Riotous Assembly

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
cover art from paperback edition

A novel combining Farce and Satire by English comic writer Tom Sharpe, who was thrown out of The Apartheid Era South Africa for being a "subversive".

Emplying a deft and very amusing mixture of slapstick comedy and extreme irony, Sharpe gives a lacerating account of the Hazelstone family's war against the cruelty and incompetence of the police force of a provincial town in South Africa during the apartheid era. From the lowliest member of the force, Konstabel Els, to the senior officer, Kommandant van Heerden, they are shown to be uniformly inept and unimaginative and eventually come to rue the day they dared complain about the behavior of Miss Hazelstone or her brother, Bishop Hazelstone of Barotseland. The town of "Piemburg" is a thinly disguised version of Pietermauritzburg, where Sharpe lived and worked for ten years. Whether he is satirizing real people is up for debate, although it is known that one British-born Anglican bishop in South Africa who was opposed to apartheid had more than a usual parochial interest in the welfare of young African men in his flock. His name was not a million miles removed from "Hazelstone", either.

Character list:

  • Kommandant van Heerden - the ineffectual and cowardly police chief.
  • Liutnanat Verkramp - his certifiably insane political policeman, local head of BOSS.
  • Sergeant der Kock - long-time copper, cunning but not bright.
  • Konstabel Els - unspeakable psychopath who joined the police so that he could legally kill black men and rape black women.
  • Miss Hazelstone - local mem-sahib and matriarch with a fetish for rubber and black men.
  • Bishop Hazelstone of Barotseland - her brother. A churchman who is falsely accused of a crime.
  • A Dobermann - a guard dog who meets an unspeakable death. You wouldn't wish it on a dog.


Tropes used in Riotous Assembly include:


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