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An Agile Hero in Reputation, Not Action

Published: November 11, 2005

George MacDonald Fraser is now 80, or almost as old as his great creation Sir Harry Flashman was when Flashman - self-proclaimed cad, poltroon, card cheat and serial fornicator - began writing the multivolume autobiography that we know as "The Flashman Papers." Mr. Fraser has just published the 12th installment, "Flashman on the March," which, like its author, and like Flashman himself, for that matter, shows no signs of flagging.

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Harry Flashman is a fictitious Victorian rogue.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

In this volume, Flashman, finding himself in a bit of bother after seducing an underage Austrian princess, eludes her angry guardians by joining the 1868 British mission to rescue the European hostages held by King Theodore of Abyssinia, who happens to be insane - or as Flash might say, not quite 16 anas to the rupee. While cowering in typical fashion, trying to save his own neck, Flashman nevertheless manages, also in typical fashion, to get credit for saving the whole operation.

Along the way, he is suspended in a metal cage over an abyss, sends a princess to her death over the Blue Nile Falls and is a more than willing participant in an orgy.

Readers of "Tom Brown's Schooldays," if there are any left, will recall that by far the most interesting character in that otherwise preachy novel is also named Flashman: he's the bully who mercilessly persecutes Tom until finally being expelled for drunkenness. It was Mr. Fraser's genius to see that such a fellow, a bully, a coward and a liar, far from coming to nothing, as his headmaster predicted, could go a long way in the days of the empire.

This revelation came to Mr. Fraser in the late 1960's, when, after a wartime stint in the British Army, he embarked on a career as a journalist. He had taken a job at The Glasgow Herald, Mr. Fraser recalled in a recent telephone interview from the Isle of Man, where he lives now, and after five years as deputy editor, he was promoted to editor in chief. That assignment lasted three months, and then he was demoted to his old job.

"Facing 20 more years as deputy, I thought, who needs this?" he said in a voice that still retains a hint of his parents' Scottish burr. "I said to my wife, 'I'm going to write my way out of this.' "

He decided to write a Victorian novel, he explained, and out of the blue he remembered Flashman. "It seemed to me obvious that he would go into the army," Mr. Fraser said, which is exactly what Flashman does in Mr. Fraser's first novel, called simply "Flashman" and published in 1969.

Flashman buys a commission, survives a duel (by tampering with his opponent's cartridges), reluctantly acquires a wife - the sweet but brainless Elspeth, who is possibly more of a philanderer than he is - and winds up in the Afghan war, where, in spite of passing out with fear, he is acclaimed as the hero of Jalalabad.

Though Mr. Fraser hadn't planned on a sequel, one followed a year later, and then another, and soon he had hit on a best-selling formula: Flash behaves abominably, turns up at some historic battle or event, where, despite his cowardice and treachery, he somehow lands on his feet and is hailed as a hero.

As book follows book, Flashman's star keeps rising, and the little Who's Who entry at the front of each volume grows longer and longer, piling up awards and accomplishments: a knighthood, the Victoria Cross, the Congressional Medal of Honor, a governorship at Rugby (the school from which he was expelled), the honorary presidency of something called the Mission for Reclamation of Reduced Females, a project no doubt dear to his heart, since over the course of the novels Flashman also beds numberless women - 480 by his rough count in "Flashman and the Angel of the Lord," and that's only Volume IX.

You might suppose that as a prefect at Rugby, Flashman would also have acquired a taste for what Thomas Arnold, that school's famous headmaster, called "beastliness" with young boys, but Mr. Fraser will hear none of it. "No, no," he said adamantly. "Quite the opposite."

What saves the Flashman books from repetitiveness or predictability is that they are also genuine historical novels, meticulously researched from original sources and full of authentic period detail.