Tom Sharpe, who has died in Spain at the age of 85, built a large and loyal following with best-selling books that combined farce, satire and vulgarity. Porterhouse Blue (1974) and Blott on the Landscape (1975) were among his best-known works and were successfully adapted for television in the 1980s. Porterhouse Blue saw the forces of tradition and change clash at an Oxbridge college, while Blott on the Landscape explored the impact of a road scheme on a country estate. But he was perhaps best known for his Wilt series, five novels detailing the comic misadventures of an accident-prone lecturer. The character, he said, "has the same uncertainties about the world that I have. But he carries them on into the enactment of fantasy and he tends to run into trouble." TOM SHARPE'S NOVELS Riotous Assembly (1971) Indecent Exposure (1973) Porterhouse Blue (1974) Blott on the Landscape (1975) Wilt (1976) The Great Pursuit (1977) The Throwback (1978) The Wilt Alternative (1979) Ancestral Vices (1980) Vintage Stuff (1982) Wilt on High (1984) Granchester Grind (1995) The Midden (1996) Wilt in Nowhere (2004) The Gropes (2009) The Wilt Inheritance (2010) "My advice, if you do go to jail, is to pick a murderer as a cellmate," he told Desert Island Discs' host Roy Plomley in 1984. "He's very clean and not the professional. Burglars tend to be rather dirty in my experience, and rapists are not particularly pleasant either." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22794761