British comic novelist Tom Sharpe, who wrote the Wilt series and Porterhouse Blue, has died aged 85, his publisher said today.

The satirist died in Spain where he had a home in the coastal town of Llafranc.

He died due to complications from diabetes, according to Spanish reports.

The author, dubbed one of Britain's greatest satirists, enjoyed huge success with his 16 novels, despite only starting his writing career at the age of 43.

Many of his novels, including Blott on the Landscape, became popular BBC television series.

His last book The Wilt Inheritance was published in 2010.

'Tom Sharpe was one of our greatest satirists and a brilliant writer: witty, often outrageous, always acutely funny about the absurdities of life,' Susan Sandon, Sharpe's editor at Random House, said in a statement.
'The private Tom was warm, supportive and wholly engaging.'

London-born Sharpe was the son a preacher from Northumberland who was a Nazi supporter.

Sharpe said in interviews that it was only when his father died in 1944 and through his National Service experience that he realised 'Hitler was not the man I was led to believe he was.'
'My mind was blown by the horror of what had been happening.' he said.

He studied at Cambridge University's Pembroke College.

In 1974 he wrote 'Porterhouse Blue' which sent up the inner workings of an ancient university loosely based on Cambridge which was made into a television mini-series with David Jason.

He said in 2010 that he did not set out to be a comic writer but wanted his first novel to attack the apartheid regime in South Africa, where he lived for 10 years before being expelled for sedition in 1961.

After serving in the Marines, Sharpe moved to South Africa in his early 20s where he worked as a social worker and then a teacher in Natal and also had his own photographic studio.

'It just happened. Before that I'd been reading Thomas Mann, and Sartre, and Kafka and Kirkegaard,' he said.

The result was his first novel in 1971, 'Riotous Assembly,' which lampoons South Africa's apartheid system and the police followed by a 1973 sequel, 'Indecent Exposure'.

Sharpe's 1975 novel 'Blott on the Landscape', about the construction of a motorway in rural England, was also made into a BBC television series in 1985 starring David Suchet as Blott.


Back in Britain, Sharpe taught apprentices at a technical college in Cambridge which inspired him to create the character Henry Wilt, a lecturer accused of murdering his wife after he was seen trying to hide a blow-up doll.

He went on to write four more Wilt novels. A film version was released in 1989 with Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith in the lead roles.

'I found that Wilt was such a good character, and the book itself was sufficiently funny, even I laughed at parts of it, and then I wrote another one, and another, and in each case he is an innocent,' he said.
Despite moving from Cambridge to Spain in the early 1990s, he had little interest in learning Spanish and kept a circle of English-speaking friends.
'I don't want to learn the language. I don't want to hear what the price of meat is,' he said in an interview with an ex-pat journal.

And he said he was disenchanted with the UK: 'It is so depressing. I can't bear it. There is no such thing as the English gentleman any more. Money rules everything.'
He was a local celebrity in his adopted Spanish home and his books are popular in the country.
A spokesman for Palafrugell City Council said: 'We are saddened by the death of Tom Sharpe.
'He came here years ago and he just stayed but used to leave the town in summer because he said there were too many people around.'
He added that Sharpe had been in 'delicate health for some time'.
El Pais said Sharpe's funeral will take place this weekend. His ashes will be scattered at his Spanish home, as well as in Cambridge and Thockrington, Northumberland.


This story is from the Mail Online.

This man was FUNNY.

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Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating