Sharpe

Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe is the rare historical hero who climbs from the gutter to the officer class on merit, and the franchise tracks that ascent across two media that rarely agree on where to start. The novels jump around their own timeline, written so that Sharpe's youth soldiering in India arrived years after readers had already followed him through the Peninsular War. The 1990s ITV films, anchored by Sean Bean's flinty, working-class performance, condensed the campaigns into muddy, low-budget television that punched far above its means.

What holds it together is Cornwell's eye for the mechanics of Napoleonic warfare: the rifle drill, the squares, the looting, the class contempt Sharpe absorbs from the men who outrank him. Read the books for the texture, watch the films for Bean's glare. Together they make one of the most durable soldiers in popular fiction.

The Sharpe franchise spans 1 series, 8 books, 8 films in the CrossBinge catalog.