But, unlike everyone else who ever came to me with a search, Warren Whatmore did not go away.
“How long will this take?”
“Depends.”
“On how soon you come across it. Yes, I see. How long will it take you to go through all of them?”
“About four days.”
“Good Lord!”

…Here. To one side of the door, a man leaned against the wall looking at a tattered girlie magazine, his rifle propped beside him. She circled a little to approach him from the side, edging along the wall, her back flat against it.
When she was six feet away he lifted his head. Even as shock widened his eyes she took one long pace and twisted to bring her leg swinging in an arc. The booted foot took him full in the groin. For an instant the unconscious body was rigid with paralysis, then it melted slowly to the ground. No need for the anaesthetic nose-plugs.
Ahead of her was a long, broad corridor with steel-barred cell doors on either side. From it came the stench of unwashed humanity, the wailing of men broken by fear, and the shrill, gasping cries of one in a nightmare.
  On her right, the heavy door of the guard-room stood left open. Within, a radio was blaring martial music interspersed by news bulletins gabbled in a high pitch of excitement.
  For a moment she hesitated over whether to use The Nailer. This meant taking off her sweater and bra, and going into the room stripped to the waist. She felt no reticence about the idea, for it was a highly practical one, first improvised on a life-and-death occasion with Willie Garvin in Agrigento five years ago, and she had proved it twice since. The technique was guaranteed to nail a roomful of men, holding them frozen for at least two or three seconds.
   Movie trivia question: what is the pulp fiction in Pulp Fiction. That is to say, in Quentin Taranto’s popular movie, when John Travolta’s character Vincent indulges his love of sitting on the dunny reading a book, what book is it? Modesty Blaise. Unlike Travolta’s first edition (how and where did he carry such a large tome around?) my cheaper copy has a passion pink cover which is far more appropriate. Written by Peter O’Donnell based on his own comic strip, it is a spy spoof and high camp stuff and I enjoyed it at the time.

   It was a character that, once created, would be with us in some form forever. First there was John Steed’s offsiders in The Avengers. Actually, his first sidekick (no pun intended) was a man, played by Ian Hendry, but in the second series Honor Blackman bobbed up and realised our every fantasy on the matter, a role which she reprised to as the outrageously named Pussy Galore in the James Bond movie Goldfinger. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, she was replaced at Steed’s side by Emma Peel, played by the awesome beautiful and nimble Diana Rigg. Eventually, Tara King took over the role as the series declined. But later still, the series was energized and revived as The New Avengers, in which the aging John Steed needed a young bloke to do his action scenes but the outstanding female tradition was upheld by the pre-Patsy incarnation of Joanne Lumley.

   Meanwhile the Americans produced a no less stunning replica in the form of Anne Francis playing Honey West. There was just something completely irresistible about drooling over a woman who would and could kick your teeth down your throat if she caught you at it.
  In the subsequent Bond movies and all their imitators, and on TV, she keep bobbing up again and again—notably in Charlie’s Angels where we got three for the price of one. And even in these more sophisticated modern times, she is there—stunningly in the French movie La Femme Nikita and its outstanding TV spin-off, in which blonde Aussie Peta Wilson upped the ante again in the beauty and agility stakes. At the time of writing, the delectable Jennifer Garner is doing it in the number one rating series Alias, although she, unlike Rigg, Wilson etc. gets a little grubby when she’s on a really tough mission. And Nikita has been revived, this time with Asiatic Maggie Q in the role.