![]() Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. ![]() Sansom has given his hero his own passion for the law, its stately, logical protocols, its civility and rationalism. When we first meet him he’s in his mid-thirties, lives in a nice house in Chancery Lane, has a horse called Chancery, works in the Court of Chancery – you get the idea. He is a methodical and candid narrator there’s a hint that the novels are confessional memoirs written late in life. The appeal of the Tudor novels owes much to Sansom’s protagonist, a London lawyer named Matthew Shardlake. He has now sold more than three million books. Since then he has published another modern thriller, Dominion (2012), which imagines Britain under Nazi occupation, and six further books set in Tudor England, progressing from publishing success to phenomenon. ![]() He completed his Spanish Civil War novel, Winter in Madrid (2006), anyway. As it turned out, Dissolution (2003) was a bestseller and a sequel was commissioned. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more.’ Even then Sansom thought the book might flop, so he began another, set in 1930s Spain. ![]() He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. I n 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. ![]()
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