Leslie Thomas, a top-selling British author who parlayed his experience as a soldier in Malaya into a darkly comic, wildly popular novel in which young troops strive to lose their virginity before they lose their lives, died on May 6 at his home near Salisbury, England. He was 83.
His website announced the death without giving a cause.
Of his more than 30 books — with total sales exceeding 10 million — Mr. Thomas’s most successful was his first novel, “The Virgin Soldiers,” published in 1966. It sold more than two million copies and was adapted into a 1969 movie of the same title starring Lynn Redgrave and Nigel Davenport. Other books mined his boyhood in an orphanage and his many years as a Fleet Street journalist.
“The Virgin Soldiers” tracks the joys, tribulations and absurdities experienced by conscripted British soldiers battling Asian Communists in the 1950s. Some likened its sardonic humor to that of “MASH,” the novel about American draftees in Korea that became a film and a television series.
“Unquiet desperation rules their existence,” the critic Charles Poore wrote of Mr. Thomas’s soldiers in The New York Times in 1966. He compared the book to “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller’s seminal antiwar novel from 1961.
Mr. Thomas’s war experience began in 1949, when he was drafted and sent to Singapore as a member of the Royal Army Pay Corps. His desk job left him time to sing with the army band at the landmark Raffles Hotel. There he fell in love with a taxi dancer, as women who danced with clients for a fee were called. When his unit was called up to fight Communist insurgents in the Malayan jungle, he was terrified, though the mission yielded ample material for combat scenes.
It was his comic augmentations of the real experience that tickled readers, who bought 500,000 copies of the book in its first six months. The lead character, Private Brigg, has himself circumcised to obtain two weeks’ sick leave. He has a shootout with workers from a laundry whom he mistakes for Chinese guerrillas. And then there is his effortful campaign to lose his virginity, either with Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of an officer, or with Juicy Lucy, a prostitute with the proverbial heart of gold.
“He had never had sex, and one of his most virulent fears was that he might, by some military mischance, get killed before he had known the experience,” Mr. Thomas wrote. “It was of huge importance, bigger, much bigger, than any of the other things he could think of living for, or, at least, that he would miss if he died.”
Lucy accommodates him.
Leslie John Thomas was born on March 22, 1931, in Newport, Wales. In his first book, “This Time Next Week: The Autobiography of a Happy Orphan” (1964), he wrote that his father, a merchant sailor, was seldom around and seldom sober when he was. He recalled praying during World War II, “Make Dad’s ship sink.”
He got his wish in 1943, when a German U-boat torpedoed his father’s ship. His mother died six months later, and Leslie was sent to an orphanage, where he avoided being bullied by larger boys by telling them stories.
He flunked out of bricklaying school but did better in a journalism course. At 17, he found a newspaper job in North London, first folding newspapers and then reporting.
After spending 1949-50 in the army, Mr. Thomas found work with a news agency, then with The Evening News, a London daily, as a feature writer. He covered the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann.
After “The Virgin Soldiers,” he wrote novels at the rate of almost one a year. Two were sequels: “Onward Virgin Soldiers” (1971) and “Stand Up Virgin Soldiers” (1975), which was also made into a movie, in 1977.
Mr. Thomas’s first marriage, to Maureen Crane, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Diana Miles; two sons and a daughter from his first marriage; a son from his second; and four grandchildren.
In 2004, Mr. Thomas was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to literature. He sometimes wore the medal that accompanied the award, along with several military medals that he and his father had received.
“I try to keep a serious face” in those moments, he said, “but I look so lugubrious that it looks as though I am about to die.”
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