I Read Books: The Night Of Morningstar

 

The Night Of Morningstar

In London an assassin tries to kill retired criminal and now freelance secret agent Modesty Blaise with a crossbow. She turns the tables and kills him. As she was accompanied by Sir Gerald Tarrant of British Intelligence they aren’t sure which of them were the target. To try and find out Modesty goes to America, avoiding her usual spots, while her partner Willie Garvin keeps a watch on Sir Gerald.

As the book tells us this was in fact an attempt on Modesty as the final initiation test for the assassin to join The Watchmen, a mysterious multi-national terrorist group. In the prologue, Hugh Oberon was recruited to join Modesty’s criminal Network, only for her to promptly dismantle it; when he tried to take over she humiliated him. Two birds, one stone; he tries to have her killed as revenge and for his job as trainer for The Watchmen. This having gone wrong, he hires two Polish assassins to kill Sir Gerald to put everyone off the scent and heads to San Francisco for the next Watchmen operation.

Perhaps inevitably Modesty decides to visit a friend from a previous adventure in San Francisco; there she encounters Ben Christie, a CIA agent who she met in the prologue, breaking a people trafficking ring. Unfortunately she blows his cover, and the two get caught up in The Watchmen’s plot to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge, foiling it at the cost of Christie’s life and The Watchmen getting away. Meanwhile Willie has fought and defeated the Polish assassins, getting a rather slender lead on how they were hired. When Modesty returns they follow it up, kidnapping the agent who hired the assassins while Willie pretends he’s been captured as well. Breaking out they get a phone number from the agent. This unexpectedly goes to the home of Earl St Maur, former soldier in the British Army, right wing crank and keen archer, who is unexpectedly popular in the press*.

Tracking him down leads to the actual point of The Watchmen, their previous scattershot random attacks in support of causes that could be plotted across the political spectrum revealed to be a smokescreen. Fortunately Modesty doesn’t have to get into her own politics** as it’s personal before she and Garvin come across Operation Morningstar.

Read This: Sixties spy caper with a few interesting villains and gimmicks
Don’t Read This: Some fairly grim murder, and a bit of weirdness in the political dimension

 

* The book spends a larger amount of time than might be expected following his wife who has little knowledge of his politics, none of the secret terrorist organisation he’s part of the ruling triumvirate of, but she is busty, likes horse-riding, and also likes having sex.

** Complicated slightly by the fact that almost all the stories are set in the sixties a few years after her retirement, while this was written nearly twenty years after