In 2003 (but really, 1537), a weary, hunchbacked lawyer on the trail of a killer stumbled into our bookshops for the first time and an entire genre of fiction — historical crime — was spawned. The lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, inhabited a vividly re-created Tudor world, investigating, dodging political intrigue and becoming embroiled in questions of faith, heresy and high treason. His creator, CJ Sansom, who died last month at the age of 72, was that rare thing: a writer who changed the literary world.
There was a scattering of historical crime novels before Shardlake. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, published in 1980, was a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery. Ellis Peters’s series of novels about the monastic sleuth Brother Cadfael also predates Shardlake. But whereas Peters and Eco wrote about small fragments of the past, Sansom anchored his whodunits to the great sweep of political history. For instance in the first book, Dissolution, we witness the destruction of the monasteries under the brutal direction of Thomas Cromwell through Shardlake’s investigation of a murder.
