George MacDonald Fraser brought delight to a generation of readers throughout
the English-speaking world with his Flashman books. He wrote confidently on
a range of themes, but Flashman made his name.
He had hit on a deceptively simple idea that proved to be a bestselling
formula at the end of the Swinging Sixties. The public still wanted to sit
down with a good rip-roaring yarn — but did not want heroes. So why not make
the central character a cad? A cad the reading public already knew about —
Harry Flashman, the bounder of Tom Brown’s Schooldays?
What happened to Flashman after the good Doctor Arnold expelled him from
Rugby? Fraser decided that he must have gone into the Army. Bully, liar and
coward he may still have been, but the Victorian military authorities did
not mind. Or perhaps they were simply too stupid to notice, as he whored and
cheated his way around the British Empire. The resulting stories became one
of the great tongue-in-cheek achievements of popular fiction.
The standing joke between Fraser and his readers was that these were genuine
memoirs: they had been discovered, “wrapped in oilskin” and stuffed into a
tea chest, during a house sale at Ashby, Leicestershire, in 1965. They
described how, after a long, eventful life, loved by the ladies and lauded
by the Establishment — Flashman was a brigadier-general, a VC, a Knight of
the Bath, a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur and, amusingly, holder of the
San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth — the old scoundrel mused in old age
about how he had got away with it: “The ideal time to be a hero,” he wrote,
“is when the battle is over and the other fellows are dead, God rest ’em,
and you take the credit.”
It was all rollicking nonsense; but it had a sterling quality that went to the
heart of many sophisticated readers who like to relax with a rubbishy book
provided it is well written rubbish. Fraser was a thoroughly professional
literary craftsman.
The books could be enjoyed at different levels. They sold in airport bookshops
and they found their way into the hands of solemn Americans who could not
understand why they were unable to find General Flashman in the reference
books. Letters came from people who claimed to be related to Flashman as a
result of one of his irregular liaisons. One serving British officer claimed
that his grandfather lent Flashman $50 and a horse during the American Civil
War — and never saw either again.
Fraser loved military history and he loved browsing through Victoriana. He
decided that the “Flashman Papers”, like all well-edited memoirs, deserved
to have scholarly references at the back of the book. Thus, when Flashman,
passing through London between postings, is taken unawares in disreputable
premises with his breeches down at his ankles the reader is told solemnly,
when he flicks through the pages to the end notes, that “Raiding of
gambling-hells was common after the Police Act of 1839 (see L.J. Ludovici,
The Itch for Play.)”.
The genial Fraser himself had not a glimmer of caddishness, and his own
military experience was very unlike Flashman’s. He served in the ranks in
General Slim’s 14th Army in Burma in the Second World War before being
commissioned in the Gordon Highlanders.
His time in Burma resulted in a memoir, published in 1992 under the title
Quartered Safe out Here, which ranks among the best of the kind of modestly
understated barrack-room books that provide a picture, more vivid than the
military historians can provide, of the harshness, squalor and black humour
of war on the ground. Here is the young Fraser in the jungle: “As the
section scout, I found myself advancing alone, safety catch off and one up
the spout, across a hundred yards of open ground to a silent screen of palm
and thicket concealing a village where there might or might not be a
Japanese position. There wasn’t, as it happened, but I remember every step.”
He found himself “wishing to God I’d passed Lower Latin and got into
university in 1943”.
He noted drily that when the 1945 general election came (after the war in
Europe ended but the soldiers of the Japanese Emperor showed no sign of
surrendering) he was not old enough to vote, although he was old enough to
lead jungle patrols.
Born in 1925, George MacDonald Fraser, the son of a doctor, was educated at
Carlisle Grammar School and Glasgow Academy. Back from the war, he became a
journalist, first in Canada and finally with the Glasgow Herald, of which he
became deputy editor.
For years one of his interests had been been the heroic world of Victorian
adventure yarns for boys, and one of his sidelines at the Herald was to
provide agreeable little articles aimed at middle-aged readers who enjoyed
recalling the derring-do of school stories. Another interest was the
American pioneer days, and in due course Flashman enjoyed adventures among
the redskins.
Fraser was in his forties when he wrote Flashman (1969) — and realised the
dream of all journalists, of telling his editor he could not afford to carry
on with a newspaper career. He moved to the Isle of Man — as a tax haven
that was not too outlandish — and there he settled down to write, in a house
large enough to contain a snooker table, to indulge the only vice that he
might have shared with the cad of Rugby.
His first novel, based on a real episode in the First Afghan War, ends with
Flashman being welcomed home by the Great Duke himself and taken to
Buckingham Palace to be decorated by Queen Victoria (who, it emerged in the
later books, had something of a soft spot for Flashman).
The great and good, and the less good, of Victorian times moved effortlessly
across the pages of the Flashman books. Second in the series was Royal Flash
(1970), a Ruritarian romp in which the villain was the young Bismarck.
Subsequent volumes took the rascally Flashman around the globe.
Through it all, sabres glint in the sunlight and the white man comes out top
in the end; bosoms heave, bodices are ripped; foreigners strut and sneer and
simper and generally prove their inferiority. Part of the delight of the
stories, when they appeared in an age of women’s liberation and campaigns
against racial discrimination, was the shameless way Fraser ignored
political correctness. In spite of ill-health in his latter years — he had
been suffering from cancer — he continued to write: The last of the dozen
Flashman books, Flashman on the March, appeared in 2005.He also produced a
couple of collections of short stories.
Fraser was also a scenarist for a number of films. He wrote the screenplay
when Royal Flash became a movie in 1975, and wrote half a dozen other film
scripts, notably (in co-
operation with Richard Maibaum) that of the James Bond movie Octopussy (1983),
which starred Roger Moore.
He had made his debut as a screenwriter in 1973 with the sleek Richard
Lester-directed The Three Musketeers, which starred Oliver Reed, Raquel
Welch and Michael York. He performed the same service in 1974 for the
somewhat perfunctory sequel, The Four Musketeers, also directed by Lester
and featuring the same cast as its rip-roaring protagonists. He was in
harness with Clive Exton on the script of the medieval nonsense frolic Red
Sonja (1985), directed by Richard Fleischer, and his final screenplay was
The Return of the Musketeers (1989), again directed by Lester, with Reed and
York now as somewhat mature hell-raisers. Fraser was appointed OBE in 1999.
He married, in 1949, Kathleen Hetherington. There were two sons and a daughter
(the novelist Caro Fraser).
George MacDonald Fraser, OBE, novelist and screenwriter, was born on April
2, 1925. He died on January 2, 2008, aged 82
