Word: flashman
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...FLASHMAN AND THE DRAGON...
...Harry Flashman, a flamboyant but minor villain in Thomas Hughes' 19th century novel Tom Brown's School Days, moved to center stage in George MacDonald Fraser's comic-historical novels of imperial adventure. Previous volumes placed Flashman, now a mature, hard-drinking rogue, in and around the Crimean War, the African slave trade and the American gold rush. With great panache he became involved with figures ranging from Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln to Queen Victoria and Lola Montez...
Author Fraser, 56, an excellent popular historian (The Steel Bonnets) as well as a prolific screenwriter (The Three-and Four-Musketeers), is best known for his seven Flashman novels, the saga of a Falstaffian poltroon who for sheer cad-dishness has no equal in contemporary literature. Like the Flashman mock memoirs, which skewer the Victorian scene with such wealth of detail that many American reviewers at first thought them to be authentic historical documents, Mr. American teems with minutiae ranging from the price of the London & Northwestern train trip from Liverpool to London (just under $6, first class) to details...
Lester has taken the tone of The Three Musketeers from Scenarist Fraser, whose Flashman novels Lester once tried to adapt. The Fraser books are full of the kind of self-deflating braggadocio, the same sort of elaborate but inglorious combats one finds here. Heroics are mocked, survival is championed. The musketeers are made into creatures whose absurdities of conduct, florid codes of honor and hollow protestations of heroism make them all the more recognizable and human. It is their own faint absurdity that makes them true...
...Scapegrace's editor), this yarn is a thorough, almost scholarly pastiche of Victorian lingo and manners. It fairly reeks of historical authenticity-and of blood-for Flashman, in his early 30s, is still his old bully self, a lucky coward and a genial sadist...