It’s the birthday of the bestselling English author Thomas Ridley Sharpe (1928-2013), a comic novelist said to be in the tradition of P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. One critic even likened him to “P.G. Wodehouse on acid” (Stanley Reynolds, “Tom Sharpe Obituary,” June 6, 2013, The Guardian); his novels are outrageous and bawdy in the extreme. Wodehouse himself became one of Sharpe’s readers.

Sharpe was born in London, England, to a South African mother and a father who was both a Unitarian minister and a fascist who loved Hitler. (To review: Unitarian minister, basically wanted to marry Hitler.) The family moved around a lot because the father was constantly under threat of being locked up with other British Nazis. Sharpe took on his father’s views when he was young, but after seeing newsreels of the liberation of Nazi death camps, he completely rejected fascism.

After studying social anthropology at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he moved to South Africa in 1951 and witnessed the racial injustice there, using it as fuel for his first novel, Riotous Assembly (1971), which satirized the South African police. (He had already been deported back to Britain by this time for his anti-Apartheid play, The South Africans, 1960.) He based one character in the novel, Miss Hazelstone, on a friend’s real-life aunt who would complain that her naps were disturbed by the screams of tortured prisoners coming from a nearby police station. This novel was followed by Indecent Exposure (1973), featuring the same police chief from the first novel, Kommandant Van Heerden.

Many feel that these two first novels were Sharpe’s best, but his most popular were the five novels of the Wilt series, featuring the wildly farcical predicaments of college lecturer, Henry Wilt. For example, in the first novel, Wilt (1976), the hapless academic tries to rehearse murdering his wife using an inflatable doll, but things go horribly wrong, the wife continues to live, and Wilt ends up accused of her murder anyway. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?) And this sounds like one of Sharpe’s quieter plots. Sharpe wrote a number of other novels as well, including the academic satire Porterhouse Blue (1974), and The Great Pursuit (1977), a satire taking aim at the world of publishing and literary criticism.

Sharpe wrote less in his later years; he suffered from diabetes and other health problems. By the time of his death at age 85, he had been living in Spain for some years with his second wife, American Nancy Looper (with whom he had three daughters), though he never bothered to learn the language. He had said, “I don’t want to learn a language. I don’t want to hear what the price of meat is.” But he and his novels were very popular in Spain, as well as England.

Have a fine and contemplative Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.