The Reckoning
By M J Trow
Crème de la Crime, 2020

The Reckoning is the 11th novel in M. J. Trow’s superbly entertaining murder mystery series starring the great Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, who both crafts rhymes and solves crimes in these pages. In 1587 the Queen’s Privy Council ordered the University of Cambridge to award Marlowe his degree despite his frequent prolonged absences, in recognition of “affaires” he’d conducted on “matters touching the benefit of his country.” This intentionally vague wording has prompted hundreds of writers to speculate or just outright assume that Marlowe was a government operative, a spy as addicted to high speech and derring-do as so many of his stage characters are. This has been the conceit of Trow’s Marlowe novels from the beginning, and it’s led to a string of intensely readable adventures.

Any Marlowe book titled “The Reckoning” is going to lead readers to think of endings, of course. For over a century, the standard historical reductionist view has been that Marlowe was stabbed to death in May of 1593 in a tavern fight over who would pay the bill, or reckoning. Actually Marlowe was killed in a Deptford house belonging to a widow named Eleanor Bull, and the three men in the room with him at the time - Nicholas Skeres, Ingram Frizer, and Robert Poley - have all been convincingly connected (by Charles Nicholl in his 1994 book The Reckoning)(there really ought not to be another Marlowe-related book with this title) with the seedy underworld of Elizabethan espionage. A murkier and more likely picture emerges than a brawl over a bill. 

Marlowe has always been a multifaceted figure in Trow’s handling, not quite a sterling, selfless hero but not quite a rogue element either. One character - not necessarily a friend - in The Reckoning puts it succinctly:

All fire and air, the Muse’s darling, but not a man to be trusted; not completely. All projectionists had that quality; it was what made them indispensable. An honest man was predictable, boring; you always knew which way he would run. But Marlowe? He was a different question. And with him, you knew one thing only - that he wouldn’t run at all.

The events of The Reckoning quickly progress to a trot and seldom slow down: a man has been murdered by a clever device hidden in a mattress; an acting company takes to the road; Marlowe is staging his incendiary play Edward II, more murders take place, and shadowy powers in the Elizabethan government seem to be drawing closer and closer to Marlowe himself. The sense of foreboding is denser here than in any previous novel, naturally, since every reader has already been warned by the book’s title. That foreboding is enhanced by the more melancholy characterization of Marlowe presented in this adventure (“The day would end as the sun went down on a gilded day, with soft limbs entwined, golden in the fading light,” our hero reflects about an ideal afternoon. “He had had perhaps two or three days like that in his whole life, but they sustained him”). And the foreboding becomes downright skin-crawling as we watch Ingram, Frizer, and Poley flit casually around the plot. Imagine a story in which John F. Kennedy goes to the gas station and Lee Harvey Oswald fills up the tank and washes the windshield. 

And of course it’s not only Ingram, Frizer, and Poley who make appearances. Trow is not so iron-willed nor so much of a spoilsport that he refrains from giving us the acting company’s bumbling second-best pen, William Shakespeare, who’s hauled on for comic relief whenever Trow has as spare minute: “Marlowe looked at the man from Stratford and tried to think of any way in which he could have been useful. He was beginning to run to fat and his slightly protuberant eyes were beginning to look more than a little myopic. At best, he could have bored a man to death.”

It’s a testament to how immediate and likable Trow has made his Marlowe that when the suggestion is first made in The Reckoning for the playwright to go to Deptford, you’ll want to yell into the book to get him to refuse. 

But of course he goes. Will he return? Only this wily author knows.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.