George MacDonald Fraser:George MacDonald Fraser, who has died aged 82, wrote stories about Harry Flashman, one of the gems of the English comic novel.
Fraser was already 44 when he left his job as deputy editor of the then Glasgow Herald to write fiction, resurrecting Flashman, the cowardly bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays, and telling of his adventures after he had been expelled from Rugby school for drunkenness.
The result was Flashman (1969), which saw the craven Flashy turned into a soldier, quaking with fear but still drinking and chasing women in the midst of the retreat from Kabul in the first Afghan war.
The book was original and very funny, and it also, most unusually for a comic novel, gave readers a telling picture of life in England and its empire between 1839 and 1842. There were four closely-packed pages of notes at the back of the novel which proved the historical accuracy of what seemed mere exuberant farce.
It is hard now, with Flashman recognised as an international comic classic, to believe that Fraser had difficulty getting the book published. It was turned down a dozen times before Herbert Jenkins, best known for publishing PG Wodehouse, brought it out.
Fraser followed it the next year with Royal Flash. This was a double literary conceit, with Flashman, a character from one Victorian novel, getting involved in the plot of another, Anthony Hope's 1894 classic The Prisoner of Zenda. The idea was that Hope had used Flashman's adventures to invent the tale of Rudolf Rassendyll, the Englishman who was the double of the king of Ruritania. Flashy gives the reader the true story, involving Bismarck and the Schleswig-Holstein affair. The book also featured Lola Montez, the beauty of the age, and her lover Ludwig, the mad king of Bavaria. Ten pages of notes again told the reader he was getting true historical gen among the comic cuts.
Bismarck and Schleswig-Holstein aside, Fraser's interests were the British empire, the American civil war and the wild west. The 12 books featuring Flashman feature some of the major engagements of the 19th century: the slave trade in Flash for Freedom (1971); the charge of the Light Brigade in Flashman at the Charge (1973); the Indian mutiny in Flashman in the Great Game (1975); Custer's last stand in Flashman and the Redskins (1982); the opium wars in Flashman and the Dragon (1985); and the abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1994).
In each novel the notes confirm that while Flash's sexual high jinks and great feats of cowardice are fictional, they are played before a real historical background. Sometimes the real events are hard to believe. The "female Caligula", Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar in Flashman's Lady, and Jeendan, the nymphomaniac maharini who dressed as a dancing girl and ruled the Sikhs in their war against British India in 1845-46, seem the work of a fevered imagination, but they turn out to be real historical figures.
Fraser was born in Carlisle, the son of a doctor. He went to Carlisle grammar school and Glasgow academy. He joined the army in 1943 and served with the Border regiment in Burma, part of the Forgotten 14th Army. Oddly for a man who spent so much time writing about historical battles in his fiction, in his own wartime memoir, Quartered Safe Out Here (1993), he told of the war as seen by a rifleman in an infantry platoon and ignored the big picture. The book was one of the great personal memoirs of the Japanese war.
A busy man of tremendous energy, he claimed to have written 20 or 30 film scripts, including: The Three Musketeers (1974); The Four Musketeers (1975); Royal Flash (1975); The Prince and the Pauper (1977); Octopussy (1983); Red Sonia (1985); Casanova (1987); and The Return of the Musketeers (1989).
Fraser perhaps reveals his literary raison d'etre in 1988 with The Hollywood History of the World, in which he claimed that cinema provided "a picture of the ages more vivid and memorable than anything in Tacitus or Gibbon or Macaulay".
Fraser lived on the Isle of Man, not, he said, as a tax exile but as an exile from the modern world. He said the island was like England used to be. He became a right-wing figure, hating political correctness (the Flashman books are full of the word "nigger"), and claiming to be surprised at the way the liberal left had cheered the Flashman novels as attacks on the British empire. They were not meant to be, he said. He liked the empire, a marvellous force for good in the world.
He is survived by his wife Kathleen, whom he married in 1949, their two sons and one daughter.
George MacDonald Fraser, writer, born April 2nd, 1925; died January 2nd, 2008. - (Guardian service)