Espials (Xtofer Marlowe in London)

Niall McDevitt and Simon King’s joint Poetopography/Walkative explorations of Christopher Marlowe’s life and death in London prove the starting point for McDevitt’s retelling of the Marlowe myth and its astonishing relevance to the major issues of today. Two sites in particular – the Dutch Church in Broadgate where an anti-immigrant verse diatribe signed ‘Tamburlaine’ was pinned to the door on 5 May 1593, and Deptford Strand where Marlowe was murdered on 30 May 1593 and where the inquest took place two days later – prove especially mind-boggling. Many Marlovians believe there was a cover-up; and the tragic loss of one of the most brilliant poets in English literature still festers. The terrain cries for redress. A Los Angeles parallelogram is erected with the help of occasional allusions to Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective Philip Marlowe, named after the Elizabethan poets Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe. King chose the novel Farewell My Lovely as bibliomantic aid, the title of which seemed suitably elegiac, and which also furnished a succinct phrase to describe the general methodology of this book: leg art. We are all Marlowes, literary gumshoes.