The Slicing Edge of Death - Hardcover

Another look at the tantalizingly unsolved murder of Christopher Marlowe, focusing on the motives provided by the playwright's membership in Sir Francis Walsingham's Cambridge Spies and Sir Walter Raleigh's School of the Night, a coven of dangerously freethinking young bucks. First-novelist Cook, a playwright and historian, posits so many possible reasons for Marlowe's death--his open homosexuality, his well-documented blasphemy, his inconvenient knowledge of state gossip--and so many spies trying to get the goods on him--from unofficial Privy Council Secretary Robert Cecil to crafty agent Robert Poley to two henchmen planted in Marlowe's acting company, the Lord Admiral's Men, who end up spying on each other--that it probably won't matter much to anybody but other historians which of these creatures ends up wielding the fatal dagger; and innocent playwright Thomas Kyd, arrested and tortured in the hope that he'll give evidence against his old roommate, rather steals the show from his more distinguished contemporary. Patient and thorough in sifting the evidence, though not in the same league as George Garrett's deeply imagined, darkly majestic Entered from the Sun (1990). -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Published as a mystery, this historical novel offers a fictional explanation for the death of Elizabethan playwright and poet, Christopher Marlowe. Cook expands on real-life theories that connect Marlowe's violent death with covert missions he carried out as an agent for Francis Walsingham, one of the queen's ministers. By his late 20s, Marlowe is a model of indiscretion, subject to accusations of homosexuality, atheism and blasphemy. When Francis suffers a stroke, his brother Thomas, who is Marlowe's patron and sometime lover, cannot protect the hard-drinking, loose-tongued agent from William Cecil, Francis's successor. The plot works its way relentlessly toward murder as Cecil sets his men on Marlowe, looking for a convenient way to destroy him. With cool indifference, Cecil also has playwright Thomas Kyd imprisoned and tortured to extract incriminating evidence. Cook's reconstruction is meticulous but ultimately flat. An authority on Elizabethan England, she fictionally reconstructs the mechanics of Marlowe's death, but fails to explore Marlowe's more novelistically interesting inner demons.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.