The Hollywood History of the World

Author George MacDonald Fraser was born April 2, 1925 in Carlisle. He was refused entrance to the medical faculty of Glasgow University, so he joined the army in 1943. He served as an infantryman with the 17th Indian Division of the XIVth Army in Burma, a lance corporal and was commissioned in the Gordon Highlanders. After the war, he became a sports reporter with the Carlisle Journal; and during this time, he met and married Kathleen Hetherington, a reporter from another paper. He worked as a reporter and sub-editor on the Cumberland News and then moved to Glasgow, in 1953, where he worked at the Glasgow Herald as a features editor and deputy editor. Fraser's first novel was "Flashman" (1969), which was followed by nine sequels, so far, that deal with different venues of the 19th century ranging from Russia, Borneo and China to the Great Plains of the America West. Some of the other titles in the Flashman Papers are "Royal Flash" (1970), "Flashman in the Great Game" (1975), "Flashman and the Redskins" (1982), and "Flashman and the Angel of the Lord" (1994). Some of his non-fiction work includes "The Steel Bonnets" (1971), which is a factual study of the Anglo-Scottish border thieves in the seventeenth century, and "Quartered Safe Out Here" (1992). Fraser has also written a number of screenplays that include "The Three Musketeers" (1973), "Royal Flash" (1975), "Octopussy" (1983), and "Return of the Musketeers" (1989). He has also written a series of short stories about Private McAuslan whose titles include "The General Danced at Dawn" (1970), "McAuslan in the Rough" (1974), and "The Sheik and the Dustbin and other McAuslan Stories" (1988). He died of cancer on January 2, 2008.