Dark Fire (69 page)

Praise for
D
ISSOLUTION

‘Remarkable . . . The sights, the voices, the very smell of this turbulent age seem to rise from the page’
P. D. J
AMES

‘Terrific . . . a remarkable, imaginative feat. It is a first-rate murder mystery and one of the most atmospheric historical novels I’ve read
in years’
Mail on Sunday

‘As clever and enthralling as
The Name of the Rose
. . . Matthew Shardlake deserves a place in the pantheon of detective fiction’
Tablet

‘Extraordinarily impressive. The best crime novel I have read this year’
C
OLIN
D
EXTER

A strong competitor to Umberto Eco’s great monastic whodunnit,
The Name of the Rose’
Scotland on Sunday

‘As good a new thriller as I have come across for years. The London of the 1530s smells real, the politics and the religious machinations are
delicious and Sansom’s voice rings true. His troubled hero Shardlake, doing Thomas Cromwell’s dread work in the burning monasteries, is a kind of Tudor Morse and a character to
treasure’
J
AMES
N
AUGHTIE
,
Sunday Times

‘
Dissolution
is not just a fascinating detective story, but a convincing portrait of a turbulent period’
Sunday Telegraph

Praise for
S
OVEREIGN

‘Don’t open this book if you have anything urgent pending. Its grip is so compulsive that, until you reach its final page, you’ll have to
be almost physically prised away from it. [
Sovereign
] pulls you, like its predecessors, into a tortuous world of Tudor terror . . . Exceptionally gifted at recreating the look, sound and
smell of the period, Sansom also excels at capturing its moral and intellectual climate . . . his remarkable talents really blaze out’
Sunday Times

‘Sansom is excellent on contemporary horrors. This is no herbs-and-frocks version of Tudor England, but a remorseless portrait of a violent, partly
lawless country . . . You can lose yourself in this world’
Independent

‘I have enjoyed C.J. Sansom’s series of historical novels set in Tudor England progressively more and more . . . Sansom has the perfect mixture
of novelistic passion and historical detail’
A
NTONIA
F
RASER
,
Sunday Telegraph
Books of the Year

‘A devilishly ingenious whodunnit . . . Sansom’s description of the brutality of Tudor life is strong stuff, but he is a master
storyteller’
Guardian

‘A brilliant evocation of tyranny in Tudor England’
Literary Review

C. J. S
ANSOM
was educated at Birmingham University, where he took 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. Following
Dissolution, Dark Fire
is the second novel in his acclaimed Shardlake series and his
stand-alone thriller,
Winter in Madrid
, was a top 5 bestseller. He lives in Sussex.

Also by C. J. Sansom

WINTER IN MADRID

The Shardlake series

DISSOLUTION

SOVEREIGN

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for
Dark Fire
took me to some widely varied sources. While I was in the early stages of writing this book, by great good fortune Channel 4 Television showed
a documentary,
Machines Time Forgot, Fireship
(2003) in which Professor John Haldon of Birmingham University successfully re-created Greek Fire and the apparatus that fired it. I have
modelled the apparatus and the formula in
Dark Fire
on his reconstruction, and I am grateful to him and to the programme.

I am indebted to a number of books on Tudor London, most especially Liza Picard’s
Elizabeth’s London
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) as well as Gamini Salgado’s
The
Elizabethan Underworld
(Sovereign, 1977). John Schofield’s
Medieval London Houses
(Yale University Press, 1995) and John Stow’s
Survey of London
(first published 1598;
reprinted 1999, Guernsey Press Co.) took me back to the houses and streets of the Tudor City.
The A–Z of Elizabethan London
(Harry Margary, 1979) enabled me to follow my characters
from place to place.

Sir John H. Baker’s monumental
Introduction to English Legal History
(Butterworths, 1971) was invaluable on the legal side; Adrienne Mayor’s
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and
Scorpion Bombs – Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World
(Overlook Press, 2003) was very helpful on the history of Greek Fire, and Allan G. Debus’s
Man and Nature in
the Renaissance
(Cambridge University Press, 1978) opened up the world of medieval alchemy to me. Rena Gardiner’s stunningly illustrated
The Story of St
Bartholomew the
Great
(Workshop Press, 1990) was a mine of information on St Bartholomew’s Priory, one of the best survivals from the dissolution in England. I have invented the tradition of burying
people with some items associated with their early lives.

I am grateful to James Dewar of the Lincoln’s Inn treasurer’s office for showing me round the Great Hall, to Mrs Bernstein of the Jewish Museum, London, for guiding me to sources on
the history of English Jewry and English Jewish names, and to Victor Tunkel of the Selden Society for the Study of Legal History for his help on sources for legal studies of the period. Needless to
say, any errors are my own.

While I was in the early stages of researching this book I was involved in a serious road accident. My heartfelt thanks go to a number of people without whose help and encouragement I doubt the
book would have been finished anything like on time. First of all to Mike Holmes and Tony Macaulay for their advice to a scientific illiterate on how the fraud on Cromwell could actually have been
carried out. Without their aid I would have been completely at sea. Thanks particularly to Mike for guiding me to the conclusion that there was nothing around at the time that would have made a
credible substitute for petroleum, and to Tony for the idea of the vodka.

Thanks again to Mike and Tony, and also to Roz Brody, Jan King and William Shaw for reading the book in draft and making valuable comments. Thanks also to my agent, Antony Topping, for his
comments and all his help generally, to my editors Maria Rejt and Kathryn Court, to Liz Cowen for her excellent copy-editing, and last but not least to Frankie Lawrence for her typing and for going
to London to find books for me while I was housebound.

First published 2004 by Macmillan

First published in paperback 2005 by Pan Books

This edition published 2007 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2008 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-0-330-50364-8 PDF
ISBN 978-0-330-50363-1 EPUB

Copyright © C. J. Sansom 2004

The right of C.J. Sansom to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic,
digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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