Tamburlaine Must Die

For her second book Louise Welsh switched settings, to the violent paranoid and depraved milieu of sixteenth century London..

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

IAN RANKIN:
It's not a whodunit, it's a why-dunit almost, it's why did Christopher Marlowe die. I'm always a bit suspicious when writers start writing books about other writers, it can be seen as an act of narcissism or desperation. In this case, I can see why she did it. It's interesting that it's Tamburlaine Must Die, it's almost as though Christopher Marlowe's most famous creation, he has been consumed by him, he's haunted by him, and he can't escape that character. Here is a young author Louise Welsh, whose first novel has been very successful. That character has almost consumed her, people keep saying "is he coming back?" Suddenly she is writing a book who about someone who is obsessed by one of their characters.

STUART MACONIE:
I was a little bit worried at first glance, because I wrongly thought it might be a whodunit. There's a lot of those literary period detective stuff right now, as Ian will know. There is, presumably, an industrial revolution detective on the go even as we speak, about industrial espionage in Stephenson's Rocket! I thought it was going to be like that. I realised it isn't, it's much more subtle than that. It has similarities with The Cutting Room, in this kind of sex, death, rather overripe style. It never gets too much. Maybe at the end there is a slight hammyness.

WARK:
Give me a definition. What makes this a novella, not a novel?

BONNIE GREER:
I wouldn't even go that far. I think it's a long, short story to be honest with you. It goes more into novella, but the novella is not only about length, but also about intention and scope. When you step into the ring with a genius like Marlowe you have to be able to stand up to him. He knocks her flat on her back, unfortunately. If you get a book like this, where you know whodunit early on, which I did, the rest of this has to be ideas. It has to be about the mind of the author. It has to be a way for us to understand the mind of Marlowe. She is a very talented writer, but she bit off more than she can chew here.

WARK:
What she did here which I thought she did well in The Cutting Room was evoke place rather than character.

GREER:
It's that time almost in close-up. We don't see anything, but we smell it, we feel it. This is Christopher Marlowe, we've got to go somewhere with this. It doesn't actually go there.

RANKIN:
As Louise Welsh says in an afterword, there are hundreds of web pages dedicated to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe, his demise, his life. So you ask yourself what does a novella bring us that various works of non-fiction don't, and she tries to take us inside the mind, make it first person. I think she said in an interview that she tried it in third person, didn't work so she went into first person. She fairly successfully gets inside his head.