George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, has died. Now we will never have the full details of the briefly-alluded to sordid episode in the Parker Library.John Sutherland has written in the Guardian about how Americans never got Flash, and how this just goes to show how British he is. He is a genuinely revolting anti-hero for much of the time, and the amount of vileness people will put up with in a hero varies hugely. Nick Hornby can't stand the Charlie Mortdecai books, for example. But I liked Flash: he drank Tokay; he seduced women; he rode fast horses; he cheated at cricket; if pursued through the Russian snow by knout-wielding cossacks he would happily push his sleeping lover off the back of the sleigh to increase speed; he felt no qualms about living off the earnings of infatuated hookers; and I learnt a huge amount about the military cock-ups of the nineteenth century by reading the copious endnotes provided by his editor. He wasn't just pretending to be nasty, he was the real thing, and a wonderful antidote to Tom Brown's Schooldays, if you have had the misfortune to read it.
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