LONDON — British creator C.J. Sansom, finest identified for his historic crime novels that includes the Tudor lawyer and investigator Matthew Shardlake, has died, his writer stated Monday. He was 71.
Pan Macmillan stated Christopher John Sansom was engaged on his newest Shardlake novel, “Ratcliff,” when he died Saturday after a interval of worsening well being.
Sansom launched the character of Shardlake in his first novel, “Dissolution,” a homicide thriller set in Tudor England within the sixteenth century. The title referred to King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
Revealed in 2003, the guide’s mixture of intriguing detective story and convincing historic particulars received Sansom crucial acclaim and lots of followers, and he went on to launch six extra novels that includes Shardlake.
“Dissolution” has been tailored right into a Disney+ sequence, and the present, starring actors Sean Bean and Arthur Hughes, is ready to be launched on Wednesday.
Sansom additionally penned two standalone historic thrillers, “Winter in Madrid” and “Dominion.” Over 3 million copies of his books are in print, his writer stated.
“An intensely personal particular person, Chris wished from the very begin solely to be printed quietly and with out fanfare,” his editor and writer, Maria Rejt, stated. “However he all the time took immense pleasure within the public’s enthusiastic responses to his novels and labored tirelessly on every guide, by no means eager to disappoint a single reader.”
Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh. He had a doctorate in historical past and educated as a solicitor earlier than changing into a full-time author.
In 2022 he received the Crime Writers’ Affiliation’s Diamond Dagger Award for his excellent contribution to the style. The affiliation known as him the “fashionable grasp of the historic thriller, no matter intervals.”
