Tarrant has been a spymaster for a long time and his judgment of people is pretty good. Stealing jewels was something that Modesty Blaise used to be very good at so it stands to reason that she’s uniquely qualified to protect jewels from other people with similar skills and similar larcenous intentions. And Tarrant has very good reason to think than an attempt is going to be made to steal the stones, and by a group that knows its business. It’s all to do with a sheikh who needs to be buttered up, to the tune of ten million pounds, and he wants the money in precious stones. She lives in extreme luxury in a London penthouse.Īnd now Tarrant at the British secret service needs her help. For some odd reason she had always intended to retire to England, which is why she was very careful in her espionage activities not to do anything that might be construed as being unfriendly to the interests of Her Majesty’s Government. At the age of twenty-six, having become extremely rich, she decided to retire. They did however dabble in freelance espionage. Jewel and art thefts were a particular speciality. Their criminal activities were highly varied but they steered clear of drugs or vice. A few years later she was running a large and very successful criminal empire with an Englishman named Willie Garvin. In 1945, aged around twelve, she had been in a Displaced Person’s Camp in the Middle East. She is of indeterminate ethnicity and indeterminate age. The novel gives us some of Modesty’s backstory. O’Donnell would go on to write another ten Modesty Blaise novels as well as a couple of short story collections.

The novel appeared in 1965, the year before the film, and was a huge success. Very little if anything of O’Donnell’s screenplay made it into the film but he based his novelisation on his original screenplay. Peter O’Donnell had been employed to write the screenplay and was also offered the opportunity to write a novelisation of the film. Not surprisingly the movie was generally regarded as a train wreck and did not set the box office on fire (although it has its weird charms).

Joseph Losey had never made a light-hearted, sexy, funny or exciting movie in his life so naturally he was selected for the job. The movie would have to be light-hearted, sexy, funny and exciting. But the choice of director was going to be tricky. A Modesty Blaise movie seemed like an obviously good idea. It was wildly successful and appeared regularly for nearly forty years. English writer Peter O’Donnell (1920-2010) created the Modesty Blaise comic strip in 1963. The 1965 novel Modesty Blaise has a rather interesting history.

Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell