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.
This blend of high history and low murder might seem like an obvious narrative device now, but only because Sansom invented it. Many great writers have followed this pattern since, from Andrew Taylor to SJ Parris and beyond. But when Dissolution landed on the desk of Sansom’s agent, Antony Topping, the genre just did not exist. Topping went looking for comparative novels to help sell Dissolution into a publishing world that is notoriously averse to novelty, but there weren’t any. “I read the manuscript and I was astonished,” Topping says. “Chris did something I had never seen before. He identified a tipping point in history and animated it through character.”
Sansom, a Scotsman, began writing in his late forties after a decade working as a solicitor (like his protagonist). Dissolution and its sequel, Dark Fire, did moderately well. But in 2006 Sansom published something a little different, a literary spy thriller set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Winter in Madrid. This was a more well-trodden genre, and the book became a breakout bestseller. It gave Shardlake wings, and he went on to star in a total of seven chunky and immersive books. Shardlake is now reaching new audiences — a Disney+ series about his sleuthing launched earlier this month.
“I read the manuscript and I was astonished.”
The Tudor court was a gift to Sansom. His Henry VIII is normally offstage, obese and malevolent. Henry’s shifting religious strictures mean that human souls become political battlegrounds, and the stakes of choosing the wrong side in a theological civil war are high.
All the great characters of Tudor history march through Sansom’s books. In Dissolution we meet the menacing, competent Cromwell, six years before Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall made him the thinking reader’s favorite hard man. As Shardlake’s boss, he is frightening, mercurial and occasionally charming.
By Tombland, the last in the series published in 2018, it is 1549, Henry VIII is dead and Shardlake is taking orders from the young and imperious Princess Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Shardlake ages. He loves and loses, he falls and rises. His back hurts and his eyes weaken, and we come to know him like an old and beloved friend.
One of the best in the series is Lamentation, the sixth book. It opens with the burning of heretics. Henry VIII is sickening and believed to be dying. Catherine Parr, his clever and heretical last wife, has written a book about religion that is radical and dangerous. When the book disappears, Shardlake must track it down or Parr and her supporters could be destroyed. This is vintage Sansom. The mystery is rooted in real history, the suspense is unbearably taut and the deep research into faith and heresy is obvious, but unobtrusive.
As Shardlake’s popularity and success grew, so did Sansom’s imitators. Most of the best historical crime novelists working today cite him as a significant influence. There are no modern spy writers who do not define themselves against John le Carré, or fantasy writers untouched by JRR Tolkien. The same is true of Sansom. If you pick up a novel tomorrow that ties a murder to a king, or a serial killer to a pope, there is a small, hunchbacked lawyer lurking in that book’s genesis.
The job of a historian is to look backward, to find patterns and explain events. Writers of fiction set in the past must pin their vivid characters to a historical present, where the future is unknown and full of treacherous shadows. At this, Sansom was a master.
C. J. Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh. He died on April 27
Antonia Senior is a book critic for The Times of London and the author of several novels, including Treason’s Daughter and The Tyrant’s Shadow
