Caro Fraser


Caroline Georgiana Fraser is a British novelist, and the daughter of writer George MacDonald Fraser, author of The Flashman Papers books.
Fraser was born in Carlisle in 1953, but her family moved to Glasgow shortly afterwards and she was brought up there until her mid-teens, attending Glasgow High School for Girls. When she was 15 her father published the first book in the Flashman series, and the family subsequently moved to the Isle of Man, where she went to The Buchan School. She started writing professionally in 1992, but before that she was a commercial and maritime lawyer, and before that an advertising copywriter.

Publications

Her first novel, The Pupil, was based on her time spent in pupillage, which is the training required to become a barrister. The novel was written largely from a male standpoint, and deals with the trials and fortunes of Anthony Cross during his six-month pupillage at Caper Court, and the various characters he meets in the eccentric world of the Inns of Court in London. Chief among these is Leo Davies, an attractive, talented, charismatic and extremely successful barrister, who happens to be bisexual, and under whose spell Anthony quickly falls. The Pupil can be interpreted as a novel which comments upon the inequities and discrimination which exist in the legal world. Nepotism and the old-boy-network is a central theme. Anthony's family background is not one of wealth or privilege – his mother is a single parent trying to bring up two sons on a teacher's salary, and his bohemian father lives in a squat – and his lack of money for going out to restaurants or taking taxis means he is constantly at odds with his girlfriend. Although brilliant – he got a first-class degree – it was from a red-brick university, not Oxbridge, and he hadn't been to a public school.
The Pupil became the foundation of the Caper Court series, which at present comprises eight novels. In the later novels Leo, rather than Anthony, is the hero and the centre of attention.

Caper Court series

She also wrote eight stand-alone novels, which she described on her web site as romantic fiction for the thinking woman.