This collection contains three episodes from Flashman’s later career. In The Road to Charing Cross he assists the journalist Henri Blowitz at the Congress of Berlin and later travels on the Orient Express, where Bismarck forces him into a plot involving the threatened assassination of Emperor Franz Joseph. The Subtleties of Baccarat places him near the Prince of Wales during the Tranby Croft scandal, largely as an observer who supplies predictably poor advice.
The title story begins with Flashman fleeing the British defeat at Isandlwana and reaching Rorke’s Drift beside the marksman Sebastian Moran. In 1894 Moran returns to blackmail Flashman’s granddaughter, connecting the Zulu campaign to the slave ship narrative of Flash for Freedom! The three stories examine how private scandal, espionage and imperial war survive as fragments outside the longer memoir packets.
Christopher Nicole
49 books
G. A. Henty
80 books
Henry Treece
35 books
Louis L’Amour
97 books