Tom Sharpe - Telegraph He went to Lancing, where the vast chapel had a strange effect on him. Forever afterwards Sharpe felt unease in church, or in any other situation where there was a crowd standing in silence. At such moments he would be subject to panic, dizziness and an irrational fear (never realised) that he might begin screaming obscenities. He went on to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied Archaeology and Anthropology. His final long essay, however, argued "violently" against social anthropology as a science, and he graduated with a Third. After National Service in the Marines, in 1951 Sharpe left for South Africa, where he did social work for the non-European affairs department and taught in Natal. By 1957 he was established as a professional photographer with his own studio in Pietermaritzburg. Sharpe, who was appalled by the apartheid system, was deported in 1961, following the staging of his play The South African. On his return to England, he accepted a post as a lecturer in History at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. In 1971, aged 43, he left the college to become a full-time novelist. His curriculum vitae provided him with his first targets. Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure (1973) attacked the policy of racial segregation. South Africa, Sharpe recalled, "was easy to write about because it was a mad society. I was living out there and I knew. It was just mind-blowing to any fair-minded person. By God there was a lot of venom in those books. When I got back to England I was able to reinvent South Africa in my own mind and write about the country in a screwball way. He depicted policemen going through an intimate form of aversion therapy to prevent them from finding black women attractive; the books were banned in South Africa. His third novel, Porterhouse Blue (1975), was an anarchic sexual farce set in a Cambridge college; the title referred to the type of disabling stroke, brought about by overindulgence, to which its fellows were prone. Porterhouse was guarded by Skullion, an irascible porter, memorably played by David Jason in the 1987 television adaptation. Skullion was thought by some to have been modelled on Albert Jaggard, head porter at Corpus Christi. Sharpe summoned up his past as a lecturer to create the character Wilt, a polytechnic lecturer in Liberal Studies, whose daytime occupation - teaching bored butchers and fitters on day release courses - offered limited scope for furthering his real interests, which included extramarital intercourse and planning the acceleration of his wife's demise. The author afflicted Wilt with increasingly random disasters throughout five books: Wilt (1976), The Wilt Alternative (1979), Wilt on High (1984) and Wilt in Nowhere (2004). The last of the series, The Wilt Inheritance, was published in 2010. He believed that his books could be divided into two categories: those written with a conscious effort, and those where inspiration arrived apparently unbidden. "I feel that Wilt and Riotous Assembly were the ones which really ran away," he said. I really can't claim that I wrote them. You hang on to the tail of it when it's running. In the early stages of his career, Sharpe seemed to be able to produce bestsellers at will: Riotous Assembly took him three weeks to write. Tom Rosenthal, of Secker, said: "We are hoping for a Sharpe a year till the crack of doom." Gradually, however, there were signs that his apparently boundless creativity was abating. For all its ingenious plotting, The Throwback (1978) developed a lurid strain that delighted some fans while alienating others. "If getting a taxidermist to stuff your grandfather and blowing up a neighbour's house by pumping gas up his lavatory pan are your taste in jokes, then Mr Sharpe is your man," remarked The Sunday Telegraph. If not, not. Before settling in southern Spain in 1995, Sharpe lived at Great Shelford, near Cambridge, where he cared for his garden. In 1987 he donated £25,000 to help launch an appeal for research funds by the Cambridge Trust for Science and Technology; he was an active participant in PEN, the international congress dedicated to defending writers and freedom of expression, and frequently travelled to the many countries in which his work was appreciated. On one occasion he had a heart attack live on Spanish television, and would offer to show visitors the tape. For the decade until 1995 he published nothing, in spite of his daily efforts in his garden shed, and explained that Britain was "too serious to be funny." But then he produced Grantchester Grind, a sequel to Porterhouse Blue. The feat was all the more amazing since, in the earlier novel, he had killed the Master, paralysed the porter and destroyed most of the college. He followed this with The Midden (1996), a characteristic romp around a country house, and the fourth Wilt novel. The two books have similar plots, but in The Midden the police are corrupt, and in Wilt in Nowhere helpful. There, Sharpe saved his mockery for the NHS. That book showed some indications that he could master his rage and settle for a more resigned, even tragic attitude towards the world. He had Flint, a policeman often pitted against Wilt, reflect of a recent calamity: "Tripping on the gravel and then being trampled over by a herd of maddened lunatics had given him fresh insight into Wilt's inconsequential view of life. Things just happened to people for no good reason and, while Flint had previously believed that every effect had to have had a rational cause, he now realised that the purely accidental was the norm. In short, nothing made sense. The world was as mad as the inmates of the hospital he had just left. The Gropes (2009), his first departure from the Wilt series in over a decade, came after a long period of enforced inactivity due to ill health. Indeed, the book was dedicated to "the doctors who saved my life in 2006." In the final years of his life he had also been working on an autobiography. He was awarded the 13th Grand Prix de l'Humour Noir Xavier Forneret in 1986 and the inaugural BBK La Risa de Bilbao Prize in 2010. Tom Sharpe married, in 1969, Nancy Anne Looper, with whom he had two daughters. Tom Sharpe, born March 30 1928, died June 6 2013