George MacDonald Fraser was the foreign sub-editor in the subs' room when I first joined The Glasgow Herald under Sir William Robieson. After I left to join Beaverbrook Newspapers, George recalled me to be his assistant when he was features editor and I succeeded him in that post when he became acting editor. I therefore knew him well.
He was a voracious reader with an astonishing memory (a "ragbag" he himself called it) for facts and details that most people would dimiss as insignificant - barefist fighting, cricket, Broadway musicals, Chicago gangsters and the American civil war were among a myriad subjects he could talk about endlessly (and with authority).
Two authors whom he admired and who influenced him greatly for different reasons were Dumas the elder and P G Wodehouse. He was also fascinated by the The Lord of the Rings and he corresponded with Tolkien about the complicated hierarchy of the underworld. I shared his passion for Dumas and am convinced that it was Dumas's insertion of fictional characters into thoroughly researched historical situations that first inspired Flashman. In any event, D'Artagnan was not for Fraser (nor for me) the debonair swashbuckling Fairbanks/Flynn character but the gauche Gascon (almost an anti-hero like Flashman) which he portrayed (true to Dumas) in his Three Musketeers of 1975 (the best filming of the book there has ever been).
Fraser was, in fact, something of an anti-hero himself, like our mutual Herald friend the late William Hunter. He cared nothing for rank or social status and hated humbug. He simply got on with his work, typing with two fingers (at astonishing speed), while one of the cigarettes he always rolled in a little machine hung from the corner of his mouth.
For all his genius I think the greatest compliment I can pay him is that, in a hard, often cruel, business, he was universally loved and respected.
A David Hogarth, 19 Cours Colonel Petitpied, 09500 Mirepoix, France.
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