There will be no more memoirs of the life of Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, outstanding Victorian soldier, coward, bully, womaniser, cad, bounder and hugely admired all-round bad egg.

George MacDonald Fraser, chronicler of the great man’s life and editor of his copious personal papers, has died at the age of 82 after losing a battle with cancer but winning a substantial literary reputation and a worldwide army of devotees.

He had intended one last fling, but had been too ill for the past year to write his final Flashman, his agent said yesterday. There is, apparently, nothing left in the bottom drawer.

Fraser, a former deputy editor of The Herald, in Glasgow, whose epiphany was to realise that there must be more to life than toiling on a newspaper, produced a round dozen Flashman novels, following and fleshing out his anti-hero’s career from the moment that Tom Brown’s Schooldays recorded his expulsion from Rugby school.

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

• Flashman and the Man from The Times

• Flashman of The Times

• Lives Remembered: George MacDonald Fraser and Sir Nicholas Pumfrey

• Audiobooks: Flashman Papers

Such was the care with which Fraser constructed his fictional conceit, researching the historical background and appending copious footnotes, that many American academics and reviewers were fooled into thinking that Flashman’s papers really had been discovered wrapped in oilskin at a house sale in 1965.

Fraser and Flashman could hardly have been more different characters. The author was a quiet, conservative man who used a typewriter to the end and always dealt in the letter and the telephone rather than the e-mail, and whose marriage lasted for nearly 60 years.

Fortune drove him to live on the Isle of Man to escape the taxman.

Vivienne Schuster, his agent, said that he was a professional to his fingertips; his typescripts never needed so much as a comma to be altered. “A lot of people have learnt more about history from reading his books than they would sitting in a classroom.”

The author found nothing surprising in Flashman’s popularity. “People like rascals, they like rogues,” he said in an interview with the BBC in 2006. His own favourite Flashman moment was when the bounder was being pursued through the snow on a sledge by Cossacks and he flung his mistress out to lighten the load. The mistress, incidentally, was one of 437 women whom Flashman calculated to have seduced before he was even halfway through his life.

Fraser, by contrast, was described by friends yesterday as a kind and courteous gentleman. Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins, his publisher, said: “He was humble about his own enormous talent and always happy to give his time to his readers.”

And a good egg, by all accounts.

Five of the best

Flashman (1969): Luck and cowardice gives our hero a glorious part in Great Britain’s inglorious first Afghan campaign

Royal Flash (1970): Flashman meets Bismarck and finds himself playing the part of the Prisoner of Zenda.

Flashman at the Charge (1973): Looming disgrace in London sends Flashman to the Crimea just in time to take (a very reluctant) part in the Charge of the Light Brigade

Flashman and the Great Game (1975): Service to the Empire takes him east just in time for the Indian Mutiny

Flashman and the Redskins (1982): Flashman is trapped with Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy