Behind its nonsensical plot about a darts-playing numbskull a feckless posh git and a

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Behind its nonsensical plot about a darts-playing numbskull, a feckless posh git and a glacial, death-obsessed "murderee" called Nicola Six who all meet, a little implausibly, in a Bayswater pub, Amis spun huge word-pictures of the sickliness of planet Earth, the ulceration of the ozone layer. Descriptive riffs about darts matches, or the homicidal baby Marmaduke, came around and around, but many readers gave up 100 pages before the end, weary of the vaudeville-turn characters, sated with the special effects. Had they persevered, they'd have found the ending mystifying.Time's Arrow followed in 1991, a bold experiment to write about the Holocaust from the point of view of a Nazi doctor, who copes with his memories by running his life backwards, so that terrible things can seem ameliorative. It was brilliant, but many of the back-to-front conceits didn't work. The face behind the writing was too grimly obsessed with the horror of his subject to find the right satirical voice."His apocalyptic imagination is a constant feature," says James Walton, the critic and a long-term fan. "For a while he was big on nuclear weapons, and when they let him down by not causing the world to end, he turned to the weather in London Fields; then he went more metaphysical and wrote about the humiliation of finding out how puny we are in the universe - it was all a bit Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy..."After a hiatus, filled with family trauma, divorce and expensive teeth problems, he returned with The Information, a novel of literary jealousy, backlit by awful knowledge - the 46-year-old Amis informing his generation that we're all going to die.

He turned up on TV, confident, perma-smoking, talking in that curiously slouchy, mid-Atlantic drawl. Women claimed to reach spontaneous orgasm just by gazing at his sulky expression, his voluptuous mouth. Thank God (we said) he's so short, or he'd be unbearable.His early books were triumphs of style over content. The Rachel Papers was a hilarious despatch from Planet Nineteen-Year-Old, all spots, johnnies, sexual disgust with girls and the apotheosis of a literary smartarse. Dead Babies was essentially Ten Little Niggers crossed with The Old Devils and given a thrilling soundtrack of sex, drugs and street visions. Success began with a typical Amis pairing of repulsive low-life and sneery aristocratic achiever, and watched them swap roles in the heartless city.

With Other People: A Mystery Story, he stopped being funny; instead, his writing was out to unsettle you, make your flesh creep. For the first time in his work, but not the last, the ending made no sense.In 1984 came Money, in which Amis took on America, Hollywood, stardom, gigantic egos, massive cash and heavy debauchery in the persona of John Self, OD-ing on the 20th century. For an aspiring young hack on the Stow on the Wold Gazette, let alone an aspiring novelist, he was the Man He was the leader. Like Cromwell, he was our chief of men.We read everything he wrote - a review in The Observer, a science-fiction fantasy in Mayfair, even a one-off poem in the TLS He was sooooo cool. In 1983, when Granta produced its first "Best of Young British Novelists" promotion, Amis emerged as the obvious boss. If the generation of striking talents that came together in the early Eighties needed a leader, he seemed to be it.