George MacDonald Fraser has died, at 82, after a long fight with cancer. The Scottish Fraser, who was awarded an OBE in 1999, was best known for the "Flashman" series, a string of comic historical novels starring Harry Flashman, a cowardly, bullying antihero of a nineteenth century British soldier, a character that Fraser had filched from the Victorian novel Tom Brown's School Days. Fraser published a dozen of Flashman's adventures from 1969 through 2005; the early novels were dedicated to the likes of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and established a tone of affectionate, barbed tribute to the swashbuckling adventure films of Fraser's youth.

Flashman never made the leap to film stardom himself; the one movie version of one of Fraser's novels, the 1975 Royal Flash with Malcolm MacDowell miscast in the lead, was directed by Richard Lester, and it was a botch. The funny thing is that Lester and Fraser had already had better success at reactivating the genre with the 1973 The Three Musketeers and its follow-up, The Four Musketeers, which Lester had directed from Fraser's screenplays. They teamed up again more than a decade later for the 1989 The Return of the Musketeers, an unhappy affair that precipitated the director's retirement. Fraser's other screenplays include one for Octopussy (1983), perhaps the most lighhearted of the James Bond pictures. Fraser's non-Flashman books include The Light's on at Signpost, a memoir of his Hollywood screenwriting career, and Hollywood History of the World: From One Million Years B.C. to Apocalypse Now, a study of the accuracy of historical pictures--a subject that Fraser, who put a lot of research into his Flashman romps, knew something about.