因故遺失了
這種多才多藝的作家
創造著名歷史情境下的"反英雄(美女無數)"冒險小說系列小說不定包括參與所謂"第2次鴉片戰爭"一集
George MacDonald Fraser
Novelist who has died aged 82
George MacDonald Fraser's anti-hero, Sir Harry Flashman, entertained generations of fans with his adventures across the British Empire. The Flashman series, among other historical books, established him as a gifted, old-fashioned story-teller with a sharp wit, which he turned on Victorian values. However, he insisted the liberal left got it wrong when they thought he was attacking the empire – he said he saw it as a force for good in the world.
George MacDonald Fraser was born in Carlisle in 1925. The son of a doctor, he joined the Border regiment in 1943 and fought in Burma. Later he worked as a journalist in Carlisle, Canada and on the Glasgow Herald before he left to write full time after the 1969 publication of Flashman. The character was taken from the nineteenth century popular classic, Tom Brown’s School Days.
Jane Little spoke to fan and fellow author, Max Hastings, and to George MacDonald Fraser’s literary agent, Vivienne Schuster.
George MacDonald Fraser was born April 2nd 1925. He died January 2nd 2008.
George MacDonald Fraser, Author of Flashman Novels, Dies at 82
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 yesterday 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Fraser's hands, the cruel, handsome Flashman is all grown up and in the British Army, serving in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now Brig. Gen.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 American Medal of Honor.
Mr. Fraser was so skilled 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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."
Mr. Fraser's survivors include his wife, Kathy; two sons and a daughter. Information on other survivors could not immediately be confirmed.
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, Mr. Fraser wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film "Octopussy," released in 1983.
Mr. Fraser's latest book, "The Reavers," a non-Flashman novel, is scheduled to be published by Knopf in April.
For his work, Mr. Fraser received many honors, among them the Order of the British Empire in 1999. This award, according to every conceivable news account, was entirely genuine.
【おくやみ】
Ｇ・Ｍ・フレーザー氏死去 英作家
2008年1月4日 01時04分
ジョージ・Ｍ・フレーザー氏（英作家）２日、肺がんなどのため英マン島にある自宅近くの医療施設で死去、８２歳。同国中部カーライル出身。ロイター通信が３日、報じた。
冒険小説の「フラッシュマン」シリーズなどで知られる。ジェームズ・ボンドが活躍するスパイ映画００７シリーズの「オクトパシー」（１９８３年）の脚本も手掛けた。（ロンドン共同）
George MacDonald Fraser作品列表
- 三剑客续集/Return of the Musketeers, The(英国)(1989年).... .(编剧)
- 两个大太阳/Red Sonja(荷兰)(1985年).... .(编剧)
- 007系列:八爪女/Octopussy(英国)(1983年).... (screenplay) and.(编剧)
- 王子与乞丐/Crossed Swords(英国)(1978年).... .(编剧)
- Royal Flash/Royal Flash(英国)(1975年).... (screenplay).(编剧) You Tube 有德文預告片
- 生死剑侠/Four Musketeers, The(英国)(1974年).... .(编剧)
- 豪情三剑客/Three Musketeers, The(英国)(1973年).... .(编剧)
George MacDonald Fraser
Jan 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition
George MacDonald Fraser, inventor of Flashman, died on January 2nd, aged 82
Mr Fraser had known him from the start of his career, when he was dragged bragging and hiccupping from the pages of “Tom Brown's Schooldays” and pitchforked out of Rugby; and he had followed him, like some devoted batman, through all his military campaigns, from Afghanistan to South Africa to the Indian wars. He had seen him frozen in a blanket in a corpse-strewn defile on the retreat from Kabul in 1842; almost split neatly in two by a grinning Chinaman in a top-knot while running guns down the Yangtse in 1860; struggling in an Indian swamp, after the great ghat massacre at Cawnpore, with what looked like man-eating crocodiles; and charging, by accident, for the Russian guns at Balaclava. As Flashman accumulated the tinware—the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Medal, the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth (“richly deserved”), both he and Mr Fraser knew it was sheer terror that propelled him, delirium funkens, plus a large measure of luck. The great hero of Jallalabad was, in fact, “yellow as yesterday's custard”. But he always emerged in splendour.
And with women. Every Flashman novel writhed with them, preferably all bum, belly and bust, giggling and bouncing at the prospect of an officer “who had raked and ridden harder than most”. After the beauteous Fetnab (who “knew the ninety-seven ways of love...though...the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed”), came Lola Montez and Cassie and Susie the Bawd; and, finest of all, the Indian princess Lakshmibai, her “splendid golden nakedness” dressed in no more than bangles and a tiny veil. It was a serious disaster that could interrupt the tumbling for any long period of time.
Packed in a tea-chest
Mr Fraser had seen service too, far more soberly, with the Gordon Highlanders in Africa and the Fourteenth Army in Burma. He knew what it was like to be pinged by Japanese sniper fire, and had the medals to prove it. His own wartime adventures led him to write other stories about Private John McAuslan, “the dirtiest soldier in the world”—though his own particular cock-ups got him regularly demoted and not, like Flashman, moved smoothly from colonel to general. But, just like Flashman, he was sure there was little glory in war. Fighting was a job to be done, often reluctantly, with simple application and dogged common sense. As for the military virtues, “the best thing you can do with 'em is hang them on the wall in Bedlam.”
This was why there was no man better than Mr Fraser to stumble on the Flashman story. It began with his “discovery”, in 1965, of a batch of memoirs wrapped in oilskins and packed in a tea-chest in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, in Leicestershire. The first Flashman novel, written in a feverish 90 hours to get him out of a financial hole, was followed by 11 others and could have led to more, for Mr Fraser had never got started on the American Civil War. He brought his journalist's and historian's eye to bear on the “papers”, adding footnotes to correct Flashman's Arabic, adjust his dates and allow for possible unfairness to the fools and incompetents who commanded him. Generally, however, he found Flashman an impressively accurate observer. Between them they made the stories so good that some Americans thought they were real.
Would Flashman have liked him, had they met? Mr Fraser was a Scot, of course, solidly and loudly so, and Flashman had no love for Scotland. He found it (on his visits to Balmoral to the girlish Queen Victoria, all popeyes and buck teeth but “pretty enough beneath the neck”) a place of gloom and drizzle and long-faced holiness. He preferred Indian heat and sun. But Mr Fraser was a devoted son of the borders, born in Carlisle and writing both fact and fiction about the ruffian-reivers and cattle-stealers of the region: men who, in their shameless venturing and whoring and disrespect for law, were quite a lot like old Flashy, except that they were brave.
Flashman's more blatant chauvinism (“I pulled her across my knees and smartened her up with my riding switch”) and his racism (jabbering blacks and lounging sepoys would soon feel the smart of his rifle) were sometimes laid at Mr Fraser's door. But his own views were more moderately right-wing, extending to a liking for law and order and a horror of the metric system. And though he and Flashman between them seemed intent on savagely satirising the whole British imperial enterprise, the truth was more complicated. The novels illustrated both the folly of war and the unsung, unregarded heroism of the lower orders, the actual builders of the empire. In their sharp-sightedness, if not much else, here were two men who could clasp each other appreciatively by the hand.
smarten (sb/sth) up phrasal verb [M] MAINLY UK
to (cause to) become more clean, tidy and stylish:
[R] She's really smartened herself up since she left university.
You'll have to smarten up if you want to work in television.
a number of Indians known as Sepoy
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