Modesty Blaise by Peter O’Donnell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I loved the comic strip, Modesty Blaise, written by this same author. The illustration work was incredible! Was i ever tickled at Christmas time of 2016 coming across 8 – that’s right, 8 – volumes of the Blaise series. 25 cents each, to boot! A Christmas present! I can now read the wonderful writing from the comic trip in book form!…….was I ever wrong.

What a slogging mess. The entire book is more and over written introduction of the characters with a bit of adventure tucked away. If you can get that far. Way, way, way too much self-examination written in that gets more and more ponderous. Why was I reading about Willie Garvin’s motivations over and over and over again?

The book starts as if 20 volumes precede it with how the Modesty kid had run some organization for a few years. Though it’s written as if she ran the group for decades. O’Donnell continues writing about Blaise’s co-hort and how he is in trouble and she goes about saving him. The action part are handful of pages in the midst of 50. The main mission is something about diamonds that really doesn’t make much sense. More perplexing is with all of this introspection being written, what really compels the Blaise character to chase after the diamonds is not revealed. There’s some clever bits written of how the diamonds are going to be swiped. Collectively none of it makes sense. except Blaise is 26 and might be so immature to chase whatever carrot put in front of her.

There’s also much silliness of Blaise being in her 20s and living the contents of a life 60 years old. Also how brilliant she was with all she learned in ten years. Ten years? Sheesh!

Thus the plotting was horrible, the writing OK and …

Bottom line: i don’t recommend this book. 3 out of 10 points.

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