Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9545 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Yorkshire Post
‘Abominably funny’

Auberon Waugh, Evening Standard
‘His best novel yet...Mr Sharpe has taken a great stride towards being considered a major craftsman in the art of farce’

Synopsis
Henry Wilt, tied to a daft job and a domineering wife, has just been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, joiners, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his massive wife, Eva, is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm - for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline. But if Wilt can do nothing about his job, he can do something about his wife, in imagination at least, and his fantasies grow daily more murderous and more concrete. After a peculiarly nasty experience at a party thrown by particularly nasty Americans, Wilt finds himself in several embarrassing positions: Eva stalks out in stratospheric dudgeon, and Wilt, under the inspiration of gin, puts one of his more vindictive fantasies into effect. But suspicions are instantly aroused and Wilt rapidly achieves an unenviable notoriety in the role of The Man Helping Police With Their Enquiries. Or is he exactly helping? Wilt's problem - although he's on the other side of the fence - is the same as Inspector Flint's: where is Eva Wilt?

But Wilt begins to flourish in the heat of the investigation, and as the police stoke the flames of circumstantial evidence, Wilt deploys all his powers to show that the Law can't tell a Missing Person from a hole in the ground.

Customer Reviews

thigh slappingly hilarious
Henry Wilt hasn't been promoted in ten years of work in further education. He is also down trodden somewhat by his wife Eva... or so it seems. Then the pair go to some pseudo intellectuals party (the Pringsheims) and all hell breaks loose after the hostess sets Wilt up in a compromising position with an inflatable doll after Wilt refuses to have sex with her. Following the discovery by Eva she buggers off with the Pringsheims leaving Henry to his increasingly warped thoughts. Soon he hatches a plan murder Eva at the risk of him being made to look a fool over the doll furore... this feeling is fuelled when Eva posts him another doll. Wilt decides to use it in place of Eva in a dummy murder run dumping it down a shaft at the tech where he works. Then when the builders are about to fill the hole they spot the doll and a hilarious story ensues. A must read!

Simply HIlarious
This is the funniest book I have ever read, hands down. If you have never laughed out loud at a book before, read this. You WILL be rolling around, laughing out loud like an idiot!
Tom Sharpe makes comic genius look like something that can be learned at a run-down Further Education college. Sadly it can't.

Superb!
The funniest book of all time! I was in hospital with a severe throat infection when I read it. It was agony to swallow or talk, let alone laugh. But after less than 20 pages the nurses has to take it off me as I was waking up the whole ward. Next day, I fell out of bed when I came to the bit about the greenhouse - the drip torn out of my arm. I was released from hospital 2 days later.