Cornwell: Sharpe’s Triumph is, chronologically, the second novel in the series, but was the fifteenth to be written and, in some ways, it’s the crucial story of Sharpe’s career because his most salient characteristic is that he was raised from the ranks. It was not impossible for that to happen to soldiers in Britain’s army in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but it was difficult. By 1815 between 5 and 6% of all officers had come from the ranks and, in nearly every case, it was a battlefield commission. The man had to have been a sergeant, has to be able to read and write and, most important of all, had to perform an act of virtually suicidal bravery. It was recognised, for instance, that a sergeant who led a ‘Forlorn Hope’ (a band of men who went first into a defended breach to spring the enemy’s traps and draw their most destructive opening volley) would, if he lived, be commissioned. In all the books of the Sharpe series there are constant references to Sharpe’s moment of commissioning which happened on the battlefield of Assaye in 1799. In that battle Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) was unhorsed and thrown into the enemy lines. The Duke never spoke of that moment which, in all his long fighting career, was the closest he came to death. We know he had to defend himself, we know he was alone for some time—surrounded by enemies—and that is all we do know, so I inserted Sergeant Sharpe into his immediate vicinity. Saving the commanding general’s life is a pretty good way to get noticed, and if that general is the future Duke of Wellington then Sharpe is guaranteed an interesting career. The Battle of Assaye is interesting in its own right. In later years, long after he had won Waterloo, Wellington was asked what had been his finest achievement and, without hesitating, answered ‘Assaye’. He led a very small army against a massive enemy force and, by nimble manouevre, defeated it. It’s an extraordinarily exciting story, and I always knew Sharpe had to be there.

HC: I notice that the Sharpe series hasn’t been written in strict chronological fashion—Sharpe’s Triumph, for instance, takes us back to an earlier stage in Richard Sharpe’s military career than many of the previous Sharpe titles. Is this principally because the character of Sharpe has endured for you longer than you originally expected? Do you ever find that decisions you made about Sharpe’s character later in his life constricts what you’re able to do in the books (written later) about his early life?

Cornwell: I think the decision to go back and write the ‘prequels’ was probably activated by the television series of the Sharpe books that was shown in Britain. That encouraged an already lively market for the Sharpe books and it seemed sensible to supply it with further stories and, as hundreds if not thousands of readers had written asking for the Indian stories, I decided to take him back and tell those tales. Naturally some of the things I’d written in the earlier books made my life difficult, but I either studiously ignored them or disguised the discrepancies in verbiage. I had always claimed, for instance, that Sharpe learned to read while he was in the Tippoo Sultan’s prison (the story is in Sharpe’s Tiger), but once I wrote of those events it was plain that I could not mew Sharpe up in a dungeon for long enough (heroes cannot be in dungeons doing nothing), so I simply flannelled about how long he was actually in jail and, so far, no one seems to have noticed.

HC: Where did the inspiration for Richard Sharpe originally come from? With every novel you write, you reinvent him, introduce readers to yet another level of his personality. What or who keeps his spirit so alive from book to book?

Cornwell: The idea was shamelessly ripped-off from Hornblower, whom I’d enjoyed as a child, and I kept wondering why no one was doing the same kind of thing for a soldier. By the 1960s and 70s there were half a dozen authors earning a decent living telling tales of British Naval exploits in the Napoleonic wars, and no one doing the same for the army, and it seemed an obvious gap on the shelf. So it proved. The stories of Wellington’s army are picaresque, extraordinary and rich in eccentric characters, far more so than the navy, and they’ve supplied a seemingly unending inspiration. I simply enjoy writing Sharpe and I imagine I’ll go on telling his tales as long as that enjoyment continues.

HC: Which are your favorite Sharpe novels? After Sharpe’s Triumph, what titles might a new reader look for first?

Cornwell: My favourite, for reasons I have never entirely fathomed, is Sharpe’s Siege, but I usually tell people to begin with Sharpe’s Tiger, because it’s a romp set against an incredibly exotic (and truthful) background. I like Sharpe’s Regiment, because it’s the one book not set in the war—but at home in England. I like them all, really.

HC: I understand you fell into writing as a profession “accidentally.” When and why did you start writing?

Cornwell: It was entirely by accident, and all the fault of the US government. In 1979 I was a harmless BBC Television Producer, minding my own business, when I fell drastically in love with an American lady who, for family reasons, could not go and live in Britain and so, if the course of true love was to run smooth, there was no option but for me to up stakes and move to America. The US Government, however, in its unfathomable wisdom, refused me a green card so I became an illegal immigrant and, forbidden from taking proper employment, airily promised Judy that I would earn a living by writing books. I wrote Sharpe’s Eagle first and have been scribbling ever since. I am no longer an illegal immigrant, but a citizen, and Judy and I are still married. I suppose, in truth, the US Government, or at least the INS, did me a favour, but I cannot reconcile myself to the pompous gits.

HC: In your development as a writer, were you principally drawn to history generally, or to military history in particular? Do you have military service in your background?

Cornwell: Anything but. I always wanted to be a soldier, but am as blind as a bat without thick pebble lenses, and so was told by the army recruiting office that the best I could aspire to was the Royal Pay Corps. This did not chime with my adolescent dreams of glory and so I turned to journalism instead. I think, on the whole, that the British Army is very fortunate that I write about it rather than serve in it.

HC: How do you research for your novels? Is there a specific process or is it a continual one?

Cornwell: It’s continual. I’ve been interested in military history since I was a child. This was principally the fault of my parents who belonged to a fundamentalist sect called The Peculiar People—now defunct, but once widespread in southern Essex. Among the sect’s peculiarities (there were many) was a strong disapproval of military service and, perhaps inevitably, I became interested in every area of life of which they disapproved (these included wine, women and song, for which I am grateful). I began collecting books on military history in my teens—when there were no more Hornblowers to read, and kept the interest going thereafter. I always hankered to be a writer, and knew from very early on that it would be a Hornblower-on-dry-land series. So I do have a fair bit of background knowledge, which I augment with more specific reading for each book, plus research in libraries—for Sharpe’s Triumph I had to spend time in the India Office library in London. I also visit every location—so for Fortress I walked and walked the field of Assaye—a quite extraordinary experience because, of all the many battlefields I’ve visited, that was the least changed. The farmers still plough up bones and you can kick the musket balls out of the furrows.

HC: How do you write?

Cornwell: I work office hours, Monday to Friday, very boring, straight onto a word-processor. I also write quickly, probably because I was a journalist for so long. My wife is always the first to read the books, and is a good critic even though she is a pacifist vegetarian yoga- teacher. I once heard her tell a friend that she reads all my books ‘but I skip the battles’. It makes them a quick read for her.

HC: You’ve lived in America for quite some time now. Why? Does being an expatriate inform your work in any particular way?

Cornwell: I doubt it, unless absence makes the heart grow fonder. I might be a citizen, but I do not really understand a country that doesn’t like cricket or proper ale, and my boat is called Royalist, and I mean it. I live here because I married wisely and because Judy is encumbered with a family of which she is inexplicably fond, while I am not, and so it makes for a much happier existence if we live here, near aforesaid family, rather than there. Besides which she doesn’t understand cricket.

HC: Do American readers react differently to your work than do, say, English readers? How so?

Cornwell: They don’t like my work as much as the Brits do. Judy (my wife) thinks that is because the books are not emotional enough, and she may be right. Also I don’t see why Americans should be as interested in the Napoleonic Wars as the British are. And, on the whole, I write about British history because that is what I grew up with and know best. But the Brits even like my American books more than Americans do. One of the books I enjoyed writing most of all was Redcoat, which is a pro-American tale of the revolution, set in Philadelphia during the Valley Forge winter and, as usual, it did brilliantly in Britain, but vanished in the States with the speed of a bullet going through a cream puff.

HC: Previous to Sharpe’s Triumph, you wrote a series of books set in Arthurian England. Can readers look forward to you expanding to still other times and places in history?

Cornwell: The book I’ve just finished is Stonehenge, A Novel Of 2000 BC, which I hope will have some appeal to American readers. Stonehenge, like the Arthurian myths, has always fascinated me, and it is a constant mystery lying deep in the taproot of British history. The archaeologists can tell us an extraordinary amount about the process of the building, but almost nothing about why the monument was made, so the book is an attempt to reconstruct the impulses that raised the great stones on Salisbury Plain. I probably did more research for that book than any other, for when a subject is so wrapped in mystery it seems important to get the verifiable detail exactly right. I also wanted to avoid the wilder reaches of surmise (UFOs etc).

HC: Will we be seeing a new Richard Sharpe novel again anytime soon?

Cornwell: There’s a final Indian adventure, Sharpe’s Fortress, which picks up where Sharpe’s Triumph leaves off, and any day now I shall start writing Sharpe’s Trafalgar, because it occurred to me that he has to go home and Trafalgar lies on the way. Besides which, Hornblower was not at Trafalgar. It’s called a gap on the bookshelf.