CJ Sansom obit

Author C.J. Sansom dies aged 71 days before launch of new Disney Plus TV series

 

He was not on the list.

Author Christopher John Sansom, best known as C.J. Sansom has died aged 71 just a few days before the Disney series based on his Shardlake series hits screens.

His death was announced by publisher Pan Macmillan, with managing director Lucy Hale saying the news had left them with ‘immense sadness’.

‘It has been our profound privilege and pleasure to be Chris’s publisher from the very beginning, and Pan Macmillan will continue to celebrate him and introduce many more readers to his extraordinary body of work for many years to come. We are all thinking of his friends at this very difficult time,’ she said in a statement.

Sansom initially worked as a solicitor before leaving the legal profession to become a full-time writer.

His best known work was the Shardlake series, a historical mystery series set in the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century.

The first book, Dissolution, was released in 2003 and was followed by six others with the most recent being 2018’s Tombland.

When announcing Sansom’s death, his publisher revealed he’d also been working on another novel in the series.

‘He was working on his new Shardlake novel, Ratcliff, when he died but his worsening health made progress painfully slow: his meticulous historical research and his writing were always so important to him,’ his longtime editor and publisher, Maria Rejt said.

His death also comes just days before the Disney Plus adaptation of his series is set to hit screens.

Arthur Hughes stars as the eponymous Matthew Shardlake, alongside Sean Bean as Thomas Cromwell, with the show launching on the streaming service on May 1.

After the books were previously set to be adapted by the BBC and then ITV, plans fell through before Disney announced last year it would be bringing the story to screen.

The four-part drama is based on the first book in the series and has been described as a ‘eerie whodunnit adventure, set in 16th century England during the dissolution of the monasteries’.

The other novels in the Shardlake series are Dark Fire, Sovereign, Revelation, Heartstone and Lamentation.

Sansom also wrote Winter in Madrid, a thriller set in Spain in 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and Dominion, an alternate history novel set in a Britain following a fictional Axis victory in World War II.

He won many accolades for his work, including the Crime Writers’ AssociationCartier Diamond Dagger Award for his outstanding contribution to the genre.

In her tribute, Rejt said the author was an ‘intensely private person’ who ‘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,’ she added.

One of Britain’s bestselling historical novelists, Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh.

He was educated at Birmingham University with a BA and then a PhD in history. After working in a variety of jobs, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer.

There are over three million copies of his novels in print.