Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh was published in 2004 and at 149 pages it’s a very quick read, and unusually for the author it’s historical fiction.

The setting is London 1593, it has been a bad year with the plague ravaging the inhabitants and threats of war abroad. The playwright Christopher Marlowe has been taken to London from his patron’s country house, under arrest. He has no idea what has caused this change in his luck, but he has been hauled in front of the Privy Council before and survived, he hopes to wriggle out of danger again.

Marlowe had a great success in the past with his play Tamburlaine and it turns out that someone has been pasting blasphemous and atheistic posters all around the city signed Tambourlaine. Marlowe is being blamed for them and the penalty is death, but the Privy Council really want Marlowe to dig up evidence against Sir Walter Raleigh as they’re keen to get rid of him, and they give Marlowe three days of freedom to come up with the goods.

Marlowe knows that someone had given the Privy Council some of his private papers in an effort to incriminate him, and he spends his time trying to track down his betrayer.

I really enjoyed this one. I didn’t know anything at all about Christopher Marlowe beyond that he was a playwright, a contemporary of Shakespeare, a homosexual and of course he famously got murdered in an argument over a tavern bill. It seems to me though that Welsh has written an entertaining and plausible tale around him. Inevitably there’s some homosexual sex involved in this book, if you’re squeamish about that then this book might not be for you.