British author George MacDonald Fraser died of cancer on 2 January 2008, at his home on the Isle of Man. Born 2 April 1925, in Carlisle, England (to Scottish parents), he served in India and Burma during World War II before becoming a newspaper writer and editor. He is best known, however, for what he did to stop working on newspapers. Fraser was the author of a dozen novels about the arch-rogue Harry Flashman, who was the villain in the classic British novel Tom Brown’s School Days. Through Fraser’s work, he became a swashbuckling, drinking, womanizing rogue who met up with many of history’s greats. The 12-volume “Flashman Papers” were fictional memoirs, and in some cases, mistakenly viewed as autobiography. In them, the hero “details his prodigious exploits in battle, with the bottle and in bed. In the process, Fraser cheerfully punctured the enduring ideal of a long-vanished era in which men were men, tea was strong and the sun never set on the British Empire,” according to the New York Times. The first volume, Flashman was published in 1969; the most recent, Flashman on the March, first appeared in 2005. The second book, Royal Flash (1970) was made into a movie with the same title in 1975, starring Malcolm McDowell as Flashman.
Fraser in interviews that, when he had tired of newspaper work, he decided, “to write my way out” with an original Victorian novel. Remembering Flashman from his early days, he was off. “In all, it took 90 hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table,” he said in an interview quoted in Authors and Artists for Young Adults.
He wrote several other, non-Flashman books (a fairly complete bibliography is available on this page), and also worked in the movies, including writing the screenplays for The Three Musketeers (1973), The Four Musketeers (1974), Octopussy (1983), and Red Sonja (1985).