"To read a Shardlake novel is to be immersed in the turbulent world of the Tudors" | Tracy Borman reflects on the work of CJ Sansom

But it was his mystery novels set in Tudor England and featuring barrister Shardlake for which he was best known – and loved.

To read a Shardlake novel is to be immersed in the turbulent world of the Tudors: the cutthroat courts of Henry VIII and his son Edward VI, the religious and social upheaval of the Reformation, and the sights, smells and sounds of 16th-century London.

A succession of seismic events, such as Henry’s rapid succession of wives, his break with Rome and the sinking of the Mary Rose, provides the backdrop to Shardlake’s sleuthing. But what Sansom’s novels bring so vividly to life is the often-devastating impact that these events had on the lives of the ordinary people of Tudor England.

His debut novel was inspired by Sansom’s fascination with the Tudors and his love of crime novels, as well as his home county of Sussex. Published in 2003, Dissolution is set in a fictional monastery on the Sussex coast on the eve of Henry VIII’s piecemeal dissolution of the monasteries. The seventh in the series, Tombland (2018), takes as its theme Kett’s Rebellion of 1549.

At the time of his death, Sansom was working on an eighth, titled Ratcliff, set in the closing year of Edward VI’s reign.

The spark of Sansom's historical fiction

What sets the Shardlake novels apart from most other historical fiction is the depth of research that Sansom undertook to ensure that they were as accurate and authentic as possible.

“The problem with history – and the further back you go, the truer this is – is that there are all sorts of gaps,” he once remarked.

“With Tudor times, information is sparse: things have single or contradictory sources. But where there are established facts, I do everything I can to insert the story around them.”

Sansom was well qualified for that task, having read history to PhD level at the University of Birmingham before leaving academia for a career in the law. Although he observed that a novel “cannot offer the accuracy you’d get in an academic article,” his research for each Shardlake novel was meticulous and extensive.

In researching Sovereign (2006) – the third book in the series, which is based around Henry VIII’s tumultuous northern progress of 1541 – Sansom made a discovery so significant that he published an academic paper about it. The abortive Wakefield Plot of March 1541 is often overlooked, but Sansom’s research proved what a threat it was to Henry VIII’s regime and how the progress (which was armed) was at least partly in response to it. Each novel also ends with an extensive bibliography and a scrupulous historical note to explain exactly how the author has interpreted the facts to serve the interests of the story.

Plots twist and turn and are never predictable. Many times, I have smugly identified whodunnit by the end of the first chapter, only to have my conclusions shattered by the end of the last.

Bringing Tudor England to life

Another mark of a great novelist is the crafting of characters that are as convincing as they are compelling. Here again, Sansom reigns supreme. Kings, queens, courtiers, lawyers, laymen and priests, rich and poor, virtuous and corrupt, famous and obscure; his characters are so startingly life-like that it feels as if they could step from the page at any moment.

The star of the show is, of course, Matthew Shardlake, a solitary, physically-challenged and slightly irascible lawyer: in short, the unlikeliest of heroes. Although professionally successful, his scoliosis brings him both physical and emotional pain. It also marks him as an outsider in a superstitious age that regarded people with physical disabilities as unlucky – or, in Richard III’s case, plain evil.

• Read more | Why Tudor perspectives on disability might surprise you

Although Sansom claimed that the character of Shardlake dropped into his head ‘fully formed’, it is tempting to see an element of the autobiographical here. Just as Charles Dickens had much in common with David Copperfield, so Sansom shares some facets with his novels’ hero. Both he and Shardlake were unmarried former lawyers who specialised in representing the less privileged and were prone to bouts of depression.

The protagonist’s jovial, handsome and unshakeably loyal sidekick, Jack Barak, is the perfect foil. The growth of their friendship is one of the most touching elements of the series. It is telling that another close friend of Shardlake’s, Guy Malton, a Moorish healer turned Christian monk, is a fellow outsider in a world deeply suspicious of difference.

As well as evoking the Tudor past, Sansom’s novels have plenty of resonance with modern-day Britain. “Political plotting is eternal and Henry VIII inserts himself into the lives of his subjects in a way that no English monarch ever had. Spin takes on a new lease of life under Henry and Cromwell,” he said. As if to prove the point, shortly before resigning in 2019, the then-prime minister Theresa May inaugurated a miniature library (housed in a redundant phone box) in her constituency by donating her copy of Dissolution.

The Shardlake novels are arguably CJ Sansom’s greatest legacy and, now that they have finally begun to make the transition to the screen, they are set to attract swathes of new devotees across the world. Historians spend a lot of time quibbling over the merits and dangers of historical fiction and dramatisation.

But, for me, novels as carefully crafted and richly authentic as Sansom’s deserve to be celebrated not just for the pleasures they provide, but for the contributions they make to our understanding of the past.

• On the podcast | Historical consultant Peter Wagstaff on bringing Shardlake to the small screen