Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard links to a last opinion piece written by George McDonald Fraser, author of the brilliant Flashman series, who passed away this week. The more I read about Fraser himself (who also wrote the Michael York/Olver Reed film version of The Three Musketeers, one of my favorite movies), the less guilty I feel about enjoying the Flashman books.

The sex in the Flashman books always embarrassed me. But (it seems to me) the secret of the Flashman stories is that you’re not supposed to like Flashman. He’s a coward and a hypocrite and a goat. But the “flashy” action of his adventures is a medium for conveying a lot of solid information about the whole business of British Colonialism in the 19th Century. And there’s a moral lesson too, it seems to me. Harry Flashman does indeed die “a thousand deaths,” and suffers considerably more than the “idiotic” heroes he disdains, who die with their faces to the enemy.