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 T H E M O D E S T Y B L A I S E C O M P A N I STORIES 14 & 14B DRAWN BY JIM HOLDAWAY START DATE OF STORY 27th May 1968 (Monday) END DATE OF STORY 16th November 1968 (Saturday) While “roughing it” on an uninhabited Pacific island, Modesty and Willie Garvin meet a film crew using a replica of a Roman trireme. The Director, Eddie Grant, knows of them through a mutual friend Steve Taylor. They hitch a lift on the trireme to nearby Tahiti. Coincidentally, Sir Gerald Tarrant is there to liaise with Frank Hoyland of the C.I.A. to try to recover a top secret control device that has been stolen and brought to Tahiti by Lim, a former Network associate of Modesty’s. Lim once saved Modesty’s life and thinking that she knows him well enough, advises Hoyland to play it straight and pay the ransom Lim wants. She offers to act as an intermediary and she and Willie call on Lim. They find him changed. The style he showed in Network times has turned to viciousness. He tells them he plans to take the C.I.A. money and double-cross them, selling the control to the Cubans. He offers them a cut to help him and when they refuse, tries to kill them. They overpower him and force him to reveal where the control is hidden, but to clear her former debt to him, do not kill him. Lim has lied, but still has to get the control to Cuba. All ships are being searched - except the trireme and Modesty realises Lim will use it. Leaving a note for Tarrant, she a Willie swim out to the trireme but Lim is waiting for them. They are caught and join Grant and the film crew shackled to the trireme’s oars. The are forced to row out to sea. With a stolen spanner, Willie frees himself, Modesty and the film crew. Modesty knocks out the helmsman and kills the man Lim sends to get her, giving his gun to Grant. Using the long oars, Modesty is lifted, first on one side of the deck and then on the other, to attack Lim’s men. Willie and Grant join the fight and Grant kills Lim. Lim’s men surrender and the trireme is rowed to a nearby island where, due to Modesty’s note, they are rescued by Tarrant and Hoyland in an American warship. The control recovered, Modesty and Willie are busily engaged in having turtle races, which Willie keeps losing because he has a bolshie turtle. 219