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

E X P A N D E D E D I T I O N PETER O’DONNELL The creator of Modesty Blaise was born in Lewisham, South London into a writing family, his father being a leading crime reporter and his elder brother a junior sub on a national newspaper. It is therefore not too surprising that he would want to write and it soon emerged that he had been blessed with a natural gift for story telling. He sold his first story, “The Lucky Break”, to The Scout , a boy’s magazine, when he was only sixteen. On leaving school a friend of his father recommended him to the head of juvenile publications at Amalgamated Press (A P), which was at the time the worlds biggest publisher of periodicals. It was here that those natural gifts were honed and he absorbed the craft that enabled him, years later, to produce the wonderful character that is Modesty. He reminisces that he felt a bit snooty about working on comics but the first job he was given at A P soon knocked that notion for six. He was told to take over a picture story called “Monarch of the Wild”. The hero was a wild horse on the American plains that had the key to an unspecified treasure in its mane. It was being pursued by two cowboys and their rival, a redskin, who wanted the treasure. Not the easiest of tasks for a new boy. The lead character did not have a speaking part and the ones that could speak were not allowed to have guns or even to fight. At twelve frames a week it required considerable powers of invention to keep the story going. It was also very challenging technically. The four line typeset narrative that accompanied each frame had to be written to an exact length so that the type ended all squared up with no widowed lines allowed. He managed to do this for about a year and it provided an excellent grounding in the craft of inventing new incidents and being both concise and explicit in using language. After a couple of years of invaluable experience at A P came World War Two. After the Czech crisis in 1938 he realised that war was inevitable and to get himself prepared joined the Territorial Army in the Royal Corps of Signals. As a Territorial he became a regular soldier on 1st September, 1939, two days before the official declaration of war and he remained so for the duration. If pressed he will relate that his first experience of war was to be frightened by an Air Raid Warden before the real war had even started. In many respects this was a frustrating time for a creative writer because opportunities to exercise his talents were few and far between. Just before the war he had been writing a few Odd Odes for Cyril Fletcher who was at the time a hugely popular entertainer. One of Fletcher’s specialities was to deliver very literate comic verses – Odd Odes – in a funny voice. These required a high degree of linguistic skill to write and were frequently memorised and often repeated by his listeners. They provided a useful earnings supplement to the two shillings a day he was now earning as a soldier. One thing that the Army did bring was travel and many of the locations that were later to be described in the Modesty Blaise novels were seen at first hand during his army service. Although he did not realise it at the time the chance encounter by his unit with a young refugee girl miles from anywhere in the Persian desert was of great significance. That meeting, which he has related under the title “Girl Walking”, was not only a touching and fascinating true story but also a memorable personal experience. Demobbed on his birthday in 1946 he took a job with a small publisher as both writer and production manager. It took some time for life to return to normal after the war and shortages of paper and newsprint reduced magazines and newspapers to basic minimums. Writers had a very hard and competitive time but in 1950 he decided to go freelance. His friend and neighbour Dan Kelleher introduced him to the editor of Film Fun , a very popular comic based on film characters. It also contained two 3,000 word text stories. The editor gave him a trial and he wrote them for the next five years. During that period he wrote for all four of the major publishing groups, A P again, Odhams Press, Newnes and The T H E M O D E S T Y B L A I S E C O M P A N IX Peter in the office where Modesty was created... ...and the typewriter on which she was born.