CJ Sansom is an author who has found his metier writing historical whodunnit mysteries set in Tudor England with Shardlake as his hunchback lawyer hero. Maybe he chose a lawyer as before he became a full time author he practised as a solicitor.
He has written seven in the series (of which I have read read four, so far) set in the reign of Henry VIII but, onto a good thing, he says he will carry them on into the reign of Elizabeth I. His books are well researched and I cannot help but feel that after the third he was heartily fed up with Tudor England and opted to write about another period. The result, published in 2006, is Winter in Madrid.
One of the pleasures of reading Sansom is he does not oversimplify. I hope he might consider setting a novel in Ireland a hundred years ago. WiM begins in the Spanish civil war and continues into World War II. It has a cracking good plot but explains the complexities of those times. For instance, the delicate juggling act by Churchill and Samuel Hoare (British ambassador in Madrid) keeping Franco out of the war. Franco was of course ideologically in tune with Hitler but wanted to make sure Germany was going to win before committing himself and it was “a damned nice thing” in 1940 to keep him neutral. Again, I had thought Spain was split between Republicans and Fascists but Sansom lays bare the divisions within these ideologies.
If I may digress, a plot point in Jewel in the Crown is the fictional public school, Chillingborough. Sansom uses the same device by sending three of his central characters to Rookwood. I should mention that Samuel Hoare (later Viscount Templewood) gets harsh treatment in the novel, I think unfairly but it improves the plot. However, as I am now watching Fortunes of War, the 1987 TV adaptation of Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, I see he got off lightly. Manning really skewers the real people she worked with in the British Council in Bucharest, Athens and Cairo.
Spain has been a very important player through European history but could have been so much more powerful and influential had it not been so troubled by internal and often cruel divisions. WiM is so definitely worth a read; it has intrigue, mystery, hope, disappointment, romance, and an understanding of the human condition, but not necessarily a feel good ending for some of the principal characters. Thank you Christopher for your recommendation of C J Sansom; I will try his Tudor mysteries now.
I hope you are better now after your unpleasant accident following your visit to the Royal Opera House. Sounded Nasty.
Thank you for this recommend which I shall take up immediately, having finally come to understand the Spanish Civil War by reading Long Petal in the Sea, Isabel Allende, yes, niece of Salvador. The book provides a clear if excruciating picture of those times, and how the sentiments and people migrated to Chile. It enhanced considerably my recent trip to Spain