CJ Sansom obituary

The novelist CJ Sansom, who has died aged 71, saw the dream of many aspiring writers come true when in mid-career he swapped a routine occupation for the life of a widely acclaimed, chart-topping novelist. By 2020, the former lawyer’s Shardlake historical mysteries had sold almost 4m copies. He built up a fan-base vast enough to guarantee that a new title would enter the UK bestseller charts at number one.

Sansom’s switch, however, was no lucky break but the fruit of deep thought, hard work and struggle against stiff odds. He overcame the blight of intense early suffering to create a much-loved series of novels conspicuous for their intelligence, integrity and humanity. An underlying idealism united the two, very different, halves of his professional life.

His debut novel Dissolution (2003) introduced the hunchbacked Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake, who investigates a death at a Sussex monastery menaced by the assault on England’s religious orders led by Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Over the next decade, further Shardlake titles appeared, and succeeded, at regular intervals: Dark Fire (2004), which won the Crime Writers’ Association award for historical fiction, Sovereign (2006), Revelation (2008), Heartstone (2010) and Lamentation (2014), with a plot set in the paranoid, heresy-hunting atmosphere of London during the final act of Henry VIII’s reign.

Set in London, Sussex, Norwich, Portsmouth and York, the books map not just the topographies but the mentalities of mid 16th-century England. They indirectly mirror, too, the political ferments of Sansom’s own age: Heartstone sees a spin-obsessed king unleash a disastrous foreign war. The seventh Shardlake novel, Tombland, its writing delayed by the author’s serious illness, appeared in 2018.

He claimed that the character of Shardlake, the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer disfigured from childhood, dropped into his head “fully formed”. Shardlake finds himself reluctantly immersed in the cruel and devious political intrigues of the 1530s and 40s. He remains a reflective outsider who seeks to help those bruised or crushed by the upheavals of an age of tumult. His disability gives him solidarity with outcast people.

In an interview, Sansom once spoke of the depression left by his early anguish as “the monkey on my back all my life”. The connection with his series hero could hardly be clearer.

Shardlake is both a man of his times – all the books rest on a bedrock of thorough, sometimes original, historical research – and a credible proxy for the 21st-century reader in the dogma-driven era of Henry VIII and his heirs. Sceptical, curious, free-thinking, he has sympathy with the Protestant reformers but feels alienated from the savage realpolitik practised by his patron, Cromwell.

Shardlake dwells in a sharply rendered, richly detailed Tudor England but stands outside it by virtue of his inquisitive, open-minded humanism. “I’m not saying a man like Shardlake did exist then,” Sansom commented, “but he could have, where even 20 years earlier he couldn’t.”

Born in Edinburgh, Chris was the son of a Scottish mother, Ann, and English father, Trevor, a naval engineer. An only child, he remembered his upbringing as Presbyterian, constrained and conservative (“with a small and a capital C”). Later, this private man who shunned attention-seeking gestures would nonetheless emerge as a vehement opponent of Scottish nationalism – part of his general distrust of any “politics based on national identity”, which he found “anti-rational, demagogic” and always destructive.

His Shardlake novels depict the dilemmas and ordeals that face a sensitive, compassionate man in a brutal and treacherous society. Sansom’s own, formative experience of persecution and survival under a despotic system took place at school. At the elite George Watson’s college in south Edinburgh, he endured sustained bullying that left him on the brink of suicide. Much later, he revealed that his “inattention” – which today might be diagnosed as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) – had made him the scapegoat of “vicious” teachers and pupils alike.

He described his school-age self as “seriously mentally ill: completely isolated … consumed with rage, plagued by migraines and tormented by thoughts of suicide and burning down the school”. At the age of 15, he took a “massive” overdose of his mother’s sleeping pills. Despite, or perhaps because of, this teenage misery, he developed a profound interest in history, politics and the workings of state power that would fuel both wings of his career. While still young, he recalled, “I arrived in my head at a sort of radical, independent socialist position which … I’ve basically retained.”

Sansom’s harrowing schooldays led to a spell as a voluntary in-patient at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. “I think the staff there saved my life,” he remembered, “just as Watson’s almost destroyed it.”

At Birmingham University he studied history as an undergraduate, then stayed on to research a PhD on mid-century Labour party policy towards South Africa. Rather than continue with academia, however, he qualified as a solicitor and spent much of the 1980s and 90s devoted to legal aid work, seeking to help vulnerable people. Living in Brighton, he attended writers’ groups as a hobby but never considered literature as a means to earn his living.

In 2000, his father’s death left him with a small legacy. He decided, without much hope, to try his hand at full-time fiction, though allowed for the possibility that: “I would be back in the law within the year.”

To his surprise, Dissolution rapidly found an agent. Publishers bid eagerly for the title (with Pan Macmillan becoming his UK home). Inspired in part by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, it reached two prize shortlists, and won over not only crime-fiction fans but a broad span of readers fascinated by the Tudor period and the distant mirror it holds up to our own fragmented times. Sansom had discovered, as he said, “how like the 20th century it was in its anxiety and uncertainty, even though people thought so differently then”.

Dissolution preceded Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall by six years in its portrayal of Cromwell and his circle – although Sansom’s chief minister is a much darker figure than Mantel’s. Among authors of historical mysteries set in medieval or early-modern England, he became a rare male luminary in a genre dominated by women, from pioneers such as Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter) to Sansom’s contemporaries, such as Susanna Gregory.

Over the next decade, the Shardlake titles became regular fixtures in the bestseller lists. Adapted versions for BBC Radio extended the books’ appeal, even though Sansom – who continued to live in Brighton – experienced more than a touch of imposter syndrome. “I still half expect to wake up in a meeting about the latest legal aid forms,” he once said.

His mass-market popularity won him some unlikely fans. Shortly before she resigned in 2019, the then prime minister Theresa May bizarrely inaugurated a miniature library (housed in a redundant phone box) in her constituency by donating her copy of one of Sansom’s books. No figure, and no event, could have been worse suited to a writer 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 talent: Winter in Madrid (2006), with its accomplished depiction of a captive nation, set in the Spanish capital during the gloomy aftermath of Franco’s victory in the civil war, and the remarkable Dominion (2012), which reanimates the hackneyed genre of counterfactual history with its chillingly believable account of Britain as a satellite state of Nazi Germany in 1952. “Given the right circumstances fascism can infest any country,” a character in Dominion remarks.

That novel presents Scottish nationalists as accomplices of fascism and ends with an afterword that excoriates the policies of the (actual) Scottish National party. In all Sansom’s books, history’s convulsions test thinking people who try to stay decent and honest in tough times. He acknowledged that he had “found myself particularly drawn to the moral dilemmas the literate classes often find themselves in at times of ideological conflict – whether Reformation England or the second world war”.

In 2012, Sansom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable bone-marrow cancer, and began to receive chemotherapy. Lamentation followed two years later, but medical treatment inevitably slowed his pace of work.

Yet the voluminous Tombland, published in 2018, proved one of the most richly imagined and researched of all his Tudor mysteries. Shardlake is caught up in the wave of rebellions that shake the realm of the boy-king Edward VI in 1549: “A colossal event that has been much underplayed”, in the author’s words. The typically scholarly essay attached to the book framed this emphasis on poor and marginal people as an overdue antidote to “the ‘royalisation’ of popular Tudor history”.

Sansom lived quietly in Brighton, on his own, and worked with a fierce dedication. Illness put a brake on his output but never doused his determination. He avoided the limelight, and once listed among his pet hates Facebook, Twitter and Christmas – as well as the “really ridiculous” television series, The Tudors.

In 2023 Sovereign, the third Shardlake novel, was staged by York Theatre Royal as a large-scale community production at King’s Manor, York, where much of the novel is set. A four-part television adaptation, Shardlake, directed by Justin Chadwick with Arthur Hughes as the eponymous lawyer and Sean Bean as Cromwell, is due to be screened on Disney+ this week.

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.

• Christopher John Sansom, novelist and lawyer, born 9 December 1952; died 27 April 2024