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Apr. 19th, 2021 03:53 pmWhen I got my copy of my agentsib Allison Epstein's A Tip for the Hangman I was extremely happy to see an Ellen Kushner blurb on the back, because if there is a single demographic I think should seek out this book immediately it's "people who loved Swordspoint and crave more novels about queer young men making ill-advised personal and professional decisions in an early modern political quagmire."
A Tip for the Hangman is an Elizabethan spy thriller focusing on a stressed-out Cambridge student named Christopher Marlowe, who's on the verge of recruitment into a career in anti-Catholic espionage -- not so much out of any personal religious or political convictions but because it pays well, and as a scholarship student the odds are significantly against Kit Making It without a substantial cash infusion. The first half of the book focuses on Kit's attempts to juggle his new and dangerous gig along with his responsibility to his struggling family back home, his burgeoning relationship with fellow student Tom, and his exam schedule, with varying degrees of success; the second half takes place after a timeskip, with Kit in fact on the verge of Making It in the London theatrical scene when the juggling act picks up again at a significantly increased difficulty level.
I feel like most of the fictional Marlowe appearances I've encountered have focused primarily on his writing and his relationship to Shakespeare and the Renaissance stage. A Tip for the Hangman takes the opposite tack -- the book is very interested in Marlowe's relationships to class, religion, sexuality, and the consequences of his own actions, but Marlowe's literary career happens pretty much entirely in the interstitial spaces of the text, with the act of imagining how the action as portrayed in the story resonates back into what we have of his writing left more or less entirely as an exercise for the reader. (Obviously a secondary effect of this is that it makes me want to go back and reread a bunch of Marlowe plays, but.)
Anyway, as a spy thriller it's exactly as messy, morally gray, and occasionally depressingly farcical as it should be -- not James Bond but rather ... I want to say 'John Le Carre' but I haven't actually read any yet (I know! I keep meaning to!) but that is my understanding. Probably my favorite terrible thing that happens is ( spoilers! )
A Tip for the Hangman is an Elizabethan spy thriller focusing on a stressed-out Cambridge student named Christopher Marlowe, who's on the verge of recruitment into a career in anti-Catholic espionage -- not so much out of any personal religious or political convictions but because it pays well, and as a scholarship student the odds are significantly against Kit Making It without a substantial cash infusion. The first half of the book focuses on Kit's attempts to juggle his new and dangerous gig along with his responsibility to his struggling family back home, his burgeoning relationship with fellow student Tom, and his exam schedule, with varying degrees of success; the second half takes place after a timeskip, with Kit in fact on the verge of Making It in the London theatrical scene when the juggling act picks up again at a significantly increased difficulty level.
I feel like most of the fictional Marlowe appearances I've encountered have focused primarily on his writing and his relationship to Shakespeare and the Renaissance stage. A Tip for the Hangman takes the opposite tack -- the book is very interested in Marlowe's relationships to class, religion, sexuality, and the consequences of his own actions, but Marlowe's literary career happens pretty much entirely in the interstitial spaces of the text, with the act of imagining how the action as portrayed in the story resonates back into what we have of his writing left more or less entirely as an exercise for the reader. (Obviously a secondary effect of this is that it makes me want to go back and reread a bunch of Marlowe plays, but.)
Anyway, as a spy thriller it's exactly as messy, morally gray, and occasionally depressingly farcical as it should be -- not James Bond but rather ... I want to say 'John Le Carre' but I haven't actually read any yet (I know! I keep meaning to!) but that is my understanding. Probably my favorite terrible thing that happens is ( spoilers! )
