Simon Gray has indeed smoked his last cigarette. A few months after publishing the Last Cigarette, the blackly funny book which was intended as the final volume of his memoirs, The Smoking Diaries, and a few weeks after completing Coda, which really is the last volume, the author renowned as much for the epic scale of his drinking and smoking as for his plays and books has died.

He had already renounced his former four bottles of champagne a day habit, and was determined to get down to five cigarettes a day, but was diagnosed last year with lung cancer. Much to his own surprise he passed his three score years and ten and outlived many of his closest friends, including the actor Alan Bates, star of his first stage success, Butley.

"We're all still reeling at the news," a spokeswoman said at Granta publications, which is due to publish Coda, a characteristically brutally frank account of his battle with cancer, in November.

His career began as an academic, lecturing on English literature for decades, before taking up writing comparatively late in life and mining his own experiences for material. He often created tremendous roles for slightly sad middle aged men, like many of the characters played by Bates, and Edward Fox's memorable performance in the 1987 Quartermaine's Terms, probably Gray's best known play - set in a language school in Cambridge very like the one where he had taught himself.

He wrote more than 30 plays, for stage, screen and radio, as well as books and innumerable essays. His technique when stuck with a piece of writing, he once wrote, was to creep up on it unawares and wrestle it into submission.

He was working on a dramatisation of The Last Cigarette - a play which will struggle to get round the laws against smoking in enclosed public places.