Sansom Is Suddenly No More

Historical crime fiction endured a stinging blow this last weekend with the demise C.J. Sansom, the UK author of seven novels starring hunchbacked 16th-century lawyer and investigator Matthew Shardlake. He was 71 years old. Cause of death is described as “multiple myeloma, a rare cancer that affects bone marrow.” “His publisher confirmed the news,” reports The Guardian, “noting that Sansom died on 27 April, just days before Shardlake, the TV adaptation of Dissolution starring Arthur Hughes and Sean Bean, is released on Disney+ on 1 May.”

The newspaper goes on to recall that Christopher John Sansom, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on December 9, 1952, “was the only child of an English father and a Scottish mother, whom he described as ‘traditional Presbyterian’ and conservative ‘with a small and a capital C’. He developed socialist political leanings in his teens, and went on to study history at Birmingham University, attaining first a B.A. and then a Ph.D, with a thesis on the British Labour party’s policy towards South Africa between the wars. Later, he retrained as a lawyer and worked as a solicitor in Sussex, until he became a full-time writer.”

Sansom’s first novel, Dissolution, introduced Matthew Shardlake back in 2003. The Guardian describes it as “a classic closed-setting mystery set in a fictional monastery in Sussex on the eve of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. It was an immediate bestseller and was nominated for two categories in the 2003 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger awards.” That book led to a series, the most recent installment of which was Tombland (2018). Sansom was working on an eighth Shardlake novel, Ratcliff, at the time of his passing, but reports are unclear as to how far along he was in its completion.

In addition to the popular Shardlake yarns, Sansom penned a 2006 spy novel, Winter in Madrid, set in 1940 during the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Dominion, a 2012 alternative history thriller. In a column for the Kirkus Reviews Web site, I described Dominion as “a slow-burning but captivating” espionage yarn “that unrolls within a counter-factual world where Great Britain—after negotiating peace with Adolf Hitler following the 1940 Battle of Dunkirk—chafes under an increasingly authoritarian regime locked in goose step with the Nazis, no matter the psychological and human costs of that partnership.”

Sansom scored several award wins over the years, the foremost of which may have been his naming, in 2022, as the Crime Writers’ Association’s Diamond Dagger recipient. I shall miss looking forward to what splendid works of fiction he might produre next.