A ‘slightly different’ Richard Sharpe is back, according to author Bernard Cornwell, and facing his final battle ... for now

“Never turn your back on the bastard”. The Last Kingdom’s celebrated creator shares a key lesson from one of his heroes as he unleashes another in a compelling new project.

BERNARD Cornwell is in the wars.

The creator of some of the most epic battle scenes on page and screen is nursing his own wounds, after costly skirmishing with a dreaded enemy.

“I’ve been going through the valley of the shadow of dentists,” he deadpans. “It’s just not fun. The equation is, American dentists plus British teeth means money! But apart from that, I’m fine.”

That’s good because Cornwell, the best-selling master of historical fiction and creator of TV hit The Last Kingdom, is about to hit the campaign trail again as he launches his latest novel.

‘Never turn your back on the bastard’ ... before penning his latest novel Sharpe’s Assassin, Bernard Cornwell took a cameo in The Last Kingdom, alongside its star Alexander Dreymon (Uhtred). Read how that turned out below. Photo: Adrienn Szabo

Sharpe’s Assassin brings back his original hero, Napoleonic Wars veteran Richard Sharpe – the man who made Cornwell famous – after an absence of 15 years. Sharpe’s Fury, the last book to feature the quick-thinking, hard-fighting soldier, came out in 2006.

“I’m not sure how the Sharpe fans will take it, but we’ll see,” says the author modestly, from the Cape Cod home he shares with wife Judy. “It’s a slightly different Sharpe book.”

Shades of difference perhaps, in that Sharpe now shows occasional, relatable, moments of self-doubt. And, having found love and fathered a child, he now harbours an understandable desire not to perish as he is thrust into the dangerously chaotic dying days of Napoleon’s regime post-Waterloo.

He’s back, after 15 years ... Sharpe's Assassin is set in 1815 Paris, in the chaotic aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo.

But all the hallmarks of the other 21 Sharpe novels are there: galloping pace; a tightly-layered plot, this time centred around fanatical loyalists who refuse to accept the war is over; moments of levity; and compelling characters including familiar favourites, a new antihero and a villain from Sharpe’s distant past.

And Sean Bean – in a sense.

The British actor who played Sharpe in the popular TV adaptation is so much a part of the character, says Cornwell, that he hears Bean’s familiar Yorkshire accent when the London-born soldier speaks.

‘He was the perfect Sharpe’ ... actor Sean Bean has had a huge influence on how Bernard Cornwell writes the character of Richard Sharpe.

“I absolutely hear Sean. I don’t see Sean, but I hear him,” Cornwall says, explaining that he even thinks like the star when writing. “He’s certainly had a huge influence on the way I think of Sharpe, and I’m very proud of that.”

Hailing the “grumpiness and stroppiness” in Bean’s portrayal, he adds, “Sharpe came first but Sean just came along and he was the perfect Sharpe.”

Cornwell says he “really enjoyed” reconnecting with Sharpe, the gutter-born illegitimate whore’s son whose talents take him from private to officer and make him an indispensable weapon, both on and off the battlefield. (The now-lieutenant-colonel’s newest mission put me in mind of how Daniel Craig’s James Bond is deployed on unofficial, official business – with ruthless efficiency and a high body count.)

Ruthlessly efficient, a high body count and a touch of introspection ... there’s something of Daniel Craig’s 007 in the post-Waterloo escapades of Richard Sharpe.

“It was very nice to be back with him, to the point where I’m thinking maybe I should do another one,” says Cornwell, politely pre-empting the usual “what’s next” question.

Having concluded his wildly successful Viking-era Last Kingdom franchise a year ago, the energetic 77-year-old is also considering a return to the later Middle Ages.

“A lot of my readers want more of Thomas of Hookton,” he says, referring to the protagonist of his Grail Quest series. “So I’m sort of researching that at the moment but it doesn’t mean I’m going to write it.”

It’s dedication to research that enables Cornwell, who has sold more than 30 million books worldwide, to create believable, vivid narrative backdrops while inserting nuggets that read like fiction – but are factual.

‘It was outright theft!’ ... Bernard Cornwell shines an interesting light on Napoleon Bonaparte’s plundered art collection; and on moves, after the emperor’s defeat, to repatriate it – an issue that modern museums grapple with to this day.

Sharpe’s Assassin features smugglers’ tunnels under the city walls and a Guy Fawkes-style Parisian gunpowder plot that really happened; and sees our not-especially-woke hero helping to repatriate artworks plundered by Napoleon from across Europe.

It also features a number of well-known locations around the Somme, an area sacred to Australians familiar with the WW1 Anzac experience but with a history of warfare stretching much further back.

“It is an extraordinary landscape,” says Cornwell. While unable to travel there this time (thanks, Covid) for his usual on-the-ground research, the author has explored previously and leaned on a Paris-based friend for last-minute extras. “I was forever phoning him and saying things like, ‘John, go up the Rue de Montreuil and look left and tell me what you can see’,” he laughs.

Vivid, yet gritty with detail ... Bernard Cornwell brings combat to life on the page. In earlier novel Sharpe’s Waterloo, he describes the battle’s infamous charge of the Scots Greys, which began as a devastating blow against the French but then turned into disaster.

In previous Sharpe-related scouting missions, Cornwell has made extraordinary battlefield discoveries: parts of muskets, ammunition and, in one Spanish village where there was brutal close-quarter fighting, the business end of a British infantryman’s bayonet stuck in a dilapidated door.

“He’d slammed it, presumably into or at a Frenchman, and it had gone into the door and broken off,” says Cornwell, pondering what that meant for the unfortunate soldier suddenly without a weapon. “I suspect nothing good, but who knows?”

It’s a vignette that could slot neatly into a Cornwellian combat scene – cinematic yet gritty affairs hooked around what the participants “are seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling”.

‘I look like an ageing rocker!’ ... Bernard Cornwell’s character is caught short, then caught out, on a raid in The Last Kingdom. Picture: Adrienn Szabo

That is something the author himself experienced when he took a cameo role in the Netflix adaptation of the Last Kingdom and, appropriately, invented his own death scene. The sharp viewer can spot a heavily disguised Cornwell (“I look like an ageing rocker!” he exclaims) as a Danish raider, busy relieving himself in the woods when ambushed by main man Uhtred.

“What is so wounding is to be killed by my own hero,” Cornwell remarks, happily. “I should have known better … never turn your back on the bastard.”

With Cornwell now considering options for his next project, let’s hope there’s plenty more Bernard bastardry to come.

Sharpe’s Assassin by Bernard Cornwell, published by HarperCollins Australia, is on sale from 30 September.

Our Book of the Month is Freckles, by Cecelia Ahern. Get 30 per cent off the RRP of $29.99 at Booktopia by using the code FRECKLES at checkout. And please come discuss Sharpe and more at the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook.