As a screenwriter I once put forward a script for a film called The Lone Ranger, in which I used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen and was as spectacular as it was shocking - and true. I first came across this in the United States, where the cancer has gone much deeper. And it is this that alarms me - the fear evident in so many sincere and honest folk of being thought out of step.
They won't risk saying anything to which the PC lobby could take exception. I hold the right views and I'm in line with modern enlightened thought, honestly." They are almost a knee-jerk reaction and often rather a nervous one, as if the writer were saying: "Look, I'm not a racist or sexist. But where once the non-PC thing could pass unremarked, they now feel they must warn readers that some may find Flashman offensive, and that his views are certainly not those of the interviewer or reviewer, God forbid. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn't an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.īut what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy's (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way. In the Nineties, a change began to take place.
In all the many thousands of readers' letters I received, not one objected. Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue - the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.Īnd no one minded, or if they did, they didn't tell me.
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