Happy 200th birthday, Flashy! The Flashman books are a masterclass in historical fiction by David Horspool
The 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Harry Flashman VC has been greeted with an outpouring of affection and admiration. You can imagine the old rogue laughing off the adulation, while inwardly relishing it all. And yes, I know, unlike those allegedly credulous American first reviewers, that Flashman wasn’t real. For all his creator George MacDonald Fraser’s meticulous research and poker-faced footnotes to the Flashman Papers, the novels follow the fortunes of a fictional character of someone else’s invention – Thomas Hughes. Hughes had already muddied the waters by including a real figure in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold, who expels Flashman from Rugby for drunkenness. It’s a nice question whether the roguery or the research made Flashman such a triumph. My money is, just, on the research, if only because a baddie protagonist is not essential to a successful historical novel. The best historical fiction...
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