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

T H E M O D E S T Y B L A I S E C O M P A N I O N Hulton Group and in 1953 got his first job on a national newspaper at the Daily Mirror when he took over as emergency replacement for Don Freeman on “Belinda”. The Mirror liked his work and he was invited back to begin a long association with Mirror strip “Garth”. In 1954 he was writing “Tug Transom” for the Daily Sketch which ran for eleven years, “Eve” for the Sketch from 1955 and “Romeo Brown” for the Mirror from 1956 to 1962. It was on this last that he first worked with the artist Jim Holdaway under the auspices of Philip Zec. It was Zec who initiated the change from the four frames per strip basis that was then common to the now more familiar three frames per strip. During this period he was writing an average of three stories a week each of about three thousand words and four picture stories for such classics as Comic Cuts , Comet , Lion and Film Fun . Early in 1962 Bill Aitken the strip editor of the Express, a Beaverbrook Newspaper, gave him the brief of creating a new heroic character for a daily strip the Express could run. Aitken understood that it might take some time to bring to fruition and accepted his request that Jim Holdaway be engaged as the artist. At this point the meeting with the dignified and obviously self-sufficient refugee child twenty years earlier surfaced from the recesses of his memory. Using this as his starting point, the creation of the fully rounded character, complete with early history, background and supporting cast took almost a year. The first four weeks of the new story were written and drawn, submitted to the Express and the answer was yes. A preliminary story was required to introduce the characters to Express readers but before this could be started the project was cancelled. The Chairman, Max Aitken, did not think it appropriate to feature an ex-criminal in a family newspaper alongside such favourites as “The Gambols: and the cartoons of Giles. Bill Aitken did not give up and asked if he could submit it to the Standard and its editor, Charles Wintour, snapped it up. On 13th May 1963 Modesty Blaise was launched upon an unsuspecting world and the rest, as they say, is history. Success was immediate and Modesty was to feature in the Standard for the next thirty eight years in ninety five full length stories. Syndication started almost immediately and there was great interest from the publishing world, most of it suggesting the purchase of book rights and the engagement of a real writer to produce Modesty Blaise novels. One exception to this condescending approach was Ernest Hecht, founder of Souvenir Press, who presented his terms and encouraged him to get on with it. All the Modesty novels have been published by Souvenir Press. Most writers would have been content with an output of ninety five full length and two shorter strip stories, eleven novels and two volumes of short stories, but these are only part of it. Working with Hammer director Michael Carreras he wrote the first screenplay for the film “Modesty Blaise” (only to see it re-written by five different hands and result in a disaster), and later another screenplay for Hammer Films. The film agent Stanley Dubens asked him to write a one off television play which was subsequently expanded into a six part serial and while doing this he was still writing “Garth” and “Tug Transom”. Even when these last two were dropped to reduce the work load, Hecht stepped in to add another dimension to an already prolific story telling career. He asked him to “write a Gothic for me”. Before writing one he had to read a few to find out what they were and he reported to Hecht that he did not feel it was his line. Hecht disagreed and urged him to forget what he had read and gave him a simple brief – girl in her teens, turn of the century, no heavy sex, high adventure and a lot of trouble for her to handle. From this meeting came the double life he led from 1971 until relatively recently when the true identity of Madeleine Brent, author of nine “Gothics” and a winner of the Best Romantic Novel Award was finally revealed. Hecht did it again a few years L I P A I X