C.J. Sansom, bestselling author of historical mysteries, dies at 71

C.J. Sansom, who transported millions of readers to 16th-century England with his erudite, psychologically complex mystery novels about Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer-turned-investigator navigating political intrigue during the Tudor era, died April 27 at a hospice center near his longtime home in Brighton, England. He was 71.

The cause was multiple myeloma, said Maria Rejt, his publisher and editor at Mantle, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.

A former lawyer with a PhD in history, Sansom was 50 when he published his debut novel, “Dissolution,” in 2003. Set in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII was taking control of monasteries and other Catholic church lands across England, the book marked the first appearance of Shardlake, a lawyer dispatched to investigate the murder of one of Thomas Cromwell’s government commissioners at a monastery in Scarnsea, a fictional town on the English coast.

The novel recalled Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” another murder mystery set within an isolated monastery, and became an unexpected hit for Sansom, who had sent the manuscript out before going on vacation, “thinking that when I came back the rejection slips would be coming in.”

Over the next 15 years, he published six more Shardlake books as well as the stand-alone thrillers “Winter in Madrid” (2006), set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and “Dominion” (2012), which imagined an alternative postwar world in which Britain was a satellite state of Nazi Germany. More than 3 million copies of his novels are now in print, and “Shardlake” – a four-part adaptation of his first book – is slated to premiere Wednesday on Hulu (on Disney Plus overseas), starring Arthur Hughes as the titular investigator and Sean Bean as Cromwell.

Often described as a Tudor version of Inspector Morse, the sullen but sympathetic detective character created by novelist Colin Dexter, Shardlake was Sansom’s bestknown literary creation, traveling across England in the midst of war, famine and revolt while suffering at times from “melancholy humors.”

Set apart by temperament as well as physique (he is an honorable man surrounded by hypocrites, labeled a “crookback” by colleagues who mock his scoliosis), Shardlake works for patrons including Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury; Catherine Parr, the last of Henry’s six wives; and the king’s younger daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I, who dispatches him to investigate the murder of a distant relative in “Tombland” (2018), Sansom’s last and longest published novel.

“Oh, goody! An 800page novel about the peasant uprisings of 1549!” New York Times book critic Marilyn Stasio wrote at the outset of her review.