Jude Cook

The first Cambridge spy: A Fine Madness, by Alan Judd, reviewed

Thomas Phelipps is dispatched to Cambridge by the Elizabethan spymaster Francis Walsingham to recruit the young Kit Marlowe for a career in espionage

A cat that walked alone: portrait of a young man thought to be Christopher Marlowe. Credit: Alamy 
issue 15 May 2021

For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The result is never less than engrossing, with Judd putting the scanty known facts about the great playwright to ingenious use.

The story is narrated from the King’s Bench prison by Thomas Phelipps 30 years after Marlowe’s fatal stabbing in a Deptford rooming-house brawl.

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