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| C.J. Sansom | |
British author Christopher John Sansom, author of the Shardlake series of crime novels under the pen name C.J. Sansom, died April 27, the Bookseller reported. He was 71. Sansom was awarded the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger Award in 2022 for his outstanding contribution to the genre.
Maria Rejt, his long-time editor and publisher, said: "An intensely private person, Chris wished from the very start only to be published quietly and without fanfare. But he always took immense pleasure in the public's enthusiastic responses to his novels and worked tirelessly on each book, never wanting to disappoint a single reader.
"He was working on his new Shardlake novel, Ratcliff, when he died but his worsening health made progress painfully slow: his meticulous historical research and his writing were always so important to him. I shall miss him hugely, not only as a wonderfully talented writer who gave joy to millions, but as a dear friend of enormous compassion and integrity."
His agent, Antony Topping, commented: "Chris did not seek the limelight, preferring to be known through his novels, and so in comparison with his fame and reputation relatively few people were lucky enough to know the person behind the work. He had an immense, far-reaching and deeply humane intelligence. His fans can see this in the novels but he applied it equally in his everyday dealings with friends, in his politics and his charitable acts.... He had a loathing of injustice of any kind and a special contempt for bullies."
Sansom was one of Britain's bestselling historical novelists, known in particular for his mystery novels featuring barrister Matthew Shardlake, set in Tudor England, the Guardian reported. He died just days before Shardlake, the TV adaptation of his debut novel, Dissolution, starring Arthur Hughes and Sean Bean, would be released on Hulu.
The first book in his Shardlake series, Dissolution (2003) was an immediate bestseller and nominated in two categories for the 2003 Crime Writers' Association Dagger awards. Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter called it "extraordinarily impressive." Six more Shardlake novels were published, with more than three million copies now in print, making it one of the most successful crime series of all time, the Guardian noted. His final published novel was Tombland.
"The problem with history--and the further back you go, the truer this is--is that there are all sorts of gaps," Sansom told the Guardian in 2010. "With Tudor times, information is sparse: things have single or contradictory sources. But where there are established facts, I do everything I can to insert the story around them."
Boyd Tonkin wrote in the Guardian: "A good man in trying times, his Shardlake became a firm friend to countless admirers. Erudite but approachable, his creator spoke engagingly about his work in a voice that bore soft traces of an Edinburgh upbringing. Above all, the one-time solicitor ceased never to explore the meaning of justice--or to tell timeless truths about power and its victims."