2008 is turning into a vintage year for my favourite crime series. We’ve already had great new books from among others, Boris Akunin, Philip Kerr and Jo Nesbo and there are new ones on the way by John Lawton, Alan Furst and Manuel Vazquez Montalban. This week it is the turn of CJ Sansom with Revelation, the fourth instalment of his mighty Mathew Shardlake series, set in the law courts, taverns, sewers, churches, palaces, alleyways and thoroughfares of seething Tudor London.

In the last episode, Sovereign, we left Brother Shardlake, “crookback” lawyer and sometime investigator of foul deeds, having only just survived political turmoil surrounding Henry VIII in the post Reformation years. Shardlake wants nothing more to do with murder or high politics and simply wants to be left alone to get on with solving property disputes on behalf of his tenant clients, with his assistant Barak and his doctor friend, Guy Malton.

But London is a divided city. Having broken with Rome and dissolved the monasteries, the King is now hankering after a return to the old Catholic ways. The Bishop of London, Bishop Bonner, has been granted license to arrest and torture those not following the new rules. It might be the beginning of an English Inquisition. At the other extreme, lies a plethora of fire and brimstone, puritanical secret societies, agitating across London and infiltrating public offices. In the middle, and under attack from both sides, are the embattled voices of moderate reform led by Archbishop Cranmer, who must prevent The King from overreacting to religious agitation and retreating from the modernising path.

When Brother Shardlake’s best friend and fellow lawyer is horribly murdered within the confines of Lincoln’s Inn, it seems there maybe a connection to the King’s latest wife to be, Catherine Parr. Catherine is an ally of moderate reform and therefore vital to Archbishop Cranmer. Cranmer insists Shardlake investigates his friend’s death before the superstitious King discovers the truth, ditches both Catherine Parr and reform, and London is led by Bishop Bonner into bloody religious turmoil.

In Revelation, having spent the first three novels (Dissolution, Dark Fire and Sovereign) building his Tudor world, Sansom dives straight into the story. And it’s a belter. Connections to two previous grisly murders are uncovered and when a fourth takes place, it becomes clear someone is murdering lapsed religious radicals according to scenarios from the nightmarish Book Of Revelations. Worse the murderer knows all Shardlake’s moves and must be close to the investigation, with Shardlake himself perhaps on the list of potential victims. Shardlake’s London is a world shaped by the apocalyptic religious madness that lie at the extremes of our own society and the plot unfolds against and around that madness.

Shardlake himself is a grumpy, maudlin presence, but is also resourceful, committed and loyal. He and Guy are both in some way outcasts – Shardlake as a hunchback, Malton as an Moorish ex-monk. Yet both are dogged moral presences, humanists, harbingers of Enlightenment thought yet to come. They are enemies of superstition, religious doubters committed to empirical truth – Shardlake through the Law and Malton through the his adherence to the new medical heresies of Vesalius in the face of orthodox (but useless) medical practice.

The story could have been an anachronism – placing the modern day supercunning, super enigmatic serial killer and ever more spectacular set-piece murders into Tudor London. But within the context of the Book of Revelations and the turmoil of the times, Revelation works splendidly. The series as a whole is now as good as any historical crime fiction set in this period – up to and including such genre classics as An Instance of The Fingerpost or The Name Of The Rose. In my world praise doesn’t come a great deal higher.

A couple of years ago, CJ Sansom took a holiday from the Shardlake series, with his excellent Spanish Civil War thriller Winter In Madrid. It hardly seems fair that one person should be allowed two such brilliant strings to their bow, but there you have it: with Revelation CJ Sansom has once again confirmed his place right at the forefront of historical crime fiction. Buy it.

Bookmark to