Seldom is it that a fictional character can take on the stuff of legend and become so much a part of readers' lives that they genuinely imagine him to be real. Harry Paget Flashman, protagonist of several novels by writer George MacDonald Fraser, is one such character. This "indomitable Victorian scoundrel remains one of English literature's finest comic creations," wrote a contributor to Publishers Weekly. Flashman "was a good idea in the beginning and has grown steadily richer," wrote Anthony Lejeune in a National Review appraisement of Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. Lejeune pointed out that Fraser lifted his character from Thomas Hughes's Victorian schoolboy classic Tom Brown's Schooldays, the "handsome, bullying villain of that pious . . . work." Fraser purports to follow the adult adventures of that charming rogue, "a colorful anti-hero much more interesting than the pallid Tom Brown," as Lejeune further noted. Fraser's conceit is...