Paul Fraser Collard

Paul Fraser Collard is a British author of historical military adventure fiction whose interest in military history began in childhood through films such as Waterloo and Zulu and novels including the Sharpe and Flashman series. He originally hoped to become an army officer and won an Army Scholarship while at school, but ultimately pursued a career in finance and has continued to work in the City alongside his writing. Collard lives in Kent with his family. His fiction reflects a particular interest in the soldiers and campaigns of the nineteenth century, combining detailed battlefield action with questions of class, ambition, identity and the realities of military service.

Collard is best known for the Jack Lark series, which follows a resourceful Victorian soldier who repeatedly assumes new identities and becomes involved in conflicts across the British Empire and beyond. The sequence begins with The Scarlet Thief, set during the Crimean War in 1854, and continues through The Maharajah’s General, set amid the Indian Rebellion of 1857, followed by The Devil’s Assassin, The Lone Warrior, The Last Legionnaire, The True Soldier, The Rebel Killer, The Lost Outlaw, Fugitive, Commander and Diamond Hunter. The novels take Jack through India, Persia, the United States, Mexico, Egypt, Sudan and other nineteenth-century theatres of conflict, incorporating events such as the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the American Civil War and imperial campaigns in Africa. Shorter prequel stories including Rascal, Rogue, Recruit and Redcoat explore his early life in London and his beginnings as a British soldier.