Bernard Cornwell

Before the novels there was the BBC, where Cornwell spent a decade and ended up running current affairs in Northern Ireland. Born in 1944 and adopted into an Essex family belonging to a small religious sect, he went to London University, taught, and did not publish fiction until he was well into his thirties.

Richard Sharpe is why people know him: a rifleman risen from the ranks of Wellington's army, competent, resented by his betters, permanently one social class below the officers he outfights. The series is a machine that works, but the interesting thing is how it was assembled. The first books, from the early 1980s, drop Sharpe straight into the Peninsular War; the India novels that come first in his life story were written fifteen years later, when Cornwell went back and built the character a youth. Read by publication date and you can watch the research deepen in real time.

He is very good on the mechanics of pre-industrial battle: what a volley does, why a square holds, how long men will stand under fire, what a shield wall actually is. He is much less interested in interiority, and his villains have a tendency to sneer. Every novel closes with a historical note setting out exactly where he departed from the record, which is the most honest habit in the genre and a large part of why historians forgive him.

The other long runs are the Saxon Stories, thirteen novels on the making of England, the Grail Quest, the Arthurian Warlord books, and a history of the Waterloo campaign. He has written a great deal, and the floor is high.