[BGB] Fw: The end of "Flashman" 1/3/2008

[PaulByzan at aol.com]

Well, that sucks.  I loved those novels.  Flashie always gulled  the real bad 
guys in a nick of time.  I was really looking  forward to the civil war books.
 
Paul
 
 
In a message dated 1/3/2008 9:07:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
gblisscdsg at msn.com writes:

 



>From the "GI  NEWSLETTER" (Gamers International Newsletter) Subscribe Free 
at: _http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/GI_Newsletter/_ 
(http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/GI_Newsletter/)    
 

"No More  Flashman Books"  1/3/2008 
Sad news for history (and  alternate history) "Flashman fans" with the 
passing of George McDonald Fraser,  82, author of the 'Flashman' series for over 40 
years.  Most notable is  that Fraser's fictional accounts were so convincing, 
that The New York Times  identified ten literary reviewers who mistook the 
first book for an authentic  account.  With the right casting, it would make a 
splendid movie series  to Rival Indiana Jones. 
Who else was at Little Big Horn,  Charge of the LIght Brigade, Custer's Last 
Stand, the Black Hole of Calcutta,  Retreat from Afghanistan, Taiping 
Rebellion,  John Brown's Raid, etc, etc, etc.?    We'll never get to read  more of his 
Civil War exploits.  The bio below is from the  front of the first Flashman 
book. Who wouldn't read it, and get caught up  wondering about the adventures 
inside? Flashman, Harry Paget. Brigadier  General, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E.; 
Chevalier, Legion of Honour; U.S. Medal of  Honor; San Serafino Order of Purity 
and Truth, 4th class Served Afghanistan,  1841-42 (medals, Thanks of 
Parliament); Crimea (staff; Indian Mutiny (Lucknow,  etc. V.C.); China (Taiping 
Rebellion). Served  U.S. Army (major, Union forces, 1862); colonel (staff) Army of the  
Confederacy, 1863).   
If you've never started the  series, today is the day to start! 
By Walt Burgoyne.    
Education Programs Coordinator,  The National World War II Museum New  
Orleans, LA    
 
>From the "GI  NEWSLETTER" (Gamers International Newsletter) Subscribe Free 
at: _http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/GI_Newsletter/_ 
(http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/GI_Newsletter/)    

George MacDonald  Fraser, 82, author of 'Flashman' novels   January 3, 2008   
By Margalit  Fox  _http://wwwiht.com/articles/2008/01/03/arts/obits.php_ 
(http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/03/arts/obits.php)    
George MacDonald  Fraser, a British writer whose popular novels about the 
arch-rogue Harry  Flashman followed their hero as he galloped, swashbuckled, 
drank and womanized  his way through many of the signal events of the 19th 
century, died Wednesday  on the Isle of Man. He was 82 and had made his home there in 
recent years. The  cause was cancer, said Vivienne Schuster, his British 
literary  agent. 
Over nearly four  decades, Fraser produced a dozen rollicking picaresques 
centering on Flashman.  The novels purport to be installments in a multivolume 
"memoir," known  collectively as the Flashman Papers, in which 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. 
The Flashman Papers  include, among other titles, "Flashman" (World 
Publishing, 1969); "Flashman in  the Great Game" (Knopf, 1975); and, most recently, 
"Flashman on the March"  (Knopf, 2005). 
The second volume in  the series, "Royal Flash" (Knopf, 1970), was made into 
a film of the same  title in 1975, starring Malcolm McDowell as  Flashman. 
In what amounted to  an act of literary retribution, Fraser plucked Flashman 
from the pages of "Tom  Brown's School Days," Thomas Hughes's classic novel of 
English public-school  life published in 1857. In that book, Tom, the 
innocent young hero, repeatedly  falls prey to a sadistic bully named Flashman. 
In Fraser's hands,  the cruel, handsome Flashman is all grown up and in the 
British Army, serving  in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now  Brigadier 
General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, he is a master equestrian, a  pretty fair 
duelist and a polyglot who can pitch woo in a spate of foreign  tongues. He is also 
a scoundrel, a drunk, a liar, a cheat, a braggart and a  coward. (A favorite 
combat strategy is to take credit for a victory from which  he has actually run 
away.) 
Last, but most  assuredly not least, Flashman is a serial adulterer who by 
Volume 9 of the  series has bedded 480 women. (That Flashman is married himself, 
to the fair,  dimwitted Elspeth, is no impediment. She cuckolds him left and 
right, in any  case.) 
Readers adored him.  Today, the Internet is populated with a bevy of Flashman 
fan sites. Flashman's  exploits take him to some of the most epochal events 
of his time, from British  colonial campaigns to the American Civil War, in 
which he magnanimously serves  on both the Union and the Confederate sides.  He 
rubs up against eminences like Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde, Florence  
Nightingale and Abraham Lincoln. For his work, Flashman earns a string of  preposterous 
awards, including a knighthood, the Victoria Cross and the Medal  of Honor. 
Fraser was so skilled  as a mock memoirist that he had some early readers 
fooled. Writing in The New  York Times in 1969 after the first novel was 
published, Alden Whitman  said: 
"So far, 'Flashman'  has had 34 reviews in the United States. Ten of these 
found  the book to be genuine autobiography." 
The son of Scottish  parents, George MacDonald Fraser was born on April 2, 
1925, in Carlisle, England, near the Scottish border.  His boyhood reading, like 
that of nearly every British boy of his generation,  included "Tom Brown's 
School Days." 
In World War II,  Fraser served in India and  Burma with the Border Regiment. 
His  memoir of the war in Burma, "Quartered Safe Out Here"  (Harvill), was 
published in 1993. 
After leaving the  military, Fraser embarked on a journalism career, working 
for newspapers in  England,  Canada and Scotland. He eventually became the  
assistant editor of The Glasgow Herald and, in the 1960s, was briefly its  
editor. 
Tiring of newspaper  work, Fraser decided, as he later said in interviews, to 
"write my way out"  with an original Victorian novel. 
In a flash, he  remembered Flashman, and the first book tumbled out in the 
evenings after  work. 
"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 
the reference work  "Authors and Artists for Young Adults." 
His other books  include several non-Flashman novels, among them "Mr. 
American" (Simon &  Schuster, 1980); "The Pyrates" (Knopf, 1984); and "Black Ajax" 
(HarperCollins,  1997). With Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson, Fraser wrote 
the screenplay  for the James Bond film "Octopussy," released in  1983. 
Fraser's latest book,  "The Reavers," a non-Flashman novel, is scheduled to 
be published by Knopf in  April. 
 

Subscribe to  "GI NEWSLETTER" (Gamers International Newsletter) free at:   
_http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/GI_Newsletter/_ 
(http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/GI_Newsletter/)    




_______________________________________________
BGB  mailing  list
BGB at battlegroupboston.org
http://www.battlegroupboston.org/mailman/listinfo/bgb





**************Start the year off right.  Easy ways to stay in shape.     
http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.battlegroupboston.org/pipermail/bgb/attachments/20080103/4a646918/attachment-0001.html