Margins
Dead Man's Handle book cover
Dead Man's Handle
1985
First Published
4.10
Average Rating
252
Number of Pages

Part of Series

This latest installment in the Modesty Blaise pulp-fiction series opens with Willie Garvin, Modesty's loyal lieutenant, rescuing a Hong Kong businessman from a Red Chinese jail. The thrills continue when Willie is kidnapped by Sibyl Pray and held prisoner at the Hostel of Righteousness, the headquarters for delusional terrorist Dr. Thaddeus Pilgrim, on the Greek island of Kalivari. The plot thickens as Willie is brainwashed into believing that Modesty has been killed and that he must kill her murderer—a woman who looks exactly like Modesty. When Modesty finds herself kidnapped and brought to Kalivari, she is forced to fight in deadly gladiatorial combat against Willie. Peppered with ingenious twists of fortune, varied and exotic locations, and a cast of fiendishly evil villains, this is a classic Modesty Blaise adventure.
Avg Rating
4.10
Number of Ratings
319
5 STARS
37%
4 STARS
37%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
1%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Peter O'Donnell
Peter O'Donnell
Author · 45 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. Peter O'Donnell also wrote as Madeleine Brent. http://www.cs.umu.se/~kenth/modesty.html is an excellent resource on this author. To help keep the novels and the adventure strip collections separate, here's some info about the Modesty Blaise works. In 1963, O'Donnell began his 38-year run as writer of the Modesty Blaise adventure story strip, which appeared six days a week in English and Scottish newspapers. He retired the strip in 2001. Each strip story took 18-20 weeks to complete. Several publishers over the years have attempted to collect these stories in large softcovers. Titan Publishing is currently in the process of bringing them all out in large-format softcover, with 2-3 stories in each books. These are called "graphic novels" in the Goodreads title. Meanwhile, during those 38 years, O'Donnell also wrote 13 books about Modesty Blaise: 11 novels and 2 short story/novella collections. These stories are not related to the strip stories; they are not novelizations of strip stories. They are entirely new, though the characters and "lives" are the same. These have been labeled "series #0". There is a large article on Peter O'Donnell on Wikipedia, with a complete bibliography.

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