Fraser wrote ‘Flashman’ series of historical adventures
Published 10:24 pm Wednesday, January 2, 2008
LONDON — George MacDonald Fraser, author of the “Flashman” series of historical adventure yarns, died Wednesday, his publisher said. He was 82.
Fraser died following a battle with cancer, said Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity for Knopf, which will release Fraser’s latest work “The Reavers” in the United States in April. Latimer was unable to provide details of where Fraser died. He lived on the Isle of Man, off the coast of northwest England.
“Flashman,” published in 1969, introduced readers to an enduring literary antihero: the roguish, irrepressible Harry Flashman.
The novel imagined Flashman — the bullying schoolboy of 19th-century classic “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” — grown up to become a soldier in the British army. In the book and 11 sequels, Flashman fought, drank and womanized his way across the British Empire, Europe and the United States, playing a pivotal role in the century’s great historical moments. A vain, cowardly rogue, Flashman nonetheless emerged from each episode covered in glory, rising to the rank of medal-garlanded brigadier general.
Fraser thought his antihero’s appeal was not surprising.
“People like rascals, they like rogues,” Fraser told the British Broadcasting Corp. in 2006.
“I was always on the side of the villain when I was a child and went to the movies. I wanted Basil Rathbone to kill Errol Flynn.”
The Flashman books were also praised by critics for their storytelling flair and attention to historical detail. Each installment of the series purported to come from a faux-biographical trove of memoirs — The Flashman Papers — discovered in an English attic in the 1960s.
Fraser proudly pointed out that a third of the first book’s American reviewers believed the Flashman papers were real.
