Flashman creator, Herald writer: George MacDonald Fraser dies

Born in Carlisle in 1925, the son of a Scottish doctor and nursing sister, he was a pupil of Carlisle Grammar School, of which he once said: "I performed so indifferently that they decided to send me to Glasgow Academy, where my examination showing was, if anything, worse."

He once said he won "two prizes, for English and general knowledge, learned to play rugby and cricket with cunning if not enthusiasm, received a cup for throwing the cricket ball, read impressive quantities of historical fiction, and became probably the only Laertes in theatrical history to defeat Hamlet - admittedly, only at a rehearsal.

"These qualifications were not considered sufficient for entrance to the medical faculty of Glasgow University and I went into the Army, a willing conscript, in 1943."

He served with the British Army in India and Burma during Second World War, and in the Middle East after the war. His service was the basis for his humorous short stories about Private McAuslan, the "dirtiest soldier in the British Army".

After the war he became a reporter with the Carlisle Journal and married Kathleen Hetherington, a reporter from another paper.

They travelled to Canada together and after a brief period in Toronto they got jobs as reporters in Saskatchewan.

After a year they returned to England where their first son Simon was born. Fraser worked as a reporter and sub-editor on the Cumberland News before the family moved to Glasgow in 1953. His daughter, Caroline, and second son, Nicholas, were born in 1953 and 1957.

On the Glasgow Herald he worked as a sub-editor before becoming features editor and then deputy editor from 1964 till 1969. He briefly held the position of acting editor.

Fraser recalled: "I had been writing on and off since the age of five, and thanks to my wife's encouragement I persevered in the hope of becoming a novelist. My first book, Flashman, was published in 1969, and I gave up newspaper work and devoted myself to being a freelance author."

The irrepressible antihero Harry Flashman was born.

Fraser became a tax exile on the Isle of Man where he lived there for the rest of his life.

His writing skills caught the attention of Holywood and he wrote nearly 40 screenplays, some of which were made into films, including Red Sonja in 1985 , starring a young Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bridget Nielsen, and The Prince and the Pauper in 1977, which starred Oliver Reed and Raquel Welch.

But it was the Musketeer series of films that became the big money-spinner.

It started in 1972 when he wrote the screenplay for Dick Lester's The Three Musketeers, featuring a galaxy of stars. The film, and sequel The Four Musketeers, were a huge success.

In 1988, the same team hoped to repeat their seventies success with The Return of the Musketeers, but one star, Roy Kinnear, died during filming when he fell off his horse.

Some readers and critics found Flashman's 19th- century racism and sexism off-putting. But by the time the final Flashman book, Flashman on the March, appeared in 2005, the critical tide had turned in Fraser's favour.

Fraser thought Flashman's appeal was not surprising. "People like rascals, they like rogues," he said in 2006. "I was always on the side of the villain when I was a child and went to the movies."

He once wrote that he styled himself as a "sentimental Presbyterian ... firmly opposed to all party politics".

Murray Ritchie, 66, former political editor of The Herald, was a young reporter on the Dumfries Standard when he first met Fraser in the 1960s.

He said: "George Fraser went around Scotland with the other journalists to the outposts giving tuition and that's how I met him.

"In journalism, he was great in all respects. He was a great writer, great sub-editor, great layout man, great headline writer, he was just a very talented individual.

"He rose effortlessly to become deputy editor in the 1960s and when he went home at night he was writing for himself and he had this idea that he would write a sequel to Tom Brown's Schooldays and took the character Flashman and wrote the first of those novels.

"It was such an instant success that he made a lot of money. He had a choice - to bank his money or lose it to tax. So there and then he gave up his very glittering career on the Glasgow Herald.

"I do not think it pushed him away but it certainly kept him away. I do not think it had the same attraction for him."

Flashman, the anti-hero who had it all

FLASHMAN, published in 1969, introduced readers to an enduring literary anti-hero: the roguish, irrepressible Harry Flashman.

The novel imagined Flashman, the bullying schoolboy of 19th-century classic Tom Brown's School Days, by Thomas Hughes, grown up to become a soldier in the British Army. In the book and 11 sequels, Flashman fought, drank and womanised his way across the British Empire, Europe and the United States, playing a pivotal role in the century's great historical moments. A vain, cowardly rogue, Flashman nonetheless emerged from each episode covered in glory, rising to the rank of medal-garlanded brigadier-general.

Fraser was the author of screenplays including The Three Musketeers (1973), an adaptation of his novel Royal Flash (1975), and the James Bond movie Octopussy (1983).

He also wrote several works of non-fiction, including a wartime memoir, Quartered Safe Out Here, Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border and The Hollywood History of the World.

His final book, The Reavers, is a historical tale featuring espionage and intrigue during the reign of Elizabeth I.

In The Observer, reviewer Simon Beckett called Flashman on the March, published in 2005, "bawdy, offensive and unrepentantly entertaining."

Fraser had heavyweight literary supporters: Kingsley Amis called him "a marvellous reporter and a first-rate historical novelist," and PG Wodehouse was also a fan.