The Books

Redcoat is the story of the Valley Forge winter during the American Revolution – told from the redcoat’s point of view. I was very aware of trespassing on the sacred ground of American legend so was scrupulously careful to keep to the facts (even the story about General Washington and Sir William Howe’s dog is true). I was attacked afterwards, not because of any historical untruths, but because I have some characters using the efficacious ‘f’ word. Alas, they did, all the time.

This is another of my favourites, and it’s also another of the books where the action is entirely fictional. It describes a ‘commando’ raid on a French coastal fort. There were many such raids in the Napoleonic Wars, and somehow Sharpe missed out on them so I invented this attack on the fort in the Bay of Arcachon, an attack that goes disastrously wrong because of Pierre Ducos’s intervention. Sharpe finds himself stranded, surrounded and with only one very unlikely ally – Captain Cornelius Killick from Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Most of Sharpe’s books describe actions abroad (Britain’s military, very sensibly, doesn’t believe in playing home games), but in Sharpe’s Regiment our hero is sent home to raise soldiers for his regiment, the South Essex, and once in England he runs into an old enemy – Sir Henry Simmerson, once a Colonel of the South Essex and now, what else, a taxman.

In which Pierre Ducos, the French super-agent, tries to end Sharpe’s life and the series, but doesn’t succeed. Ducos does succeed in having the Marguesa imprisoned in a convent, and he almost frustrates the Duke of Wellington’s ambitious campaign that will end in the astonishing victory at Vitoria where Sharpe and the British capture the greatest treasure ‘since Alexander’s Macedonians plundered the camp of the Persian King.’ Somewhere along the line the Spanish Inquisition and a partisan leader called The Slaughterman get involved.

The gilded family had been the envy and the pride of England for centuries. Never had the Lazenders seemed more powerful or more wealthy. And never had the unseen means of their destruction seemed so close…