Why did I wait so long to meet Harry Flashman? What kind of idiot spends 58 years on planet Earth, partway literate for most of them, without getting stuck into George MacDonald Fraser’s peerless Flashman series? I knew they were out there, yet for some reason (snobbery? indolence?) I neglected what must rank among the best comic writing since Wodehouse. With the bonus of providing a superb history lesson in 19th-century British foreign policy and, in America, the expansion of the frontier and the Civil War. The action is presided over, of course, by one of literature’s greatest antiheroes. I could kick myself. If I’d devoured Flashman 30 years ago I could be on my third re-reading.
I last had the pleasure of unearthing a top-notch pristine protagonist when I discovered Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, in his case only shortly after the author’s death. The difference being that the Bernie books were all about his conscience, while the Flashy books are all about how he hasn’t got one.
