The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Author dies days before airing of Disney+ drama
Author Christopher John Sansom, famed for his character of Matthew Shardlake, has died at the age of 71.
The historical novelist, known as CJ Sansom, died at the weekend.
Shardlake, a Tudor lawyer, was introduced in his first novel Dissolution, published 21 years ago.
He released six further novels featuring Shardlake, as well as two standalone historical novels, Winter In Madrid and Dominion.
His works have just been adapted into the series Shardlake, which features The Innocents star Arthur Hughes in the main role and Game Of Thrones actor
Sean Bean as Thomas Cromwell.
The first season of the Tudor murder-mystery series is to be released today on Disney+.
His literary agent Antony Topping called it an “extraordinarily strange coincidence that Chris has died only a handful of days before a new generation of fans will meet Matthew Shardlake”.
“This is also a moment for which Chris’s established fans have been waiting a long time,” he said.
Tributes to Sansom came in from fellow Scotsman and ex-police officer turned writer Denzil Meyrick as well as Scottish-Bengali crime writer Abir Mukherjee.
Writing on X, formerly Twitter, Mukherjee called Sansom “one of the finest ever writers of historical fiction”.
Meyrick wrote: “His colourful, superbly researched historical fiction especially, made him one of the most successful writers of his generation. God rest you, sir. You’ll be much missed.”
Sansom was a signatory to an 2014 open letter advocating that Scotland should remain in the UK. The author also donated £161,000 to the Better Together campaign, according to published accounts. His editor and publisher, Maria Rejt, 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.”
Born In Edinburgh in 1952, Sansom studied at Birmingham University, where he achieved a BA and PhD in history.
Before becoming a fulltime writer, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex.