Tamburlaine Must Die

Charles Taylor

The most pleasurable thing here is Welsh's depiction of Marlowe. He's presented not as a distant figure but as an ambisexual dynamo, at least as interested in the life of the body as in the life of the mind. As she showed in The Cutting Room, Welsh has a talent for depicting grungy sexual situations without rubbing the reader's nose in degradation; there is no uneasy sense that either here, or in the violent scenes, she's going overboard or using what she's showing us for cheap thrills. When Marlowe turns on his betrayer in the midst of a performance, the beating he metes out is brutal. Welsh handles the scene deftly, letting us feel Marlowe high on his own savagery but never slipping into that sadism herself.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Christopher Marlowe, "playwright, scenester, and celebrated wit," was a superstar in Elizabethan London. Unfortunately for him, Elizabethan London was a risky place to attract notice. In Welsh's slim, taut follow-up to her 2003 debut, The Cutting Room, she reimagines the bitter end of the great dramatist's life, retold in his own words on the eve of his still-unsolved murder. The beginning of the end comes in the form of a messenger from the queen's Privy Council, summoning him back to the city from a comfortable ensconcement at his patron's country house. Turns out that heretical verses signed by Tamburlaine, his most famous (and famously ruthless) creation, have been turning up all over plague-decimated London in his absence. Faced with charges of heresy and blasphemy, Marlowe has an unspecified, "but clearly short," window of opportunity to offer up a more appealing scapegoat in his place. Welsh doesn't waste a word on any of the florid romanticizing so common in historical fiction: no heaving, corseted breasts or speeding steeds here. Just a hard, sharp little rapier of a thriller/mystery that packs a punishing schedule of sex, violence, wheeling and double-dealing into its brief length. The tension is unabated throughout this frantic, 72-hour dash among backstabbers, spies, murderers and prostitutes-even as Marlowe realizes that not even he will be able to talk his way out of this one. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Claiming to be hurriedly penned by Christopher Marlowe on the eve of his own mysterious murder, this Elizabethan thriller describes the great English playwright's descent toward death in London. As the story unfolds, Marlowe is betrayed to the all-powerful Privy Council, both by his own blasphemous words and by a nefarious agent masquerading as his heroic character Tamburlaine. In the few days of freedom that the Council has granted him, Marlowe hunts for his nemesis, accompanied by his only friend, a debauched actor named Blaize. During his search, Marlowe encounters a sadistic gaoler in an alley beside Newgate prison, a treacherous but erudite spy in a seedy pub, and a frightened whore whom he straddles while Blaize looks on. Welsh captures the underbelly of 1690s London with touches of frightening realism. In the company of unsavory characters, Marlowe is portrayed as a violent and drunken protagonist whose degeneracy overwhelms his genius. Unfortunately, the narrative fails to convey adequately the sense of trepidation and urgency that one would expect from such a desperate man, while the language seldom reflects the literary talent of its alleged author. The preponderance of description over action, a thin plot, and a predictable denouement also detract from the novella's suspense. Recommended for larger fiction collections and for those readers who enjoyed Welsh's more successful first mystery, The Cutting Room.-Joseph M. Eagan, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The last feverish week in the life of Christopher Marlowe, dramatist, informant and spy. Fresh from the bed of his patron, Lord Thomas Walsingham, the storied playwright is summoned before the Queen's Privy Council and charged with heresy, atheism and libel. There's nothing unusual about the first two charges. Marlowe's old friend Thomas Kyd, caught with a heretical pamphlet, has sought to save himself by claiming that he copied it for his former housemate, and the atheism of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine is a canard throughout London. It's the libel charge that's most menacing. Someone calling himself Tamburlaine has posted threatening verses on the door of a Dutch church, and although Marlowe points out that "if I were to write a libel I would not make it so illiterate," his accusers are unimpressed because, in the severe political economy of 1593, somebody has to take the blame. Indeed, Wells (The Cutting Room, 2003) presents her dark Elizabethan gallery of rogues and poets, who turn desperately on one another to save themselves from death and worse torments, as mirrors of today. "We live in desperate times, where loyalty is all," observes Marlowe as he embarks on his quest to unmask the blustering Tamburlaine before his own life is forfeit. As the clock ticks down, Marlowe confronts his oldest friend Thomas Blaize, a player with literary aspirations; an old bookseller, Blind Grizzle; an unnamed power who offers to protect him from the charges if he will inform against Sir Walter Raleigh; and an emissary from Raleigh himself, who points out the mortal risk of accusing the Queen's sometime favorite. Despite the catchy title, the thin plot will disappoint readers looking for the genericpleasures of the historical mystery. What they'll find instead is a pitiless rendering of an Elizabethan celebrity culture in which each celebrity survives by unceasingly attacking all the others. Agent: David Miller/Rogers, Coleridge & White