# Wilt

By Tom Sharpe · Wilt, book 1

Profile: https://hahafiction.com/books/wilt-347f9268/

Henry Wilt teaches literature to vocational students who have little interest in it, misses another promotion, and privately imagines killing his wife. After a humiliating party and Eva’s disappearance, Inspector Flint starts taking a much closer interest in the lecturer.

## What makes it funny?

A blow-up doll becomes the centerpiece of an exhumation scene: an absurd object receives the gravity of an investigation. In her review, Verena Kyratzes singles out that sequence and Wilt’s conversations with Inspector Flint as the book’s comic highlights.

### The comedy at work

Wilt begins as a man whose work and marriage leave him feeling powerless. Police suspicion gives him people who have to listen. The inquiry becomes another arena for frustration, with the supposed criminal flourishing while the officers struggle to make sense of him.

### Try this if…

Expect sexual farce, an embattled teacher and police conversations that become contests of endurance. Kyratzes found the opening slow, then much funnier after roughly sixty or seventy pages; that gradual buildup is part of the bargain.

### Good to know

This is the first Wilt novel. Fantasies of killing a spouse, graphic sexual material and a blow-up doll are central ingredients of its dark comedy.

## What to expect

- Genre: Contemporary & literary · Mystery
- On the shelf: Campus novel
- Kind of humor: Dark comedy · Farce · Satire
- The atmosphere: Irreverent
- Format: Novel
- Length: 336 pages
- Audiobook: Available
- Published: 1976

## A few distinguishing details

- A lecturer finally gets an attentive audience: the police
- A blow-up doll treated with investigative gravity

## Sources & further reading

- Publisher: [Print publisher](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/353838/wilt-by-sharpe-tom/9780099435488)
- Review: [Verena Kyratzes review](https://verena-kyratzes.net/2009/11/02/wilt)
- Publisher: [SNR Audio catalog](https://snr-audio.com/audiobooks)
- Book information: [Casa del Libro book description](https://www.casadellibro.com/libro-wilt/9780099435488/861336)
- Book information: [Tom Sharpe Chair bibliography](https://www.udg.edu/en/catedres/tom-sharpe/tom-sharpe/obra)