George MacDonald Fraser Books in Order

Written early in Fraser's career but published long after his death, this swashbuckling novel follows pirate captain John Rackham in the Caribbean. As he weighs a royal pardon against one more bold venture, he tangles with fellow outlaws and a wily colonial governor.

Set on the Anglo Scottish Borders in Elizabethan times, this is a broad, tongue in cheek romp of raids, kidnappings and shifting loyalties. Fraser gleefully piles on larger than life reivers, scheming courtiers and improbable rescues in a send up of romantic historical adventure.

On the run after a Mexican escapade, Flashman is recruited to help Britain's 1868 expedition to Abyssinia. Between carrying silver to the army, courting rival queens and falling into Emperor Theodore's hands, he once again survives a brutal campaign by sheer luck.

In this memoir and essay collection, Fraser looks back on his years as a soldier, journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He writes about working in Hollywood, arguing with modern Britain and the small incidents that shaped his views, in the same plain, anecdotal voice as his fiction.

Three later episodes from Flashman's career show him meddling in high politics and scandal. He rides the first Orient Express into a plot against Emperor Franz Josef, witnesses the royal baccarat affair, and much later crosses paths with Tiger Moran, the Zulu War and Sherlock Holmes.

Black Ajax retells the rise and fall of real life boxer Tom Molineaux in Regency England. Through trainers, patrons, spectators and the father of Harry Flashman, Fraser shows the brutal allure of bare knuckle prizefighting and the colour line that shadows Molineaux's career.

Flashman is kidnapped and shipped to America, where abolitionists, pro-slavery plotters and politicians all try to use him in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. He only wants to escape the gallows, but ends up an unwilling witness to history.

Short and dark in tone, The Candlemass Road follows a Border valley on the Anglo Scottish frontier as raiders strike and neighbours take sides. Through one household's ordeal it shows how duty, revenge and fear can pull a fragile community apart.

In this memoir Fraser recalls his time as a nineteen year old private in the Border Regiment during the Burma campaign of 1944 to 1945. He focuses on a single infantry section, capturing the language, humour and sudden horror of jungle fighting without romanticising it.

Sent to the Punjab as tension rises with the Sikh kingdom, Flashman is ordered to spy on the Lahore court and the feared Khalsa army. Intrigue, open war and the fate of the Koh i Noor diamond leave him juggling loyalties to survive.

The final volume of McAuslan stories follows Dand MacNeill and his comrades through home leave, odd postings and the run up to demobilisation. The tone shifts between farce and reflection as soldiers who have known nothing but the army face the approach of civilian life.

This non fiction book tours century after century of historical films, asking what the movies get right as well as wrong. Fraser compares famous screen epics with the record, using battles, costumes and small details to show how cinema has shaped our picture of the past.

From Hong Kong into the heart of civil war China, Flashman agrees to escort what he thinks is opium and finds himself running guns for the Taiping rebels. Drawn between rebel leaders, British diplomats and a dangerous imperial concubine, he survives the Second Opium War.

The Pyrates is a gleeful parody of every swashbuckling yarn Fraser ever loved. A square jawed naval hero, flamboyant pirate captains and imperilled heroines career through shipwrecks, duels and treasure hunts, with deliberate anachronisms and jokes on almost every page.

Fleeing New Orleans with a brothel owner and her girls, Flashman heads west on the overland trail and crosses paths with scalp hunters and Apaches. Decades later he is dragged back into the world of the Plains tribes and the road to Little Bighorn.

In 1909, Nevada silver millionaire Mark Franklin arrives in rural Norfolk hoping for peace and roots. Drawn into Edward VII's circle, village feuds and a risky marriage to a young aristocrat, he must face both his violent past and the limits of belonging in Edwardian England.

This illustrated study looks at the traditions, games and inner life of British public schools, the fee paying boarding schools that shaped so many imperial figures. Fraser traces their history and myths with an insider's eye for odd customs, slang and class assumptions.

Flashman's talent for cricket pulls him into London society, then a rich merchant's obsession with Elspeth leads to kidnapping, piracy and slavery. Chasing his wife to Borneo and Madagascar, he falls into the hands of Queen Ranavalona and must scheme his way off the island.

Ordered to investigate rumours of mutiny in India, Flashman finds himself disguised among native cavalry as the 1857 uprising explodes. From Meerut to Cawnpore and Lucknow he witnesses massacres, sieges and desperate marches, earning medals for acts of courage he never meant to perform.

This second McAuslan collection finds the battalion still stumbling through peacetime soldiering. Golf matches, quiz competitions, smallpox scares and romantic tangles all go awry once McAuslan and his fellow Jocks are involved, giving a comic but affectionate portrait of regimental life.

Trying to dodge a posting to Crimea, Flashman is instead given charge of a royal cousin and rides straight into the Charge of the Light Brigade. Captured in Russia, he stumbles onto a scheme to invade India and is dragged across Central Asia to stop it.

The Steel Bonnets is Fraser's history of the Anglo Scottish Border reivers, the riding families who raided and feuded along the frontier. Drawing on records and ballads, he explains how they lived, fought and were finally tamed when the crowns of England and Scotland united.

A rigged card game and a furious father in law land Flashman on a slave ship bound for West Africa. From Dahomey to Mississippi plantations and the Underground Railroad, he poses under false names, meets a young Abraham Lincoln and does everything possible not to be heroic.

A collection of linked stories narrated by Lieutenant Dand MacNeill, The General Danced at Dawn follows a Highland battalion in the late 1940s. Between desert postings, ceremonial duties and eccentric officers, MacNeill wrestles with army tradition and the chaos embodied by Private McAuslan.

Inspired by the intrigues of 1848, this adventure sees Flashman blackmailed by Bismarck and entangled with Lola Montez. Forced to impersonate a German prince in the duchy of Strackenz, he must survive revolution, a perilous marriage and the kind of duel he always dreads.

The first of the Flashman Papers finds the disgraced Rugby bully buying a cavalry commission, seducing the wrong woman and being shipped to India. Posted to Afghanistan, he endures occupation, betrayal and the disastrous retreat from Kabul, emerging with a hero's reputation he knows he does not deserve.