Flashman (1 Viewer)
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aujj65
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Brad,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to live in my home town of Crowborough, East Sussex back in 1905 and lived here untill his death in 1930. While living here he wrote some of the Sherlock Holmes novels and quite a few of the science fiction stories. The latter years of his life were largely devoted to psychic research and in 1927 Sherlock Holmes made his final appearance in 'The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes'.
In April 2001 the Town Council erected a bronze statue of Sir Arthur in the main area of the town, also one of the coffe shops in the town is called 'Sherlock Holmes'.
Thought this might be of some interest.
Jeff
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chiefs70
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The originals are always the best but with Holmes' popularity you have a lot of writers who gave it a crack - I have read some of them and many are quite good. Here is a link to a list of authors other than ACD who have written Holmes novels/stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_of_new_Sherlock_Holmes_stories
aujj65
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Started reading again and just got to the end of the Charge of the Light Brigade and only just over a third of the book gone! Looking forward to finding out what the rest of the book covers?
Jeff
jazzeum
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chiefs70
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Thanks. Shows what I know
LOL, don't feel bad. I wasn't really aware that some of the stories I listened to on tapes of old time radio shows were not original ACD books until I stumbled across another tape that had an academic paper as its introduction which is where I heard the term for this type of work - a story written using characters created by another author. It is driving me insane that I can't recall the term and have been reading through my Encyclopedia of Literature to sooth my addled mind.
Suffice it to say, there is a precedent for GMF's work to be carried on and done quite well if the right author comes along. We can only hope it shall come to fruition - or not be done at all.
Harrytheheid
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Started reading again and just got to the end of the Charge of the Light Brigade and only just over a third of the book gone! Looking forward to finding out what the rest of the book covers?
Jeff
Flashy spends a fair bit of the rest of the book covering - VALLA.....
Following is copied and pasted from a couple of links;
FICTIONAL CHARACTERS;
Flashman - The hero or anti-hero
Elspeth - His adoring and possibly unfaithful wife
Prince William of Celle
Count Pencherjevsky - A Cossack Hetman who is now the feudal Russian lord of a large estate.
Scud East - Character from Tom Brown's School Days, now a junior officer in the British army.
Valla - The daughter of Count Pencherjevsky and Flashman's lover.
Aunt Sara - Aunt of Valla, who teaches Flashman how to properly enjoy a Russian steam bath.
Ko Dali's daughter - (Perhaps historical) A Chinese woman and Yakub Beg's lover. She seduces Flashman and doses him with hashish in order to make him effective in the coming battle.
Powered by fear and flatulence, he reaches the Russian guns in front of the other surviving members of the charge and promptly surrenders.
.....with the aid of Flashman (who is drugged with hashish and utterly fearless as a result, for the first and only time in his life).
Try these links;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald_Fraser
http://www.harryflashman.org/
http://ns.netmcr.com/~ambro/papers.htm
Cheers and Good Reading
H
OzDigger
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Aren't they called derivative works, or is there a more particular term.
chiefs70
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Oz-
There is a more particular term for it - I just can't recall what it is exactly. I found the case for the recording last night but the tape is missing. I am starting to wonder if my wife is pulling my chain as she has her undergrad in English and can't recall the term and now the tape has gone AWOL - she must be getting me back for some of my recent purchases by driving me to the loony bin.
There is a more particular term for it - I just can't recall what it is exactly. I found the case for the recording last night but the tape is missing. I am starting to wonder if my wife is pulling my chain as she has her undergrad in English and can't recall the term and now the tape has gone AWOL - she must be getting me back for some of my recent purchases by driving me to the loony bin.
Harrytheheid
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aujj65
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Flashy spends a fair bit of the rest of the book covering - VALLA.....
Count Pencherjevsky - A Cossack Hetman who is now the feudal Russian lord of a large estate.
Scud East - Character from Tom Brown's School Days, now a junior officer in the British army.
Valla - The daughter of Count Pencherjevsky and Flashman's lover.
Aunt Sara - Aunt of Valla, who teaches Flashman how to properly enjoy a Russian steam bath.
Harry, caught up with the above over the last couple of days whilst travelling to London and back.
So far, so good.
Jeff
OzDigger
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I'm stumped
Of course there is the term plagiarism when someone copies another's work without authority but it seems you are after a term for semi/authorised use.
chiefs70
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Pastiche! The term is pastiche! Ahhh, the weight is finally gone from my brow - it was driving me nuts but I finally found the term by reading through my Encyclopedia of Literature. I really wish it would have been bastiche for more than one reason.
Here is a link to the Wiki entry on the term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche
Here is a link to the Wiki entry on the term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche
OzDigger
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Well that's different, I've always thought of Pastiche as being the equivalent of Montage rather than something closer to Homage, but as you may have guessed I'm not one of the literati
Harrytheheid
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The "Flashman" novels of George MacDonald Fraser, who died earlier this month at the age of 82, pass one of the great reading tests. I thought them rollicking comic delights when I discovered them in my early teens -- and had hardly any sense that there really were Sikhs, much less an Anglo-Sikh war or two in the 1840s. And I liked them even better as an adult when I could revel not just in the comedy, but also in Fraser's command of history. For while the epic bounder Harry Paget Flashman is a fictional creation, his adventures occur amid the very real events of British imperial history -- from the Afghan disaster of 1842 to the desperate stand at Rorke's Drift in 1879. Fraser was fond of dipping into the pages of Punch and books like Kaye and Malleson's six-volume "History of the Sepoy War in India" to get even his slang and haberdashery right.
George MacDonald Fraser
His inspiration was Rafael Sabatini, whose "Captain Blood" -- now best known from the Errol Flynn movie -- "made me realise that history was one helluva story." Sabatini had a tremendous gift for opening lines: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony," begins "Scaramouche," his French Revolution adventure. Fraser picked up the trick. It is unthinkable to put down a novel that opens "If I had been the hero everyone thought I was, or even a half-decent soldier, Lee would have won the battle of Gettysburg and probably captured Washington" ("Royal Flash") or "They don't often invite me to Balmoral nowadays, which is a blessing; those ****ed tartan carpets always put me off my food, to say nothing of the endless pictures of German royalty and that unspeakable statue of the Prince Consort standing knock-kneed in a kilt" ("Flashman in the Great Game").
Unlike Sabatini, though, Fraser didn't go in for the standard brave, honorable hero. Flashman is the most impossibly toadying, lying, cheating and cowardly hero in fiction. It is one of his prime delights. That his attitudes toward women and the races ruled by the Empire can be characterized as somewhere to the right of "un-p.c." is another. As Fraser noted, "If he wasn't an elitist, racist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer."
Fraser was fascinated by the way reviewers' attitudes toward Flashman changed over the decades, until they were essentially apologizing for liking the novels. He certainly had no liking for modern Britain. His 2002 autobiography condemns the whole of our modern social regime, which "demands that 'stress,' which used to be coped with by less-sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments lavished on griping incompetents who can't do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen 'traumatised' by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted."
No matter the topic, Fraser was one of the masterly comic writers of the 20th century -- and praised as such by his true peers, P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis. And it isn't just that the Flashman books are all laugh-aloud funny. His account of his service in the British infantry in Burma during World War II, "Quartered Safe Out Here" (1992), a thoughtful examination of how war is experienced and remembered, is riotously brilliant. I need only commend you to the section where Pvt. Fraser has to demonstrate the PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank -- "Like many British inventions, it looked improbable, unwieldy, and unsafe -- and it worked.") to one Capt. Grief to establish my point.
His gift for dialogue and situation is equally evident in his more than 30 movie scripts: none better than his two-picture adaptation of Dumas's "The Three Musketeers." The adventures of D'Artagnan and company are one of our greatest adventure stories, but, in the original, there are oppressively long stretches of melodrama and overwriting. Fraser turned the tale into the comic masterpiece it always longed to be.
"The Three Musketeers" (1973) and "The Four Musketeers" (1974), both directed by Richard Lester, are over-the-top romps characterized by a big cast of stars -- Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, and Charlton Heston as Richelieu -- delivering Fraser's lines with relish. Pretty much everybody gets a chance to chew the scenery. Porthos (Frank Finlay), at the siege of La Rochelle, complains about having to shoot "these poor devils of Protestants. I mean, what are we killing them for? Because they sing psalms in French and we sing them in Latin?" Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) replies: "Porthos, have you no education? What do you think religious wars are all about?"
Fraser's least-celebrated book, "The Hollywood History of the World" (1988), is a defense of such movies' portrayal of the past. He argues that they "have given a picture of the ages more vivid and memorable than anything in Tacitus or Gibbon or Macaulay, and to an infinitely wider audience." This is a paean to the power of entertainment and full of praise for long-forgotten films. Browsing through my copy as I prepared this article, I found myself yearning to watch "Sanders of the River" and "Victoria the Great."
For Fraser, movies and novels were not opposed to good history. In noting the dominance of Kipling in our cultural remembrance of the British Raj, he wrote that the "reliance on fiction [for the plots of films set during the Raj] must influence one's consideration of Indian films as 'historicals'; it becomes not a question of comparing them with written records, but of seeing how well they reflect the country, its people, Indian and British, and that mysterious institution, the Raj, which is now fast fading beyond recall." The Flashman books reflect rather well another mysterious British institution, the Empire -- certainly better than much of the scholarship of the past 50 years. A reading of all 12 this year wouldn't be the least pleasant way to develop a better sense of the history of the British Empire during Victoria's reign.
For instance, you'd be hard pressed to find a pithier description of what went wrong in Kabul in 1841 than Flashy's appraisal of Gen. William Elphinstone: "Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganised enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with a touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again."
George MacDonald Fraser
His inspiration was Rafael Sabatini, whose "Captain Blood" -- now best known from the Errol Flynn movie -- "made me realise that history was one helluva story." Sabatini had a tremendous gift for opening lines: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony," begins "Scaramouche," his French Revolution adventure. Fraser picked up the trick. It is unthinkable to put down a novel that opens "If I had been the hero everyone thought I was, or even a half-decent soldier, Lee would have won the battle of Gettysburg and probably captured Washington" ("Royal Flash") or "They don't often invite me to Balmoral nowadays, which is a blessing; those ****ed tartan carpets always put me off my food, to say nothing of the endless pictures of German royalty and that unspeakable statue of the Prince Consort standing knock-kneed in a kilt" ("Flashman in the Great Game").
Unlike Sabatini, though, Fraser didn't go in for the standard brave, honorable hero. Flashman is the most impossibly toadying, lying, cheating and cowardly hero in fiction. It is one of his prime delights. That his attitudes toward women and the races ruled by the Empire can be characterized as somewhere to the right of "un-p.c." is another. As Fraser noted, "If he wasn't an elitist, racist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer."
Fraser was fascinated by the way reviewers' attitudes toward Flashman changed over the decades, until they were essentially apologizing for liking the novels. He certainly had no liking for modern Britain. His 2002 autobiography condemns the whole of our modern social regime, which "demands that 'stress,' which used to be coped with by less-sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments lavished on griping incompetents who can't do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen 'traumatised' by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted."
No matter the topic, Fraser was one of the masterly comic writers of the 20th century -- and praised as such by his true peers, P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis. And it isn't just that the Flashman books are all laugh-aloud funny. His account of his service in the British infantry in Burma during World War II, "Quartered Safe Out Here" (1992), a thoughtful examination of how war is experienced and remembered, is riotously brilliant. I need only commend you to the section where Pvt. Fraser has to demonstrate the PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank -- "Like many British inventions, it looked improbable, unwieldy, and unsafe -- and it worked.") to one Capt. Grief to establish my point.
His gift for dialogue and situation is equally evident in his more than 30 movie scripts: none better than his two-picture adaptation of Dumas's "The Three Musketeers." The adventures of D'Artagnan and company are one of our greatest adventure stories, but, in the original, there are oppressively long stretches of melodrama and overwriting. Fraser turned the tale into the comic masterpiece it always longed to be.
"The Three Musketeers" (1973) and "The Four Musketeers" (1974), both directed by Richard Lester, are over-the-top romps characterized by a big cast of stars -- Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, and Charlton Heston as Richelieu -- delivering Fraser's lines with relish. Pretty much everybody gets a chance to chew the scenery. Porthos (Frank Finlay), at the siege of La Rochelle, complains about having to shoot "these poor devils of Protestants. I mean, what are we killing them for? Because they sing psalms in French and we sing them in Latin?" Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) replies: "Porthos, have you no education? What do you think religious wars are all about?"
Fraser's least-celebrated book, "The Hollywood History of the World" (1988), is a defense of such movies' portrayal of the past. He argues that they "have given a picture of the ages more vivid and memorable than anything in Tacitus or Gibbon or Macaulay, and to an infinitely wider audience." This is a paean to the power of entertainment and full of praise for long-forgotten films. Browsing through my copy as I prepared this article, I found myself yearning to watch "Sanders of the River" and "Victoria the Great."
For Fraser, movies and novels were not opposed to good history. In noting the dominance of Kipling in our cultural remembrance of the British Raj, he wrote that the "reliance on fiction [for the plots of films set during the Raj] must influence one's consideration of Indian films as 'historicals'; it becomes not a question of comparing them with written records, but of seeing how well they reflect the country, its people, Indian and British, and that mysterious institution, the Raj, which is now fast fading beyond recall." The Flashman books reflect rather well another mysterious British institution, the Empire -- certainly better than much of the scholarship of the past 50 years. A reading of all 12 this year wouldn't be the least pleasant way to develop a better sense of the history of the British Empire during Victoria's reign.
For instance, you'd be hard pressed to find a pithier description of what went wrong in Kabul in 1841 than Flashy's appraisal of Gen. William Elphinstone: "Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganised enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with a touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again."
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Sounds like a hors d'oeuvre for a fancy party. "Darling the pastiche is simply divine! Why, it puts the caviar at the Archibald's party last week to shame! You must try some."
Louis Badolato
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Bloody brilliant Harry! The only thing I would add is that for my money, his best fictional characters were those from the Dand MacNeil/MacAuslan books. A more lovable bunch of misfits, lunatics and "heid cases" I cannot even begin to imagine. I would love it if somebody with Fraser's talent would continue the Flashman series, but as nobody has managed to clone Kipling yet, I doubt anyone is up to the task.
Harrytheheid
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One thing I forgot to do was make quite clear that it wasn't me who wrote my previous post. I copied the info straight out of Wikipedia.
Just as an aside; I did 2 years in the Territorials when I was 19~20 (our equivalent of your National Guard). I was in the Argyle and Sutherland's which was part of the famous 51st Highland Division. I never met anyone quite like MacAuslan......but I do remember a few who came close...
. Those were the days. Jumping out of landing craft on the West coast of Scotland after being told the water would only be 1 foot deep - then finding out it was actually 5 feet deep..!!! Or carting an ammo box all the way across an exercise field by myself cos everyone else had disappeared. Or going out on night patrol exercises - always good for a laugh. I remember an exercise we participated in over in Applecross - beautiful countryside just opposite the Isle of Skye. Our task was to catch some SAS men who were carrying out an escape and evade exercise. Needless to say, we were singularly unsuccessful...!!! Nice people those SAS guys though.PS. Louis, I think you're one of the very few outside of the UK (and Hong Kong) who really "gets" the full humour in my Harrytheheid nickname.
Cheers
H
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Louis Badolato
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Harry,
An Argyle and Sutherland Highlander! I should have guessed! Although the Gordons are my favorite regiment, the 93rd are a close second. I have got to get together with you in person one day and toast a tot of the creature to your old regiment. And as to getting your name, remember I miss-spent my youth up to my neck in British comedy. A little of the lingo was bound to rub off on me!
An Argyle and Sutherland Highlander! I should have guessed! Although the Gordons are my favorite regiment, the 93rd are a close second. I have got to get together with you in person one day and toast a tot of the creature to your old regiment. And as to getting your name, remember I miss-spent my youth up to my neck in British comedy. A little of the lingo was bound to rub off on me!
Harrytheheid
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Aye Louis,
It was only for a couple of years, so I'm not laying claim to being an "Old Sweat".
Being from Aberdeen, it would've been the Gordon's, but I was living in the Glasgow area at the time so the A&S's it was. Wonder if my Mum still has some old photos kicking around, especially of that beach landing I referred to. Don't think I ever laughed so much even though I got soaked when I stepped of the ramp.
The good thing about being in the Argyles was that we got to do the majority of our exercises on the West Coast of Scotland or the Inner Hebrides, whereas the Gordons generally didn't get further than Barry-Buddon just outside Dundee on the East Coast. There's no comparison when it comes to the scenery. Although come to think on it, Barry-Buddon was good for annoying the local residents...
Another of those stunning thoughts that I'm prone to.....if I'd been living in China back then, instead of the Argyles it might have been "The Brave Fighting Kites" or some other such nonsense....
If there's one thing I've learned then that is - you never know what's just around the corner - so maybe a get-together could be on the cards. I'm hoping to take Missus Heid to the London show in December if we can get her visa sorted out and if I can talk her into it. Apart from Dubai, the last time I persuaded her to travel outwith China - it was to Malabo in West Africa, and she's never quite forgiven me for that one.
Cheers
H