Royal Flash

ROYAL FLASH

by George MacDonald Fraser

Flyleaf:

A new and crackling episode in the adventures of England's Number 1 scoundrel, that bully, liar, and womanizing coward named Flashman, whose youthful skulduggery was first revealed in Tom Brown's School Days. Now his voluminous, villainous memoirs (a first sampling, Flashman, surfaced last year) are little by little revealing how he disgraced himself and his Queen (who was not amused) from India to Little Big Horn in a trail of tangled bedsheets, angry husbands, and besmirched uniforms.

The scene of Royal Flash is the Europe of Revolutions, and of that ultimate in the advanced diplomacy of 1848, the Schleswig-Holstein Question.* Flashman is no diplomat, but he's right in the middle of this gigantic international double-cross, and when you're cheating, dodging, and playing for your life against the unholy alliance of Count Bismarck and Lola Montez, you'll stir up any amount of mud to save your skin. Prussia's greatest statesman and Europe's most active lady of the bedchamber are plotting a royal marriage that will change the destiny of a continent. Flashman is their luckless pawn. Blackmailed into doubling for a prince with a most inopportune and unsuitable disease (especially for a bridegroom, that is) he has to use all his reserves of deceit, low cunning, and treachery to stay one hop ahead of pursuing death. The Prisoner of Zenda? Here's what really happened.

In these gloriously inglorious memoirs, the soft and seamy underbelly of that greatest of Victorian epics, The British Empire, is being laid bare, inch by squameous inch. Take a peep, and you stay for an eyeful, on tenterhooks and avid for more.

* [The Schleswig-Holstein Question was so complicated that it was understood by only three men: one who died, one who went mad thinking about it, and Lord Palmerston, who never cound remember the answer.]

Royal Flash

FROM THE FLASHMAN PAPERS

1842-3 and 1847-8

EDITED AND ARRANGED BY

George MacDonald Fraser

For KATH, again, and for

Ronald Colman,

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.,

Errol Flynn,

Basil Rathbone,

Louis Hayward,

Tyrone Power,

and all the rest of them.