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tambourlaine must die


"Brilliant... as a thriller, her book is utterly engrossing... Elizabethan England has never seemed more beguilingly immediate... It would be hard to better the physical descriptions with which the book is laced; brawny milkmaids; stinking fishwives; the sails of the windmills on Highgate Hill; alehouses packed with humpbacked fiddlers and blowzy whores drinking Spanish wine. Every vignette, every minor character, every sight, sound and smell, has the ring of truth."
Julla Flynn, Sunday Telegraph

Welsh’s Elizabethan metropolis is pungently atmospheric, a city of competing playwrights, corruption and mistrust where religion and politics are as entwined as sex and death.
The Observer

"A tale of vivid homoerotic passion, murderous treachery and strutting intellectual pride." Financial Times

This account of the last three days of Marlowe's life has lashings of sex and violence, plus a dash of poetry.
The Independent

Pleasantly lurid.
London Review of Books

"Tamburlaine Must Die refines Welsh's powerful vision of death in a godless world... This bold, imaginative, vibrant novella resonates on several levels. Its claustrophobic airs of menace and betrayal are those of a thriller. It works as historical fiction and captures the Tudor setting by virtue of Welsh's extraordinary prose."
David Isaacson, Daily Telegraph

"The sort of narrative that you can smell on your hands after turning the pages, with proper attention paid to the pleasures and perils of illicit sex and the importance of seeing and savouring all that's on offer before the lights go out for good."
Philip Oakes, Literary Review

"A page-turner to the very end."
Ron Butlin, Sunday Herald

Tamburlaine Must Die sets the seal on Welsh’s skill as a writer. She weaves fact and fiction into a compelling plot.
Scotland on Sunday

The sort of narrative you can smell on your hands after turning the pages
Literary Review

Elegant, but pacy
Buzz

The language has the ring of Elizabethan authenticity without ever being incomprehensible and no knowledge of either the real life Marlowe or his work is required.
Stirling Observer




 

Tamburlaine Must Die
(Canongate Books Ltd; New edition, 1 May 2003) buy

It is 1593 and London is a city on edge. Under threat from plague and war, strangers are unwelcome and severed heads grin from spikes on Tower Bridge. Playwright, poet and spy, Christopher Marlowe has three days to live. Three days in which to find the murderous Tamburlaine, a killer who has ascaped from between the pages of his most violent play...Tamburlaine Must Die is a swashbuckling adventure story of a man who dares to defy both God and state - and discovers that there are worse fates than damnation.

Inspiration for the Novel:

Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564. The son of a shoemaker he was educated at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. His plays include The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Dr Faustus, Massacre of Paris and Tamburlaine the Great I and II. The Tamburlaine plays were the only ones published during his lifetime and follow the fortunes of an eponymous antihero who declares war on the kings of the world and flourishes unpunished through merciless violence.

Marlowe was arrested in 1593 after some seditious papers were discovered in the room of his friend, the playwright Thomas Kyd with whom Marlowe had previously lodged. Under torture Kyd claimed that the papers belonged to Marlowe who he accused of heresy. Marlowe was subsequently bailed and the task of investigating him given to his sometime friend, sometime enemy Richard Baines. Baines’s report detailed a list of blasphemies that he alleged Marlowe had made including, ‘Christ was a bastard’, ‘St John the Evangelist was a bedfellow to Christ and used him as the sinners of Sodoma’ and the famous statement that, ‘all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools’. 

Marlowe never came to trial. He was stabbed to death at a pub in Deptford on the 30th May 1593. The circumstances surrounding Marlowe’s death are much disputed. His killer Ingram Frizer and his two witnesses were variously con men, double agents, fences and international spies. The coroner decided it was simply a tragic accident, the sadly familiar story of young men armed with knives drinking too deep and too long on the first day of summer. But some people consider Marlowe’s murder too timely to have simply been a drunken quarrel gone wrong and there are conspiracy theorists that allege his death was a ruse designed to cover his escape.

Whatever the truth, Marlowe’s line in Doctor Faustus, ‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight’ proved horribly prophetic.  

Read an exclusive interview with Louise from the launch of the Canadian edition here (pdf file).

The Portrait of Mr Christopher Marlowe by Louise Welsh here (pdf file).

Further Reading:
 
'The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe' by Charles Nichol
'The World of Christopher Marlowe' by David Riggs
'Christopher Marlowe, Poet and Spy' by Park Honan
'History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe' by Rodney Bolt

A fast-paced and sparkling story that needs no literary knowledge to be enjoyed and which should win Welsh, and possibly even the late Marlowe, some devoted new fans.
The Herald

A taut, seedy novella scraped off the undercarriage of Elizabethan England.
Arena

A rocket-propelled novella also features the uneasy intrigue of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiel Hammet thriller.
The List

A little gem.
The Birmingham Post

The only quibble is why Welsh chose to write a novella: you cannot help wishing for more.
Jack

Welsh’s sentences ooze fun.
Uncut

A gripping fiction as bloody and entertaining as one of Marlowe’s own plays.
Diva