Books
Peter O'Donnell was invited to write a novel to tie in with the 1966 film. The novel, called simply Modesty Blaise and based on his original screenplay for the movie, fared considerably better than the movie itself did. (It was also released a year before the movie.) During the following decades he would write a total of eleven Modesty Blaise novels and two collections of short stories. Several of the short stories either adapt comic strip stories, or would later be adapted as comic strips themselves, and there was frequent crossover of characters between the two genres. All the books, with the exception of "Pieces of Modesty", were originally issued in hardback and have since gone through numerous paperback editions.
Beginning in the early 2000s (decade), Souvenir Press began a series of paperback reprints of the Modesty Blaise book series, using the first edition hardback covers, and originally concluding with a reprint of Cobra Trap in 2006. Souvenir subsequently gained the rights to the short story collection Pieces of Modesty and issued their reprint of that book in March 2010, with a new cover design based on the original hardback cover from the first Modesty novel.
In 2008, Penguin Books of India reprinted the full series.
The 2012 Charles Stross book "The Apocalypse Codex" is a "tribute to Modesty Blaise", according to its author.
- Modesty Blaise (1965)
- Sabre-Tooth (1966)
- I, Lucifer (1967)
- A Taste for Death (1969)
- The Impossible Virgin (1971)
- Pieces of Modesty (1972)
- The Silver Mistress (1973)
- Last Day in Limbo (1976)
- Dragon's Claw (1978)
- The Xanadu Talisman (1981)
- The Night of Morningstar (1982)
- Dead Man's Handle (1985)
- Cobra Trap (1996)
O'Donnell's final book, Cobra Trap, is his most controversial, as the title story which ended the book concluded with Modesty's and Willie's deaths (and a hint of an afterlife), although the comic strip would last for several more years before it was retired; many longtime fans of the series refuse to read Cobra Trap in response. By contrast, O'Donnell ended the comic strip on a more hopeful note.
Read more about this topic: Modesty Blaise
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”
—Bible: New Testament Revelation 20:12.
“The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)