Another Flashman!

I’ve just finished ‘Flashman and the Great Game’ for the umpteenth time and I thought I’d check to see if George MacDonald Fraser is still alive. Queue my surprise to see that his latest book is being published in April 2005.


Unfortunately it deals with the little-known Abyssinian campaign.
I’m still hoping that the guy has enough strength to write a book featuring Rorke’s Drift and the American Civil War. Here’s hoping…

Cool! Thanks for the heads-up.

I suspect that the Civil War book(s) will never actually be written, much like the Giant Rat of Sumatra…

WARNING: “Look at me!” post inbound.

Alive and kicking, as he signed off of my stage adaptation of [b]The Pyrates[/b] last year. He (and his agent) were a pain in the ass to track down, though. Glad to see other Fraser fans here.

Now I am impressed.
Speaking of adaptations, has anyone seen ‘Royal Flash’? How appropriate would the Flashman series be for movie or television?
Part of me thinks that Flashman would make a terrific big-budget series ala Hornblower whilst the other part thinks that much of the charm of his work comes from his thoughts rather than his actions.

That was a major dilemma with The Pyrates, too. Much of the charm of Fraser’s work is in the description, narration, and/or inner monlogues; you have to figure out ways to make that lot dramatic. My collaborator and I put a lot of such material in the mouths of the characters, which worked to a a certain extent. I’m currently revising the adaptation, though, as we were a little too reverent of the book and the show ended up too long.

I’ve thought about trying tackle the Flashman novels, as well, but both those and The Pyrates really scream to be movies. I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy of Royal Flash, but I bet the blockbuster treatment would do justice to Fraser’s work.

He more or less covered Rorke’s Drift in “Flashman and the Tiger”.

You’re right- I’d recollected that the story dealt with just Isandhlwana but a quick flick through shows that his summary of Rorke’s Drift involved him spending most of the time searching for a corner to hide in, including the thatched roof of the commissariat store before it was set alight.
Okay then, is it just the American Civil War we’re waiting for?

Splendid, I say, splendid series!

He also recently did a radio adaptation of ‘Flash for Freedom’ for BBC Radio.

Let us know when/where this goes up, please?

Great news, I doubted we would see another one…

Fraser died in 2008. He never wrote the Civil War volume. This is odd because he made so many allusions to it in the earlier books that you’d think he was going to write it. For example, in Flash for Freedom, when he mentions Flashman’s later involvement with Lincoln during the war, he actually says, “But that’s another story for another day.” I read somewhere that he once said that he thought the Civil War was overworked as a topic. If that’s how he felt, why then did he make all those allusions? This is a question that has always troubled me.