The novelist CJ Sansom, who has died aged 71, noticed the dream of many aspiring writers come true when in mid-career he swapped a routine occupation for the lifetime of a broadly acclaimed, chart-topping novelist. By 2020, the previous lawyer’s Shardlake historic mysteries had offered virtually 4m copies. He constructed up a fan-base huge sufficient to ensure {that a} new title would enter the UK bestseller charts at primary.
Sansom’s change, nevertheless, was no fortunate break however the fruit of deep thought, exhausting work and wrestle towards stiff odds. He overcame the blight of intense early struggling to create a much-loved sequence of novels conspicuous for his or her intelligence, integrity and humanity. An underlying idealism united the 2, very totally different, halves of his skilled life.
His debut novel Dissolution (2003) launched the hunchbacked Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake, who investigates a dying at a Sussex monastery menaced by the assault on England’s non secular orders led by Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Over the subsequent decade, additional Shardlake titles appeared, and succeeded, at common intervals: Darkish Fireplace (2004), which gained the Crime Writers’ Affiliation award for historic fiction, Sovereign (2006), Revelation (2008), Heartstone (2010) and Lamentation (2014), with a plot set within the paranoid, heresy-hunting ambiance of London through the ultimate act of Henry VIII’s reign.
Set in London, Sussex, Norwich, Portsmouth and York, the books map not simply the topographies however the mentalities of mid Sixteenth-century England. They not directly mirror, too, the political ferments of Sansom’s personal age: Heartstone sees a spin-obsessed king unleash a disastrous overseas struggle. The seventh Shardlake novel, Tombland, its writing delayed by the writer’s critical sickness, appeared in 2018.
He claimed that the character of Shardlake, the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer disfigured from childhood, dropped into his head “absolutely fashioned”. Shardlake finds himself reluctantly immersed within the merciless and devious political intrigues of the 1530s and 40s. He stays a reflective outsider who seeks to assist these bruised or crushed by the upheavals of an age of tumult. His incapacity provides him solidarity with outcast folks.
In an interview, Sansom as soon as spoke of the despair left by his early anguish as “the monkey on my again all my life”. The connection together with his sequence hero might hardly be clearer.
Shardlake is each a person of his occasions – all of the books relaxation on a bedrock of thorough, typically authentic, historic analysis – and a reputable proxy for the Twenty first-century reader within the dogma-driven period of Henry VIII and his heirs. Sceptical, curious, free-thinking, he has sympathy with the Protestant reformers however feels alienated from the savage realpolitik practised by his patron, Cromwell.
Shardlake dwells in a sharply rendered, richly detailed Tudor England however stands outdoors it by advantage of his inquisitive, open-minded humanism. “I’m not saying a person like Shardlake did exist then,” Sansom commented, “however he might have, the place even 20 years earlier he couldn’t.”
Born in Edinburgh, Chris was the son of a Scottish mom, Ann, and English father, Trevor, a naval engineer. An solely little one, he remembered his upbringing as Presbyterian, constrained and conservative (“with a small and a capital C”). Later, this personal man who shunned attention-seeking gestures would nonetheless emerge as a vehement opponent of Scottish nationalism – a part of his common mistrust of any “politics primarily based on nationwide identification”, which he discovered “anti-rational, demagogic” and all the time harmful.
His Shardlake novels depict the dilemmas and ordeals that face a delicate, compassionate man in a brutal and treacherous society. Sansom’s personal, formative expertise of persecution and survival beneath a despotic system occurred in school. On the elite George Watson’s faculty in south Edinburgh, he endured sustained bullying that left him on the point of suicide. A lot later, he revealed that his “inattention” – which in the present day is perhaps identified as Consideration Deficit Hyperactivity Dysfunction (ADHD) – had made him the scapegoat of “vicious” lecturers and pupils alike.
He described his school-age self as “critically mentally unwell: fully remoted … consumed with rage, affected by migraines and affected by ideas of suicide and burning down the college”. On the age of 15, he took a “huge” overdose of his mom’s sleeping tablets. Regardless of, or maybe due to, this teenage distress, he developed a profound curiosity in historical past, politics and the workings of state energy that may gasoline each wings of his profession. Whereas nonetheless younger, he recalled, “I arrived in my head at a kind of radical, impartial socialist place which … I’ve mainly retained.”
Sansom’s harrowing schooldays led to a spell as a voluntary in-patient at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. “I feel the workers there saved my life,” he remembered, “simply as Watson’s virtually destroyed it.”
At Birmingham College he studied historical past as an undergraduate, then stayed on to analysis a PhD on mid-century Labour social gathering coverage in direction of South Africa. Moderately than proceed with academia, nevertheless, he certified as a solicitor and spent a lot of the Eighties and 90s dedicated to authorized support work, looking for to assist susceptible folks. Dwelling in Brighton, he attended writers’ teams as a interest however by no means thought-about literature as a method to earn his residing.
In 2000, his father’s dying left him with a small legacy. He determined, with out a lot hope, to attempt his hand at full-time fiction, although allowed for the likelihood that: “I’d be again within the legislation inside the 12 months.”
To his shock, Dissolution quickly discovered an agent. Publishers bid eagerly for the title (with Pan Macmillan turning into his UK dwelling). Impressed partially by Umberto Eco’s The Title of the Rose, it reached two prize shortlists, and gained over not solely crime-fiction followers however a broad span of readers fascinated by the Tudor interval and the distant mirror it holds as much as our personal fragmented occasions. Sansom had found, as he stated, “how just like the twentieth century it was in its nervousness and uncertainty, though folks thought so otherwise then”.
Dissolution preceded Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Corridor by six years in its portrayal of Cromwell and his circle – though Sansom’s chief minister is a a lot darker determine than Mantel’s. Amongst authors of historic mysteries set in medieval or early-modern England, he turned a uncommon male luminary in a style dominated by girls, from pioneers comparable to Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter) to Sansom’s contemporaries, comparable to Susanna Gregory.
Over the subsequent decade, the Shardlake titles turned common fixtures within the bestseller lists. Tailored variations for BBC Radio prolonged the books’ attraction, though Sansom – who continued to dwell in Brighton – skilled greater than a contact of imposter syndrome. “I nonetheless half anticipate to get up in a gathering in regards to the newest authorized support kinds,” he as soon as stated.
His mass-market reputation gained him some unlikely followers. Shortly earlier than she resigned in 2019, the then prime minister Theresa Could bizarrely inaugurated a miniature library (housed in a redundant cellphone field) in her constituency by donating her copy of considered one of Sansom’s books. No determine, and no occasion, might have been worse suited to a author who believed in a properly-funded public sector and detested the politics of nationalism and xenophobia.
Sansom’s two non-Tudor novels proved the breadth of his expertise: Winter in Madrid (2006), with its completed depiction of a captive nation, set within the Spanish capital through the gloomy aftermath of Franco’s victory within the civil struggle, and the exceptional Dominion (2012), which reanimates the hackneyed style of counterfactual historical past with its chillingly plausible account of Britain as a satellite tv for pc state of Nazi Germany in 1952. “Given the fitting circumstances fascism can infest any nation,” a personality in Dominion remarks.
That novel presents Scottish nationalists as accomplices of fascism and ends with an afterword that excoriates the insurance policies of the (precise) Scottish Nationwide social gathering. In all Sansom’s books, historical past’s convulsions take a look at pondering individuals who attempt to keep respectable and sincere in powerful occasions. He acknowledged that he had “discovered myself significantly drawn to the ethical dilemmas the literate courses typically discover themselves in at occasions of ideological battle – whether or not Reformation England or the second world struggle”.
In 2012, Sansom was identified with a number of myeloma, an incurable bone-marrow most cancers, and started to obtain chemotherapy. Lamentation adopted two years later, however medical therapy inevitably slowed his tempo of labor.
But the voluminous Tombland, revealed in 2018, proved some of the richly imagined and researched of all his Tudor mysteries. Shardlake is caught up within the wave of rebellions that shake the realm of the boy-king Edward VI in 1549: “A colossal occasion that has been a lot underplayed”, within the writer’s phrases. The usually scholarly essay connected to the e book framed this emphasis on poor and marginal folks as an overdue antidote to “the ‘royalisation’ of standard Tudor historical past”.
Sansom lived quietly in Brighton, on his personal, and labored with a fierce dedication. Sickness put a brake on his output however by no means doused his willpower. He prevented the limelight, and as soon as listed amongst his pet hates Fb, Twitter and Christmas – in addition to the “actually ridiculous” tv sequence, The Tudors.
In 2023 Sovereign, the third Shardlake novel, was staged by York Theatre Royal as a large-scale neighborhood manufacturing at King’s Manor, York, the place a lot of the novel is ready. A four-part tv adaptation, Shardlake, directed by Justin Chadwick with Arthur Hughes because the eponymous lawyer and Sean Bean as Cromwell, is because of be screened on Disney+ this week.
man in making an attempt occasions, his Shardlake a turned a agency pal to numerous admirers. Erudite however approachable, his creator spoke engagingly about his work in a voice that bore gentle traces of an Edinburgh upbringing. Above all, the one-time solicitor ceased by no means to discover the which means of justice – or to inform timeless truths about energy and its victims.
