You probably know about Flashman's other parent, Tom Brown's School Days. Fraser read Thomas Hughes' moralising semi-classic of boarding school life and found the cowardly drunken godless bully Harry Flashman the only entertaining bit of it. But the book was a useful model. Just as Hughes incorporated the real headmaster and school reformer Thomas Arnold into his fiction, Fraser resolved to write Flashman out of fiction and into the real and exhaustively researched history of the British Empire at its height. That was his first bit of inspiration. The second was inverting Graves' order. Statesmen like Claudius direct many more interesting things than they actually do. Fraser lands Flashy in a soldier's life after Hughes has him expelled from Rugby School for drunkenness. This allows him to be involved directly and decisively—scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward, toady and fornicator though he is—in some of the grandest actions in British military history.

On one level, Flashman offers the pleasures of James Bond. Mortal peril, far-off lands, nubile women, terrifying villains with elaborate methods of execution. It's not a coincidence that Fraser wrote the screenplay for Octopussy. But Flashman has glories of language, humour, pathos and satire that Fleming never came to within ten miles of equalling. Here are a few representative passages:

They left me in the hospital perhaps two hours, and then old Thomas came to say the Doctor wanted to see me. I followed him downstairs and across to the School-house, with the fags peeping round corners and telling each other that the brute Flashy had fallen at last, and old Thomas knocked at the Doctor’s door, and the voice crying “Come in!” sounded like the crack of doom to me.

He was standing before the fireplace, with his hands behind looping up his coattails, and a face like a Turk at a christening. He had eyes like sabre-points, and his face was pale and carried that disgusted look that he kept for these occasions. Even with the liquor still working on me a little I was as scared in that minute as I’ve ever been in my life—and when you have ridden into a Russian battery at Balaclava and been chained in an Afghan dungeon waiting for the torturers, as I have, you know what fear means. I still feel uneasy when I think of him, and he’s been dead sixty years.

I found myself liking his lordship, and did not realise that I was seeing him at his best. In this mood, he was a charming man enough, and looked well. He was taller than I, straight as a lance, and very slender, even to his hands. Although he was barely forty, he was already bald, with a bush of hair above either ear and magnificent whiskers. His nose was beaky and his eyes blue and prominent and unwinking—they looked out on the world with that serenity which marks the nobleman whose uttermost ancestor was born a nobleman, too. It is the look that your parvenu would give half his fortune for, that unrufflable gaze of the spoiled child of fortune who knows with unshakeable certainty that he is right and that the world is exactly ordered for his satisfaction and pleasure. It is the look that makes underlings writhe and causes revolutions. I saw it then, and it remained changeless as long as I knew him, even through the roll-call beneath Causeway Heights when the grim silence as the names were shouted out testified to the loss of five hundred of his command.

I snapped my heels and bowed with a great flourish—I was in uniform, and the gold-trimmed blue cape and pink pants of the 11th Hussars were already famous, and looked extremely well on me. Four heads inclined in reply, and one nodded—this was Mistress Morrison, a tall, beak-nosed female in whom one could detect all the fading beauty of a vulture. I made a hasty inventory of the daughters: Agnes, buxom and darkly handsome—she would do. Mary, buxom and plain—she would not. Grizel, thin and mousy and still a schoolgirl—no. Elspeth was like none of the others. She was beautiful, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and pink-cheeked, and she alone smiled at me with the open, simple smile of the truly stupid. I marked her down at once, and gave all my attention to Mistress Morrison.

I found [a house] not far from the Fort, a pleasant place with a little garden of shrubs, and a verandah with screens, and my nigger fetched the owner, who was a great fat rogue with a red turban; we haggled in the middle of a crowd of jabbering blacks, and I gave him half what he asked for and settled into the place with my establishment.

First of all I sent for the cook, and told him through my nigger: “You will cook, and cook cleanly. You’ll wash your hands, d’ye see, and buy nothing but the finest meat and vegetables. If you don’t, I’ll have the cat taken to you until there isn’t a strip of hide left on your back.”

He jabbered away, nodding and grinning and bowing, so I took him by the neck and threw him down and lashed him with my riding whip until he rolled off the verandah, screaming. “Tell him he’ll get that night and morning if his food’s not fit to eat,” I told my nigger. “And the rest of them may take notice.”

They all howled with fear, but they paid heed, the cook most of all. I took the opportunity to flog one of them every day, for their good and my own amusement, and to these precautions I attribute the fact that in all my service in India I was hardly ever laid low with anything worse than fever, and that you can’t avoid. The cook was a good cook, as it turned out, and Basset kept the others at it with his tongue and his boot, so we did very well.

The conceit of the books is that Fraser is only the editor, not the author of the Flashman Papers. The historical record that Flashy intrudes on is accurate in its minutest details (except where Fraser corrects him, historian-like, in the footnotes when the author's memory is supposed to have slipped). If one of the great names of Victorian Britain or her enemies appears, you can be sure he or she really was in that location on that date. It's a wonder that Mark Corrigan was never depicted as reading Flashman. Like Fraser, he's of a blueish dye, and I know I've retained more real history from these books than any non-fiction. Part of the historical pleasure is just being in Flashy's world—the terrible Khyber Pass, with throat-slashing ghazis on one side and Latin-spouting public schoolboys on the other. Part of it is being told how things actually went down, contrary to Flashy's self-cultivated reputation as a hero. Part of it is the divine, Indian-seasoned English you can get nowhere else. Sentences like

"Best foot foward, then, and try to swagger like a regular badmash. Take your cue from Flashy here; ain’t he the ugliest-lookin’ Bashie-Bazouk you ever saw?”

are as meat and drink to me. As a stylist, Fraser knows just how far to go and no further. He pays himself an unintentional and well-deserved compliment when he "speculates" that the memoirs were dictated. The easy, attractive, conversational prose is so fluent, so seamless that I slightly regret pulling the passages above out of their context. I wanted to give you some of the Retreat from Kabul, near the climax of the book, but I just couldn't chop it up. It's a waking nightmare, horrible to endure, and you should experience it intact. And through it all we're with the wonderful voice of Harry Flashman, the honestest dissembler there ever was, who sabres Victorian piety as frankly and unstintingly as he confides his basest impulses. As a storyteller, he has few equals—and no superiors.