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THE SLICING EDGE OF DEATH by Judith Cook

THE SLICING EDGE OF DEATH

by Judith Cook

Pub Date: Oct. 14th, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-10011-6
Publisher: St. Martin's

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).