Captain Fantom

by Reginald Hill

Based on the life of Captain Carlo Fantom.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Reginald Charles Hill was a contemporary English crime writer, and the winner in 1995 of the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement.

After National Service (1955-57) and studying English at St Catherine's College, Oxford University (1957-60) he worked as a teacher for many years, rising to Senior Lecturer at Doncaster College of Education. In 1980 he retired from salaried work in order to devote himself full-time to writing.

Hill is best known for his more than 20 novels featuring the Yorkshire detectives Andrew Dalziel, Peter Pascoe and Edgar Wield. He has also written more than 30 other novels, including five featuring Joe Sixsmith, a black machine operator turned private detective in a fictional Luton. Novels originally published under the pseudonyms of Patrick Ruell, Dick Morland, and Charles Underhill have now appeared under his own name. Hill is also a writer of short stories, and ghost tales.

Reviews

[Peter]

A 1978 novel by Reginald Hill under his Charles Underwood pseudonym, this was highly reminiscent of Flashman, except much crasser and without the humour, set during the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War. Fantom is a Croatian mercenary with Flashman’s self-preservation gene uppermost as he fights with Tilley and Wallenstein before both Royalists and Parliamentarians claim his allegiance. A poignant ending, some interesting history, rounded colleagues, his love for his horses and an understated enemy family mark an unexpectedly good read.

[Reader]

Captain Carlo Fantom, a Croatian, spake thirteen languages.. He was very quarrelsome and a great ravisher.. Set in the 17th Century, tells the story of this soldier of fortune's adventures in The Thirty Years War and in the English Civil War.

[Doodles McC]

As a teenager I loved this fiction biography of European history. I had the old edition under the pen name of Charles Underhill

[Zrinka Jelic]

Captain Fantom being an account of sundry adventures in the life of Carlo Fantom soldier of misfortune, hard-man and ravisher. I liked the book very much even if the main character is well, pretty much, a rapist. But he hides it under the condition that "his bells go off" and he must charge. The grass or rather tea leaves he boils that makes him "hard" (as in bulletproof not hard ahem hard) I certanly never heard of and he supposed to be my country man. A very good account of a military life in 1500s.