George MacDonald Fraser, OBE FRSL (2 April 1925 – 2 January 2008) was an English-born author of Scottish descent, who wrote historical novels, non-fiction books and several screenplays. He is best known for a series of works that featured the character Flashman.

Biography

Fraser was born to Scottish parents in Carlisle, England on 2 April 1925. His father was a doctor and his mother a nurse. It was his father who passed on to Fraser his love of reading, and a passion for his Scottish heritage.

Fraser was educated at Carlisle Grammar School and Glasgow Academy; he later described himself as a poor student due to "sheer laziness". This meant that he was unable to follow his father's wishes and study medicine.



War service
In 1943, during World War II, he enlisted in The Border Regiment and served in the Burma Campaign, recounted in his memoir Quartered Safe Out Here. After completion of his OCTU (Officer Cadet Training Unit) course, Fraser was granted a commission into the Gordon Highlanders. He served with them in the Middle East and North Africa immediately after the war, notably in Tripoli. In 1947 Fraser decided against remaining with the army and took up his demobilisation. He has written semi-autobiographical stories and anecdotes of his time with the Gordon Highlanders in the "McAuslan" series.


Journalism
After his discharge, Fraser returned to the United Kingdom. Through his father he got a job as a trainee reporter on the Carlisle Journal and married another journalist, Kathleen Hetherington. They travelled to Canada, working on newspapers there, before returning again to Scotland. Starting in 1953, he worked for many years as a journalist at the Glasgow Herald newspaper where he was deputy editor from 1964 until 1969. He briefly held the title of acting editor.


Novelist
In 1966 Fraser got the idea to turn Flashman, a fictional coward and bully originally created by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown's School Days, into a hero and wrote a novel around his exploits. The book proved popular and led to a series of further novels, presented as packets of memoirs written by the nonagenarian Flashman looking back on his days as a hero of the British Army during the 19th century. The series is notable for the accuracy of the historical settings and praise from critics. P.G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."

Fraser also fictionalised his post-war military experience as the adventures of the rather unassuming "Dand" MacNeill in a Scottish regiment of the line. This series of short stories is noted for the strong and strange characters surrounding McNeill, including an aged and prototypical colonel, a perfect-soldier regimental sergeant-major, a Wodehousian adjutant, an active and dedicated pipe sergeant, a die-hard Algerian revolutionary, various blackguards and spivs, and, most memorably, Private John McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world. Featuring games of golf, scrapes and run-ins with the police both military and civil, the transfer of the die-hard to the French (of all people), and McAuslan's various disasters, these works form a picture of the British army in the period immediately after World War II.


Screenwriter
The film rights to Flashman were bought by Richard Lester who was unable to get the film funded but hired Fraser to write the screenplay for The Three Musketeers in Christmas 1972. This was successful and also launched Fraser as a screenwriter. The movie "Royal Flash" by Richard Lester with screenplay by Fraser appeared in 1975. For the next twenty years he would alternate between novels and film scripts, including work as a script doctor.

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