nature, and even a number of animal characters. Approximately two thirds of these characters appear only in the strip stories, a small number cross over either in to or from the novels and the remainder appear exclusively in the novels and short stories. All of them appear in this book. This expanded edition contains a new introduction by Lawrence Blackmore – “Honorary Modesty Blaise Archivist”, an index of the Modesty Blaise strip collections published by Titan Books, the missing Titan strips and a piece on Modesty in different media. Modesty Blaise