Hi Bernard,
This year I wanted to express appreciation to my favorite artists and I’m glad you make it easy to contact you! I’ve read most of the Sharpe books and all of the Saxon Stories (so far). For the sake of this email I tried to choose my favorite protagonist – by a narrow margin it goes to Uhtred because he seems to enjoy himself a bit more than Sharpe. I guess that’s the benefit of nobility.
I wanted to tell you the scenes that stick in my memory:
– When Sharpe is wounded in Spain and thinks his men are cheering death, but its actually salvation from the KGL.
– When Sharpe is locked in that Danish house and crawls through the chimney. I didn’t think I was claustrophobic but that was awful, nice job.
– I often think about Sharpe deciding that a bird needs to fly away, and when it doesn’t he throws a rock at it to make his own luck.
My favorite moment is when Uhtred and his band are backed up to a river and those Mercians are coming to kill them. There is no way out but Finan and young Uhtred plan to fearlessly, or in spite of fear, cut through and kill the Mercian leader anyway. That’s how I try to approach adversity.
Trafalgar is my favorite book, everything I’d ever need to know about wooden warships. There is a line in a Stan Rogers song ‘And the maintruck carried off both me legs’ and I never knew what that was until Sharpe mentioned it.
I also enjoyed Agincourt.
Thank you for your writing.
Brian