The caper started with the saving of a drowning man by Modesty Blaise while solo-sailing a vessel through the Tasman Sea. It soon took deadly form when the strange criminal leader Beauregard Browne decided that Blaise was a hindrance to his art theft ring and should die. The actual removal of Modesty and her companion, Willie, would fall to the insane Reverend Uriah Crisp, a would-be evangelical preacher with as an uncanny speed with his six-shooters as Willie had with his knives.