Bernard Cornwell Brings Back His British Rifleman In ‘Sharpe’s Storm’

CHATHAM – Not every author can say that a beer was named for one of their characters. But Bernard Cornwell can.

 In October, Kirkstall Brewery in Leeds, England, released Rifleman’s Pale Ale, inspired by Richard Sharpe, the lead character in Cornwell’s long-running Sharpe series of novels. The beer’s packaging includes the line, "Major Sharpe's great talent is in disobeying orders," a neat encapsulation of the fictional character whose exploits are told through actual events and battles in the Napoleonic Wars.

 Cornwell himself was able to draw a pint of Rifleman’s Pale Ale at a pub while in the UK to promote his latest Sharpe novel, “Sharpe’s Storm.”

 “It does taste good,” he said.

 “Sharpe’s Storm” is the 24th novel featuring Cornwell’s English rifleman, whose exploits the Chatham author began chronicling in 1981. The novels jump back and forth chronologically throughout Britain’s war with France which lasted from 1803 to 1815, and even reach back to 1799 when Sharpe was a private and participated in the Siege of Seringapatam in India, as told in “Sharpe’s Tigers.”

 “Sharpe’s Storm” takes place in 1813 when the Duke of Wellington’s army is making inroads into southern France. Cornwell throws Sharpe and his motley band of soldiers into the Battle of Saint-Pierre. The author relies on diaries kept by contemporaries to provide the verisimilitude in his historical novels, and one described the battle as the worst of the entire war. 

 “I didn’t know anything about the battle, but I thought, ‘I can send Sharpe there,’” Cornwell said. The British were outnumbered in the battle three to one. “Readers like Sharpe taking on large numbers of Frenchmen and cutting them down.”

 Sharpe later leads his men on a reconnaissance mission across the River Adour, escorting engineers whose job it was to determine the viability of building a pontoon bridge across the river’s mouth. There’s no evidence that any such reconnaissance mission actually occurred, Cornwell said, but it would not have been out of character for Wellington.

 “So I invented that. That’s the privilege of a fiction author,” he said. “And it ended up working quite nicely.” He added that he had initially wanted to have Sharpe help build the pontoon bridge — an engineering feat that helped hasten the end of the war — but realized the rifleman could not have been there; he was somewhere else at that time, a story told in “Sharpe’s Siege."

 Although the future of the Sharpe series is left vague in notes at the end of “Sharpe’s Storm,” Cornwell said he enjoys writing the books and hopes to continue them, perhaps recounting Sharpe’s role in the Battle of the Pyrenees. 

 “I hear his voice in my head,” he said of Sharpe, adding that the voice is that of actor Sean Bean, who portrayed Sharpe in a 16-episode TV series from 1993 to 2008. There have been “mutterings” about reviving the show, he added. 

 Cornwell saw success with the Netflix adaption of his 13 “Last Kingdom” novels, and he is currently working on a 14th. The series chronicles how England was consolidated from a collection of small kingdoms into Great Britain. The lead character, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, was based on Cornwell’s ancestor. 

 Along with the Sharpe and Last Kingdom novels, Cornwell has several other series among his more than 60 books, including the Warlord Chronicles, which focuses on King Arthur and was also made into a TV series. He’s also written many stand-alone novels, including “Agincourt,” which is in development as a feature film. “Fools and Mortals” centers on the first performance of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and his only non-fiction work, “Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles,” focuses on that famous battle.

 For many years Cornwell wrote two books a year, but his output slowed after Alan Rust enlisted him to perform at the Monomoy Theatre in 2006. He’s been part of the Cape Cod Shakespeare Festival in Chatham company since it launched, and he plans on performing in Kate Gould Park again next summer.

 For now, Cornwell is watching “Sharpe’s Storm” climb the bestseller charts (when it was released in the UK in October it debuted at number 4) and enjoying the ale that carries his creation’s name.