For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The result is never less than engrossing, with Judd putting the scanty known facts about the great playwright to ingenious use.
The story is narrated from the King’s Bench prison by Thomas Phelipps 30 years after Marlowe’s fatal stabbing in a Deptford rooming-house brawl. Phelipps is good company, a master cryptographer and key employee of the spy-master Francis Walsingham, yet a self-proclaimed ‘simple man’ who yearns to marry and settle down. These contradictions help make him as fascinating as the mercurial Marlowe, who he’s sent to recruit at Cambridge. Phelipps immediately senses that Marlowe needs ‘protection from himself… Expounding heresies excited him’. Yet he’s powerless to save him. A jejune loose cannon, Marlowe is already thrillingly amoral. A natural anarchist and atheist, with a zeal for disruption, he’s also ‘a cat that walked alone, always with something withheld’.
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