12 replies to this topic

[spynovelfan]

We all know that Kingsley Amis loved Ian Fleming's James Bond, but he was a fan of a lot of genre fiction: detective stories, science fiction and other spy thrillers. He was a particular fan of Peter O'Donnell's series about thief-turned-MI6-agent Modesty Blaise: the back of my edition of the first eponymous novel has a glowing quote from Amis saying that Blaise and Willie Garvin are one of the great partnerships in fiction, comparable to Holmes and Watson.

How could Amis make such a sweeping statement from reading just one novel? Well presumably, he'd read the comic strips, which were published in The Evening Standard from May 1963 on. A big-budget film was also released in 1966 - it was critically mauled, and O'Donnell rewrote his original screenplay as a novel, published it, and then continued to write both the strips and novels.

Kingsley Amis may, then, have already been familiar with Modesty Blaise from the newspaper strips. O'Donnell had also written the strips for the Express' adaptation of DR NO in 1960, so perhaps he had been intrigued enough to follow it on account of that. At any rate, what do we make of the fact that in 1964, the Standard ran a Modesty Blaise adventure called...

Mister Sun!

It ran from 19th June to 5th December 1964 - a good two years before Amis started working on his Bond novel. In O'Donnell's strip, Sun is a Hong Kong drug baron. Blaise is forced into action when Sun takes her manservant Weng hostage. Here's a glimpse of the strip:

http://londontrask.tripod.com/id5.html

Although COLONEL SUN's plot isn't particularly similar to Mister Sun, a lot of the prose has a similar feel and tone to the Modesty Blaise adventures - more so than it does to Fleming, perhaps. In the first novel, the villain installs himself in a hide-out on Kalithos, a Turkish island near Cyprus. In COLONEL SUN, Sun installs himself in a hide-out on Vrakonisi, an island between Greece and Turkey.

Could it be that Amis drew inspiration from the Modesty Blaise series when he wrote his James Bond novel?

[ACE]

Doesn't Willie Garvin also wear a green mohair suit? Designed by Brioni.

SNF, interesting theory.

[spynovelfan]

Boom boom!

Are you seeing any resemblances to COLONEL SUN in SABRE-TOOTH? Probably not. Been a while since I read that one. But the *kind* of plot Amis used in COLONEL SUN is, I think, more akin to O'Donnell's books than Fleming's. CS has that outdoorsy adventure feel to it - lots of rocks and boats and blazing sun type stuff. I suppose it's in Fleming's DR NO in the bit where Bond, Honey and Quarrel wade through the swamp. Rider Haggard, that's what I'm looking for. Modesty Blaise books and COLONEL SUN have a Rider Haggard/early Victor Canning feel to them - there's much less of the casinos and clubs and long descriptions of barracuda and so on. Solid straightforward adventure fiction with a slightly outlandish feel.

Oh, bother. *I* know what I mean!

Daniel Craig for Garvin!

[TheSaint]

Can't see Craig as either Bond or Gavin-both are handsome, Craig is homely.

[spynovelfan]

Can't see Craig as either Bond or Gavin-both are handsome, Craig is homely.

Here's a brand new image of Craig in CASINO ROYALE. He looks Bond-ish to me:

[Mod's note: Sorry, was Eon copyright photo of emaciated thingy-whatsit who played Kronsteen in From Russia with Love and was jolly funny... perhaps you had to be there]



How about Craig as Simon Templar, TheSaint? No?

Edited by Jim, 09 January 2006 - 04:09 PM.

[TheSaint]

Just keep playing with the piranha.

[spynovelfan]

Sorry! Couldn't resist it.

[pgram]

Interesting theory snf. I haven't read any of the Blaise books or Amis' CS, but having read the strips from Titan, I 'd say it is difficult to identify who influenced who. Whatismore, have you noticed that Peter o' donnel is in the credits of Dr No as a co writer?

[spynovelfan]

Interesting theory snf. I haven't read any of the Blaise books or Amis' CS, but having read the strips from Titan, I 'd say it is difficult to identify who influenced who. Whatismore, have you noticed that Peter o' donnel is in the credits of Dr No as a co writer?

The film? I know he wrote the Express comic adaptation, but credited in the film? Really!

[doublenoughtspy]

Very interesting snf. I just bought a huge book on the letters of Kingsley Amis - I'll look up O'Donnell in the index tonight when I get home.

[spynovelfan]

I've looked there, DoubleNought - nothing at all. But there are a few juicy bits about Bond.

I wonder if Amis hadn't already written a a few notes about a possible Modesty Blaise novel, and then switched Modesty and Willie for Bond and Ariadne. That bit where Bond starts worrying about the boy getting in the way seems like Willie, not Bond.

To make matters sillier, O'Donnell's 1973 novel THE SILVER MISTRESS features the head of SIS being taken hostage by a Chinese-sponsored American villain, Colonel Jim Straik. It's probably all just coincidence.

Still: 'Mister Sun' is a large coincidence considering Amis' love of the Modesty Blaise series.

[pgram]

Interesting theory snf. I haven't read any of the Blaise books or Amis' CS, but having read the strips from Titan, I 'd say it is difficult to identify who influenced who. Whatismore, have you noticed that Peter o' donnel is in the credits of Dr No as a co writer?

The film? I know he wrote the Express comic adaptation, but credited in the film? Really!

Not the film, the strip cartoon. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. My point was that O' Donnel had worked on a Bond strip as well, making it impossible to really tell who was influencing who.

[spynovelfan]

Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I know O'Donnell worked on the strip of DR NO - it's in my first post. Yes, Modesty Blaise is, of course, massively influenced by James Bond - O'Donnell was specifically asked to create a female secret agent in the same mould for a serialised comic strip. And yes, the title MISTER SUN was quite probably inspired by DR NO. But COLONEL SUN is one step more. I'd always assumed COLONEL SUN was a response, title-wise, to DR NO. It came as a surprise to see that O'Donnell had used something even more similar to it than DR NO before Amis wrote his book, especially as Amis was a fan of O'Donnell's and it involves an ally being taken hostage.

But yes, it may well all be coincidence. As my example from THE SILVER MISTRESS shows, these things can work both ways - or perhaps not work at all. There are only so many title formulations one can use, and as both O'Donnell and Amis were influenced by Fleming, it's not so surprising that there are other similarities in their work. I think the same probably applies to the similarities between John Gardner's novels and the EON films - for every idea Gardner seemed to have before EON, there were plenty that happened the other way round. Many will be coincidence, I'm sure.

Influences are extremely tricky to detect in the thriller genre. DR NO, MISTER SUN and COLONEL SUN all have Oriental criminal masterminds for villains. Though I haven't read MISTER SUN, I suspect that, like the other two, he would bear a resemblance to Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu (Fleming grew up reading Rohmer, and admitted his influence). In MODESTY BLAISE (1965), a villain leaves a scar on Willie Garvin's hand in the shape of an unfinished letter 'S'. A reference to CASINO ROYALE, then? Perhaps. Or O'Donnell may have been inspired by THE SCARLET LETTER, or army lore, or The Bible, or some Bulldog Drummond story or other. Such an incident might happen in a thriller from the 20s, and both Fleming and O'Donnell used twists on it. Or they both may have simply thought up the idea independently. So yes, it's easy to jump too far.