It is arduous work, requiring travel hither and yon, and mentally draining to see the look of fear and barely suppressed loathing that people feel for a representative of Cromwell.
Shardlake has become disillusioned about working for Cromwell. I had just been introduced to Matthew Shardlake when he is summoned to the office of Lord Thomas Cromwell. The monastery was founded in the 12th century and abandoned during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. I had tried to keep my doubts, my weariness, to myself surely I had told nobody.”Ī view eastwards along the chancel of the church at the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx Abbey in the Yorkshire Wolds. You would look up again to find those hard brown eyes still boring into you. Lord Cromwell had the trick of staring fixedly at you, unblinking, until you felt compelled to drop your gaze. ‘Lacking in fire and godly zeal, even perhaps in loyalty.’ ‘Some say you are soft, Matthew, ‘ he said quietly. ‘The papists will use every means to present us from building the christian commonwealth, and so God’s blood I will use every means to overcome them.’ This is a violent realm, stewed in the corruption of a decadent church.’ ”’This is not Thomas More’s Utopia, a nation of innocent savages waiting only for God’s word to complete their happiness. Sansom himself was "Very Highly Commended" in the 2007 CWA Dagger in the Library award, for the Shardlake series.
He has also written Winter in Madrid, a thriller set in Spain in 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.ĭark Fire won the 2005 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, awarded by the Crime Writers' Association (CWA). Sansom has been consulted on the series, which is in the final stages of negotiation. The rest of the Shardlake books are expected to follow. The BBC have commissioned an adaptation of Dissolution with the actor Kenneth Branagh set to star as Shardlake. Shardlake works on commission initially from Thomas Cromwell in Dissolution and Dark Fire and then Thomas Cranmer in Sovereign and Revelation. He came to prominence with his series set in the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century, whose main character is the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake. He practised for a while in Sussex as a lawyer for the disadvantaged, before quitting in order to work full-time as a writer. After working in a variety of jobs, he decided to retrain as a solicitor. He was born in 1952 and was educated at the University of Birmingham, where he took a BA and then a PhD in history. Christopher John "C.J." Sansom is an English writer of crime novels.
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