Dark Fire

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.

About the Author

C.J. SANSOM was educated at Birmingham University, where he took a BA and then a Ph.D. 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 on from his remarkable debut, Dissolution, Dark Fire is the second novel in his Shardlake series. He has recently completed working on a novel set in post Civil War Spain, Winter in Madrid, and is now writing the third crime novel to feature Shardlake, entitled Sovereign. He lives in Sussex.

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