Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser

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Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser



English | ePUB | 4.88 MB | Books: 12

George MacDonald Fraser OBE FRSL (2 April 1925 – 2 January 2008) was a Scottish author who wrote historical novels, non-fiction books and several screenplays. He is best known for a series of works that featured the character Flashman.

In 1966, Fraser got the idea to turn Flashman, a fictional coward and bully originally created by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), into a hero, and he wrote a novel around the character’s exploits. The book proved popular and sale of the film rights enabled Fraser to become a full-time writer. He moved to the Isle of Man where he could pay less tax.

There were a series of further Flashman novels, presented as packets of memoirs written by the nonagenarian Flashman looking back on his days as a hero of the British Army during the 19th century. The series is notable for the accuracy of its historical settings and praise it received from critics. For example, P.G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, “If ever there was a time when I felt that ‘watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet’ stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.”

The first Flashman sequel was Royal Flash. It was published in 1970, the same year that Fraser published The General Danced at Dawn, a series of short stories which fictionalised his post-war military experience as the adventures of the rather unassuming “Dand” MacNeill in a Scottish Highland regiment. This series of short stories is noted for the strong and strange characters surrounding McNeill, including an aged and prototypical colonel, a perfect-soldier regimental sergeant-major, a Wodehousian adjutant, an active and dedicated pipe sergeant, a die-hard Algerian revolutionary, various blackguards and spivs, and, most memorably, Private John McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world. Featuring games of golf, scrapes, and run-ins with the police both military and civil, the transfer of the die-hard to the French, and McAuslan’s various disasters, these works form a picture of the British army in the period immediately after World War II.

The following year Fraser published a third Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, as well as a non fiction work, The Steel Bonnets (1971), a history of the Border Reivers of the Anglo-Scottish Border.

The books in suggested reading order: PREVIEW