Napoleonic war hero Captain Richard Sharpe has survived all the French can throw at him to make it into his 20th novel. STEPHEN LEWIS asks author Bernard Cornwell how he does it.

TALK about career changes. Bernard Cornwell was a top-flight TV news journalist - a producer on Nationwide, then head of the BBC's current affairs department in Northern Ireland, and finally editor of Thames Television's Thames at Six.

Then, abruptly, he gave it all up to waltz off to the United States to write a novel about the Napoleonic Wars. What on earth for?

"Love," he says cheerfully. "I met an American, Judy, and fell hopelessly in love. She couldn't come and live in Britain for family reasons. I had to go to the States, but couldn't get a green card so I airily told her that I'd write a book."

And, just like that, he did. "That was the first Sharpe, and I'm still writing him and still married to her Judy!" he says.

The first Sharpe novel was published in 1981. Since then the book's hero, Richard Sharpe, has been immortalised on screen by actor Sean Bean and now, in Cornwell's latest book Sharpe's Escape, makes his 20th appearance.

This time around it is 1810, and the French are making yet another attempt to invade Portugal and push the British back into the sea. Facing them is a wasted land, stripped of food by Wellington's orders - and Captain Richard Sharpe.

It's typically swashbuckling stuff which finds Sharpe, somehow discarded by his regiment, waging what is virtually a private war against a Portuguese criminal in the burning, pillaged streets of Coimbra, Portugal's ancient university city.

Sharpe's enemies are everywhere, but by his side he has his trusty sergeant, Patrick Harper - and a prickly English governess whose first aim is to clean up his language.

It's classic Sharpe; but even so, 20 books represents an awful lot of adventures for one man. How does he manage to keep the books so fresh and interesting after all this time?

"I suppose because I enjoy writing them," Bernard says. "If I didn't, I'd stop. It helps that I never know how the book (any book) will end when I begin to write it - and if the impetus for reading a story is to see what happens then it's also the impetus for writing.

"Above all, though, I enjoy his company - after 20-something years he feels like a very old and comfortable friend. A bit grumpy, true, and badly in need of sensitivity training and anger management therapy, but no one's perfect."

Isn't he getting a bit, well, tired? "I'm giving Sharpe a break this year because he probably needs it," Bernard admits. "But I know I'll be raring to go by the time I start the next one in 2005."

So the poor man is going to get himself in a few more scrapes before he can take a well-earned retirement.

Bernard plans to start thinking about the next instalment of his hero's adventures at the end of the year. First, however, there is the small matter of a visit to York to promote book number 20.

The US-based author will be in York on Tuesday to do a reading, answer questions, and sign copies of the book.

It is, he admits, something he's looking forward to. He may have been born in London and raised in Essex, and he may now spend most of his time in the States, but he's descended from a solid Yorkshire family, the Oughtreds. It is, he says, a family "chiefly famous for a 17th century mathematician who invented the slide rule - that gene got lost".

The family also has a direct link with York. "Somewhere in the Minster there's buried an Oughtred who was a royal chaplain, and somewhere near York the family coat of arms is blazoned on a medieval bridge," Bernard says.

So it'll be almost like a homecoming then? "I have an ancestor buried in the Minster," he adds. "So I feel I belong."

Updated: 08:41 Wednesday, March 31, 2004