BULLY: A Flashman Sourcebook
George MacDonald Fraser once described his first novel as “the purported memoir of an unregenerate blackguard, bully and coward resurrected from a Victorian school story.” He admitted it was “a pretty eccentric subject.” For two years publishers kept turning it down. When it was finally published in America, a third of the forty-odd critics who reviewed it took it for a genuine historical memoir.
Fifty-odd years and twelve volumes later, Brigadier-General Harry Paget Flashman, V.C., K.C.B., has the kind of following that names pubs after him and writes in to point out that the 109th Bombay Impossibles wore puce facings, not pink. BULLY is for them.
Dunce Books has pulled the best 1990s fan scholarship back out of the Internet Archive and bound it in one volume:
- “The Ultimate Cad.” Fraser’s own 1994 account of where Flashman came from, and what he made of the critics who called him a satirist, a moralist, and (in one German review) something to do with Proust.
- The Flashman Macropædia. An A–Z of the people, places, ships and scandals in the first three volumes, compiled by the founder of the Royal Flashman Society’s Roanoke chapter. He bills it, accurately, as “wholly incomplete and mostly inaccurate.” It includes an entry for a messenger who probably never existed. Fraser himself appears only as “Editor of The Flashman Papers.”
- The Complete Flashman Chronology. Brian Siano’s reconstruction of the General’s life, from his birth on May 5, 1822, to his last memoir in 1913. Every date is tied to its source passage and checked against the histories. Expanded for this edition.
- Summary Chronology & Publication Sequence. Every volume in story order and in print order, with first-edition details and plot synopses.
- Mr. Fraser Responds. Royal Flashman Society members put their questions to the author.
Plus a full index.
150 pages | 5.5 × 8.5 | Paperback
