There’s no better example of this than the diabolical revenge that the ex-slave Cleonie takes on Flashman – after he has callously sold her to the Apaches almost 30 years earlier – by luring him into Indian country and arranging his kidnap by Sioux braves. But the thing about Flashman’s women, and I think this is what appeals to female readers, is that they invariably get the better of him.’ He really loves Elspeth, there’s no question about it. ‘Yes,’ agreed MacDonald Fraser, ‘he falls for a lot of them – temporarily at any rate. I do not believe in the niceness of humanity.’ Yet even Flashman is not all bad and seems to have a genuine affection for many of his lovers. So did MacDonald Fraser share any traits with his fictional creation, an inveterate womanizer who, more by luck than judgement, always ends up smelling of roses? ‘No,’ he told me, ‘but I do share his general philosophy. ‘It wasn’t just his looks and his style, and so on,’ he told me. He’s big, he’s got presence and he’s got style.’ MacDonald Fraser’s all-time favourite for the role, however, was Errol Flynn.
‘Someone suggested today that Daniel Day Lewis might make a Flashman – and on reflection I think he would.
I was very impressed with his Gangs of New York.’ At his talk at the Bath Literary Festival that evening, he was even more taken with the idea. ‘He’s probably getting on a bit,’ he said (Day Lewis was then 48), before conceding: ‘He’s probably the best around. Out of left field I suggested Daniel Day Lewis. The other reason for the dearth of Flashman films was, said MacDonald Fraser, the lack of a suitable British actor. ‘I will not let anyone else have control of the script,’ he explained, ‘and that simply does not happen in Hollywood.’ But that expertise, it turned out, was part of the problem. MacDonald Fraser was, after all, an experienced screenwriter whose credits included The Three Musketeers, the James Bond film Octopussy and the aforementioned Royal Flash, starring Malcolm McDowell.
Which prompted me to ask why only one Flashman, Royal Flash (a send-up of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda), had ever made it to the silver screen. As well he might because Flashman on the March had already sold more hardbacks than any of its predecessors. He still had his Scottish lilt (as do most Caledonians, wherever they live, including my wife) and looked incredibly well for his 80 years. He was smartly dressed in blazer and open-neck shirt, with a wide friendly face, long ears and a hearty laugh. Two minutes ahead of the newly appointed time, MacDonald Fraser reappeared and sat down opposite me. I repaired to the bar to mug up on my notes. But he had only just arrived himself, thanks to a delayed flight from the Isle of Man (where he had been in tax exile since the early 1970s) and needed an hour to freshen up. Well aware that MacDonald Fraser was an old soldier – his account of his time in Burma with the Border Regiment, Quartered Safe Out Here, is one of the finest memoirs to emerge from World War Two – I made a special effort to get to his Bath hotel a little early. We didn’t, as it happens, get off to the smoothest start. Who wouldn’t want to meet their literary hero? I did not know it at the time, of course, but it would be the last interview that MacDonald Fraser gave before his death in January 2008. In 2006, shortly before the publication of my own Victoria’s Wars, I was asked by the Daily Telegraph to interview George MacDonald Fraser who had just brought out his twelfth and last Flashman novel, Flashman on the March, set during the Abyssinian Campaign of 1868. Hence the first eponymously titled Flashman is set in Afghanistan, with our cowardly hero somehow emerging from the disastrous Retreat from Kabul with his reputation enhanced. Flashman is expelled from Rugby at about the same time Queen Victoria comes to the throne and the ill-fated First Afghan War begins. Tiring of journalism in the mid-1960s (he was assistant editor of the Glasgow Herald), he decided to use Hughes’ creation as the anti-hero in his own Victorian adventure story. MacDonald Fraser had read Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a bestselling Victorian novel, as a boy and immediately recognized the drunken bully Flashman as the unacknowledged ‘star’ of the book. The books became the literary inspiration for my own four histories ( The Homicidal Earl, The Indian Mutiny, Zulu, Victoria’s Wars) and two historical novels ( Zulu Hart and Hart of Empire) on the same subject. I read them in my teens and was immediately captivated by MacDonald Fraser’s colourful depiction of Victorian warfare. But for George MacDonald Fraser and his wonderfully funny – and, to modern eyes, decidedly un-PC – Harry Flashman novels, I would not have become a historian.