[BITList] Like a Flash?

[John Feltham]

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Fraser,  George Macdonald  (1925-2008), journalist, novelist, and screen-writer, was born on 2 April 1925 at 48 London Road, Carlisle, Cumberland, the son of William Fraser, medical doctor, and his wife, Annie Struth, nee Donaldson, nurse. His original aim, during his schooldays at Carlisle Grammar School and later at Glasgow Academy, was to read medicine at university. But he was an indifferent student and in 1943, feeling that he would never amass the qualifications necessary to enter the University of Glasgow's medical school, he enlisted in the Border regiment and was sent to India. Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), his memoir of the Burma campaign, recounted his wartime experiences in some detail. Among other exploits he was hung upside down by his heels while strafed by Japanese sniper fire as he foraged for water, and promoted to lance-corporal on four occasions but three times returned to the ranks for minor infringements of army discipline. One of these involved losing a tea urn. Subsequently he was given a commission in the Gordon Highlanders and served with the regiment in the Middle East and north Africa. This period of his life offered material for the semi-autobiographical 'McAuslan' stories, collected in The General Danced at Dawn (1970), McAuslan in the Rough (1974), and The Sheikh and the Dustbin (1988).

After returning to Carlisle on demobilization in 1947 Fraser embarked on a career in journalism. This began with a post on the Carlisle Journal, then took him to Canada, where he worked on the Regina Leader-Post, and finally to Glasgow, where he moved with his family in 1953. On 16 April 1949 he had married Kathleen Margarette Hetherington, a reporter on a rival Carlisle paper, and daughter of George Hetherington, baker. They had three children. By the mid-1960s, however, Fraser had become disillusioned. Passed over for ultimate preferment on the leading Scottish newspaper, the Glasgow Herald, when it came under new ownership (he served as deputy editor between 1964 and 1969 and at one point rose to the position of acting editor) he determined, as he put it to his wife, 'to write us out of this'  (private information).

Fraser's literary imagination had been stirred by pre-teenage exposure to sanguinary historical fiction, notably Raphael Sabatini's Captain Blood, which he read at the age of ten. This undoubtedly informed his first novel, Flashman (1969), supposedly one among a trunk-full of manuscripts discovered at a sale in Leicestershire, but in fact deriving from Fraser's own historical research. The distinguishing mark of the twelve-volume Flashman series, which found the villain of Thomas Hughes's morality tale Tom Brown's Schooldays purposefully yet pusillanimously at large at the upper levels of Victorian society, was its relish of historical detail. While its animating force was merely an inspired invention the world in which Flashman moved was sharply and convincingly laid out. To the comparatively rare spectacle of an unreal person intervening in a real world Fraser added a further refinement. Unlike the conventional heroes of historical fiction Harry Paget Flashman was a coward, a bully, and a satyromaniacal philanderer. The honours and decorations with which he was routinely showered (these included the Victoria Cross, a knighthood, and the thanks of parliament) were invariably the result of grotesque accidents. This worm's eye view of history gave the novels a significant internal dynamic. Knowing that Flashman was a self-advertised moral absence, the reader believed everything he said, on the grounds that he had no reason to dissemble. All this produced an acute, but often bitterly humorous, critique of the Victorian imperial project, in which the folly and mismanagement of some of its military endeavours was never allowed to disguise Fraser's transparent admiration for some of the personalities on display.

Although turned down by nearly every publisher in London, until its eventual acceptance by the firm of Herbert Jenkins, Flashman, which followed its anti-hero ingloriously through the First Afghan War of 1841-2, was an instant success, inspiring in P. G. Wodehouse what he called 'that-watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet-stuff'  (book cover). Charlie Chaplin was also a fan. In later instalments Flashman starred in a reworking of Anthony Hope's Ruritanian romance of 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda (Royal Flash, 1970), mistakenly stormed the Russian guns at Balaklava (Flashman at the Charge, 1973), sailed a war canoe with Rajah Brooke in Borneo (Flashman's Lady, 1977), was the solitary survivor of Custer's last stand at the battle of Little Big Horn (Flashman and the Redskins, 1982), and assisted the US abolitionist John Brown at Harper's Ferry (Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, 1994). Among a riot of encounters with celebrated nineteenth-century personalities he became the intimate of Queen Victoria, Ulysses S. Grant, Bismarck, Palmerston, and Queen Ranavalona, the deranged and lustful monarch of 1840s Madagascar. The vigour of Fraser's prose led to comparisons with Robert Louis Stevenson and the tough-minded eighteenth-century Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett. A small part of his vast international fan-base-mostly Americans-believed that the books were genuine historical documents.

Meanwhile, from the early 1970s, and on the back of the Flashman series' success, Fraser pursued a yet more lucrative career as a Hollywood screen-writer. His credits included The Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequel, The Four Musketeers (1974), Royal Flash (adapted from his novel, and starring Malcolm McDowell and Britt Ekland, 1975), The Prince and the Pauper (1977), the James Bond vehicle Octopussy (1983), and Red Sonja (1985), featuring the young Arnold Schwarzenegger. As his Hollywood memoir, The Light's On at Signpost (2002), made clear, he came from a generation for whom the novelty of cinema never waned: the shaky transit of an ageing Gregory Peck across a restaurant foyer always had him delightedly turning his head. Fraser's other novels included Mr American (1980), The Pyrates (1983), The Candlemass Road (1993), and Black Ajax (1997), a spirited re-imagining of the career of the black Regency-era prize-fighter Tom Molineaux. He also wrote a history of the Anglo-Scottish border reivers, The Steel Bonnets (1971).

In personal dealings Fraser combined an occasionally rugged reserve with an extreme courtesy. He was devoted to his wife, Kathleen, to whom all the Flashman books were dedicated, to his sons, Simon and Nicholas, and to his daughter, Caro, herself a successful novelist, and doted on his grandchildren (who by the time of his death numbered eight). As he grew older, living in the tax exile's seclusion of the Isle of Man, his political and social views became steadily more hard-line. The Light's On at Signpost was interspersed by periodic teeth-gnashings on the subject of law and order, and on 'New Labour' and other abominations. Exposure to a typical Fraser audience, which tended to magnify and in some cases to distort these opinions, could occasionally unnerve the more literary of his admirers. A younger friend who conducted an interview with him at the National Army Museum, where the crowd consisted largely of serving soldiers, confessed that the experience made him feel 'vaguely homosexual and left-wing'  (private information).

Apart from an OBE (1999) for services to literature and a belated fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature (1998) Fraser received little formal recognition for his work, the 1973 Playboy editorial award notwithstanding. He did not seem cast down by this neglect. A final novel, The Reavers (2007), appeared shortly before his death, of cancer, at Nobles Hospital in Strang on the Isle of Man on 2 January 2008. He was survived by his wife and children.

D. J. Taylor 

Sources  The Times (4 Jan 2008) + Daily Telegraph (4 Jan 2008) + The Guardian (4 Jan 2008) + The Independent (4 Jan 2008) + WW (2008) + personal knowledge (2012) + private information (2012) + b. cert. + m. cert.
Archives  FILM BFINA, Borderers, W. Cartner (director), ITV, 9 Sept 1975 + BFINA, South Bank Show, B. Bee (director), ITV, 12 Nov 2000 + BFINA, current affairs footage
Likenesses  photographs, 1982-2005, Rex Features, London · photographs, 1988-2006, Getty Images, London · N. Drabble, C-type colour print, 1999, NPG [see illus.] · obituary photographs · photographs, Camera Press, London



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