Cobra Trap
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| Cobra Trap | |
 Hardcover first edition, 1996, Souvenir Press, featuring Jim Holdaway's original cover art. |
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| Author | Peter O'Donnell |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Jim Holdaway |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Modesty Blaise |
| Genre(s) | Spy fiction, Short Stories |
| Publisher | Souvenir Press |
| Publication date | 1996 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback and paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-285-63332-5 |
| Preceded by | Dead Man's Handle |
| Followed by | Final book of series |
Cobra Trap is the title of a short story collection by Peter O'Donnell featuring his action/adventure heroine Modesty Blaise. The book was published in 1996, and is the thirteenth, and final, book in the Modesty Blaise series, a series that began in 1965. (Cobra Trap was released 11 years after the previous book in the series, Dead Man's Handle.)
[edit] Contents
The short stories featured in the collection are:
- "Bellman"
- "The Dark Angels"
- "Old Alex"
- "The Girl With the Black Balloon"
- "Cobra Trap"
One rather special thing about these five short stories is that they take place at different times in the life of Modesty Blaise. The first story, Bellman, begins with a flashback to when Modesty is 20 years old. In The Dark Angels Modesty is in her late 20's, in Old Alex she is in her early 30's, in The Girl With the Black Balloon she is in her late 30's, and finally in Cobra Trap she is around 52. (All ages are approximate, both because they are not actually specified and because part of Modesty's history is that she can not remember her early childhood and does not know her exact age.)
Another interesting thing about this book is that in Old Alex Peter O'Donnell makes it completely clear that Modesty, as a fictional character, has a different rate of aging than real people. The story in Old Alex is very clearly stated to occur in 1997. If we assume that the stories in the first books in the series take place around 1965-1970, then Modesty has aged something like eight years while the rest of us have aged 30 years.
"Cobra Trap", the title piece of the collection, is (among fans) the most controversial Modesty Blaise story ever published, in that it profiles the final mission of Modesty and her partner, Willie Garvin. The story takes place 10-15 years after the time frame of the comic strip/novels with Modesty and Willie going on one final mission together. Modesty, who has been recently diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and given only a short time to live, chooses to give her life in order to save a train full of innocents, including many children, from a group of rebels. Soon after revealing her illness to Willie, Modesty is killed in an attack, and shortly after that Willie too is shot dead. The story ends with the two friends reuniting in some form of afterlife.
Many fans of the characters refuse to read this final story. When Peter O'Donnell brought his comic strip to a close five years later he chose to do so with a more upbeat story promising future adventures.
In 2002, a comic book adaptation of "The Dark Angels" was published in Scandinavia as a postscript to the British Modesty Blaise daily strip; Enrique Badia Romero, the final artist on the Evening Standard comic strip, adapted the story for the publication. To date its only English-language publication has been in the American magazine Comics Revue.
Elements of several other stories (in particular "Old Alex" and "Bellman") also appeared in the comic strip prior to being featured in Cobra Trap.
The original first edition cover art for Cobra Trap was a painting of Modesty Blaise by Jim Holdaway, who had drawn the original comic strip for O'Donnell from 1963 until his death in 1970.
[edit] Availability and the future of the series
Cobra Trap was at one point considered one of the rarest of the Modesty Blaise book series as it is the only one that was not initially made available in paperback and the hardcover editions went out of print and are considered collectables. However, Souvenir Press released a new paperback edition of the collection in 2006, putting the book into wide circulation again.
Peter O'Donnell retired from writing a few years after this book's publication and is reportedly opposed to anyone else writing about his creation.
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