George MacDonald Fraser

Got a big shock surfing the net tonight when I read that George MacDonald Fraser had died... a month ago. And I never even knew. To be sure, I hadn't been keeping up on the news much, but still - well, I wish someone had told me.

At one stage George MacDonald Fraser was one of my favourite authors, if not the favourite. He's the first author I ever sent a fan letter to - he wrote back to me as well. My ardour cooled in later years, with the decline in the quality of the Flashman books and his increasingly ranty right wing attitudes, as evoked in his memoirs. But still, the affection remained. There is a line in All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane which mentions him as tribute.

I first got into GM Fraser books at high school when I stumbled upon a copy of Hollywood History of the World. I enjoyed this terrific book so much - bright, opinionated, funny - that I tried to read other things he had written. The blurb announced Fraser was the author of "the Flashman novels", as if that was supposed to mean something. Well, our school had a good library and it had all the Flashmans up til that time. I devoured them eagerly and bought new ones as they came out, not to mention discovering his other works: the hilarious McAuslan stories, his entertaining histories on the Scottish-English Border Wars (both a non fiction and fictional work), his other novels.

My peak loving-George-MacDonald-Fraser time came in the mid 90s, when I had a large library of his work, wrote the fan letter, even tracked down old book reviews he had written. His masterpiece for my mind was his war memoir, Quartered Safe Out Here (still think it is). I didn't mind the straight novels, loved his writings on movies. He was a joy to read; I learned a lot about using semi colons from him (that sounds flippant and kind of is but it was also a very real impact on my own writing)

In recent years Fraser became a bit too obssessed about the decline of Britain and how bad society and Tony Blair had become. He called himself an angry old man but "cranky" would describe it better. It was distressing - sometimes you wondered what happened to the man who ran such a cynical eye over the British Empire in the first Flashman. Or how someone who could convey how vividly what it was to be young in the jungle in Quatered Safe Out Here then sounded so old on the pages of the same book when talking about the present day.

He got old, I guess, and also I think when you are stuck out on the Isle of Man and get most of your knowledge about what's happening in Britain from the television, your impressions are bound to be warped. Sometimes reading The Light's On at Signpost you just wanted him to chill out, see the good things around him a bit more. But on the other hand, maybe he enjoyed being a curmudgeon. It could have even prolonged his life. (He died of cancer at age 82 - he was a heavy smoker who only gave it up in 1999).

But the books remain. All the obits go on about Flashman but Fraser wrote so many other terrific reads as well - if you're interested in history and Hollywood try The Hollywood History of the World. If you like old pirate movies try The Pyrates. (The Reavers, the only novel of his I haven't read, his most recent one, sounds like it's in a similar vein.) There's few better memoirs of war than Quartered Safe, or of peacetime army service than the McAusland stories. He also wrote some excellent film scripts, including one of my favourite Bonds, Octopussy.

Fraser's strengths as a writer were many: vivid descriptions, brilliant historical detail (no writer had made the past come more alive), clever plot twists, raunchy sex scenes (something a lot of people ignored when talking about his work), a brilliant gift for describing sports events.

As his Sydney Morning Herald obit pointed out it was a shame he never got the chance to write a Flashman set in Australia but there yougo. The best tribute was written by his daughter, Caro. It's lovely. This reminiscence from some friends is good too.

Vale George MacDonald Fraser. He had an action packed life, wrote some terrific books, made a pile of dough and had loving friends and family. It doesn't get any better than that.