Of the many explanations for the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade, there is surely none as entertaining or persuasive as this: that it was launched by a bugle-like volley of farts from a cowardly cavalry officer who had spent the previous night drinking too much dodgy Russian champagne.

You won’t find this version in Tennyson. It comes, as all George MacDonald Fraser fans will know, from the purported memoirs of Sir Harry Flashman VC – cad, woman-iser, coward and unlikely participant in almost every military campaign of the Victorian empire, from the retreat from Kabul to the Boer war.

Fraser died last week of lung cancer aged 82, but Flashman is destined for literary immortality, thanks to his unerring and hilarious ability always to do the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, yet still come shining through.

At Little Bighorn, Flashy saves his skin by shooting General Custer. In Afghanistan, he acquires a thoroughly undeserved reputation for heroism when his unconscious body is discovered draped in the regimental colours he’d cravenly striven to give away to the enemy. In Flash for Freedom, he reveals himself to be a heroic antislavery campaigner – but only because the ship full of slaves he is helping sail to America has just been boarded by abolitionists.

George MacDonald Fraser

Author of dashing period novels which became a cult among young and old with their caddish anti-hero, Flashman

BACKGROUND

• Flashman author loses his final battle

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• Lives Remembered: George MacDonald Fraser and Sir Nicholas Pumfrey

• Audiobooks: Flashman Papers

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• Flashman author loses his final battle

En route to establishing himself as one of the most admired and decorated figures of the Victorian age – “Flashman, Harry Paget, brigadier general, VC, KCB, KCIE; chevalier, Legion of Honour; Order of Maria Theresa, Austria; Order of the Elephant, Denmark (temporary); US Medal of Honor; San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth, 4th class”, his official biography reads – he also contrives to roger at least 486 of its most lascivious women. Among them are the mad Queen Ranavalona of Mada-gascar, the courtesan Lola Montes, the actress Lillie Langtry and the Dowager Empress Cixi of China’s Manchu dynasty.

One of the great joys of Flashman is his gleeful subversion of Victorian values. Consider the marvellous shipboard scene in Flash for Freedom when the slave girl Flashy has been using as his concubine wanders by mistake in the dark into the cabin of a prudish abolitionist. “‘What shall I do?’ says he. ‘What can she want? I spoke to her – she’s the big, the very big, black one – but she has hardly any English, and she just stays there! She’s kneeling beside my cot, sir!’” “‘Have you tried praying with her?’ says I.”

Describing Flashman in interviews, Fraser took an implacably disapproving line. “He’s just a character I write about. I don’t particularly like him. He’s not a very nice person.” But the majority of his fans disagreed. Female ones, especially, were prone to write to Fraser pleading that Flashy was an essentially misunderstood, even quite decent, figure who exaggerated his faults in his journals out of sheer modesty. “If that’s the way they want to see him, fair enough,” said a clearly unconvinced Fraser, adding: “Flashman’s just a monster. He’s extremely unpleasant but he knows how to present a front to the world.”

For all his moral reservations, Fraser must have known he was on to a winner the moment he hit on the bright idea of pinching the most interesting character – Flashy the fag-roasting rotter – from Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days and granting him a picaresque 12-novel afterlife.

If he didn’t, his wife Kathleen put him right. “Boy, you don’t know the riches you’re standing on,” she said – quoting The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – to cheer him up after the first book in the series had been rejected by “at least a dozen publishers”.

What Kathleen was canny enough to recognise was that throughout literature – Chaucer’s Miller, Satan in Paradise Lost, Iago in Othello, Moll Flanders – the devil has often had the best tunes. If there’s one thing readers and audiences enjoy more than virtue being rewarded, it’s seeing vice celebrated with unseemly relish.

No doubt Kathleen also understood Flashman’s huge appeal to women. This may seem odd, given how casually Flashman uses his women – in the first book he descends to rape – but, according to the author Jilly Cooper, few girls can resist a cad. “Partly it is the same intrinsic maso-chism that drives men to get turned on by bitches and wicked ladies; and partly it’s because as a woman you always imagine that once you’ve bagged your cad you’re going to be the one that reforms his rake’s progress.” The Flashman books, usually written in no more than three months, have been selling steadily round the world to at least as many women as men since 1969, guaranteeing their author a comfortable life of tax exile on the Isle of Man. (Though Fraser insisted he stayed there because he liked the way the Isle of Man was 30 years behind the rest of Britain.)

Fraser, the Carlisle-born son of a doctor and nurse, was often asked to identify the real-life Flashman. His old housemaster once wrote claiming to have known him in India and he even had letters from fans claiming in all seriousness that their grandmothers had slept with him.

The author, however, was adamant that the greatest inspiration for Flashman came from within. “I think like him. It’s like Charles II – ‘My words are my own; my actions are my ministers’.’ ” “There was an awful lot of Flashy in George,” says Fraser’s friend and fellow author Bernard Cornwell, creator of the Sharpe series. “You wouldn’t think it because he was such a kind, decent man, happily married, not given to caddishness, cowardice or philandering. But it was there, all right, bubbling beneath the surface.”

Shortly before he died, Fraser sent Cornwell his two favourite quotes from Flashman. The first was: “You think twice about committing murder when you’re over 70”; the second: “We all live under false pretences. You just have to put on a bold front and brazen it through.”

Cornwell believes the choice was significant. Flashman was inspired by Fraser’s fury with the cant and dishonesty of the world and the compromises one has to make to live successfully in it. Flashy – the cheat, liar and scoundrel who prospers – was born of bitterness and cynicism.

Fraser honed his writing skills as a subeditor and journalist on The Herald in Glasgow, where he rose to become deputy editor. But his formative experience was the time he spent in 1945 in Burma serving with the Border Regiment as part of Bill Slim’s renowned Fourteenth Army. “The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry riverbed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice and sweat and human waste and . . . Jap,” begins his memorable autobiography, Quartered Safe out Here, widely thought to be among the finest infantryman’s recollections to emerge from the second world war.

Fighting shoulder to shoulder not just with his countrymen but also with Sikhs, Gurkhas, Afghans and east and west Africans amply confirmed for Fraser the view he had held since his 1920s childhood reading RM Ballan-tyne and GA Henty: that the British Empire “was one of the best things that ever happened to the world”. The experience, he believed, gave his generation a far deeper, more honest and unsentimental understanding of people of different races than any namby-pamby white liberal has today.

What Fraser also learnt from the military was the joy of male camaraderie in times of extreme hardship, the language and ribald wit of soldiers, the taste of true fear and the random-ness of fate. Fraser killed at least one Japanese and fought in a battle where the two comrades either side of him were killed as they advanced. The knowledge of what war is like, Cornwell believes, is what gives the Flashman series its true power.

“I’m just a storyteller, an entertainer, but George is something much more than that,” Cornwell says. “There is in Flashman a wisdom, a deeper truth, that you probably won’t find in Sharpe. I tend to make my characters heroic, whereas George, because he has ‘seen the elephant’, knows better than that. Those who’ve never been to war think it’s a boy’s game and a big adventure. George knows that what it’s really about is terror and fear and horrible accidents.”

This accords with Fraser’s view of his work. The more Flashman books he wrote, the less enamoured he became with his character’s turpitude. Rather, what kept Fraser writing was the chance to immerse himself in ever more remote backwaters of Victorian military history and surreptitiously to remind his growing audience that the world was never a better-run place than when much of it was coloured pink on the atlas.

The older Fraser grew, the more strident he became in his assertions that the world had gone to pot. “From the world’s greatest power to an insignificant island which bends over backwards to appease hostile aliens, all in 50 years. It’s insane,” he said.

Yet it was precisely this insanity we have to thank for the birth of one of literature’s great comic creations. Out of despair and frustration and bubbling rage sprang forth the magnificent Harry Flashman.

Flashman was part of the inspiration for James Delingpole’s new second world war adventure series, the first novel of which, Coward on the Beach, is published by Bloomsbury

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