Watered Down
Dec. 5th, 2010 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

C.J. Sansom, Dissolution, 2010
The pages of this novel open at the start of the English Reformation, when Thomas Cromwell, in behalf of King Henry, began to smoke out papists by dissolving all monasteries (a few years after Anny Boleyn's execution). When one of Cromwell's commissioners is found beheaded in a remote monastery, Cromwell hires hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake to investigate and catch the culprit before news gets out and papist passions are stirred across the land. There are two problems though: Matthew Shardlake ain't no Poirot and C.J. Sansom ain't no Hilary Mantel.
I can't imagine anything harder than a historical novel which is also a murder mystery. Not only do you need to develop an intriguing plot that delivers a bona fide mystery but you must get all the historical information right. Dissolution quickly gives away its murderer through poorly placed red herrings, then stumbles on a few historical inaccuracies - the most glaring for me being an English sailor mentioning to Shardlake shipment of slaves to the Americas nearly two decades before the birth of Portugal's slave trade. Another inaccuracy that nagged me was the use of the word bully in its modern context; I researched and it turns out that it meant "lover" at the time and not someone who intimidates others.
Otherwise, it's a pleasant enough read with enough corpses popping up here and there until the predictable conclusion. Since this is the first of a fairly popular detective series, I'm hoping the follow ups are better written. I'm probably better off though re-reading the infinitely superior The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.