Dear Mr Cornwell,

Thank you for diligence and craft in producing so many wonderful books, They are both a real joy to read and also educational.  (Up until the recent publication of your history ‘Waterloo’ I always used to hold up your novel ‘Sharpe’s Waterloo’ as the best description of that confusing battle that had ever been written.) I notice that in one of your responses to a letter that you suggest George MacDonald Fraser as an author for further reading. Would I be correct in assuming that you have also read ‘The Steel Bonnets’, his scholarly and readable history of the Anglo-Scottish Borders Reivers, and the associated anarchy and turbulence?  If you have, have you ever been tempted to write a novel based around some of those huge real-life characters?

Yours aye

Keith Wren