Marlowe's life has always been mysterious, but there have throughout this century been occasional breakthroughs, usually through the discovery of records never before known or comprehended. Nichol is the latest and the most successful of these analysts. He at last is able to identify the people who surrounded Marlowe, and the retinues to which they have belonged.

The book is in six parts: the first, "The Killing" includes five chapters, describing the death and the three men with Marlowe. Each of them was in turn in the retinue of some noblemen, but all of them were dubious characters - involved in fraud, and robbery of young gentlemen. And the house where it took place - always known as being owned by Eleanor Bull - has usually been taken as a tavern, and often Marlowe is thought to have been killed in a drunken pub fight (over "le Reckninge" - the bill). In fact, Mrs Bull's house must have been a private residence, possibly a sort of Elizabethan B & B - but in light of what happened there Nicholl's research allows him to point out "technically speaking Eleanor Bull was related to Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer of England".

Marlowe was close to the court because he was under investigation for his "monstrous opinions". He had not been arrested, but he was on bail. He in turn had been picked up because of anti-foreigner riots in London, which in turn had been sparked by a poem pasted up on a Dutch church in Broad Street on May 5th - the ballad was full of references to Marlowe's work (The Jew of Malta and The Massacre At Paris), and signed "Tamburlaine". That he was not immediately arrested and tortured to obtain information suggests that the authorities knew that Marlowe was not the author, nevertheless this had happened to some of his circle. His friend and former room-mate Thomas Kyd was arrested on 11 May and interrogated. He made a series of statements about Marlowe and his beliefs, none of which show any xenophobia in Marlowe. Probably after his statement was made, Kyd, in the best practices of British government, was tortured. He does not seem to have added much, although a document of Marlowe's about Arianism was found.

On the 18th May a warrant was issued for Marlowe to be brought before the Privy Council, it said he could be found at the house of Thomas Walsingham, brother to the Queen's minister Francis Walsingham (the house was at Scadbury in Kent). And sometime in the next few days another document was written by one of Walsingham's informants, Richard Baines, again dealing mainly with religion, but ending "I think all men in Christianity ought to endeavor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped." One of the annotations on this document dates it three days before Marlowe's death, which would have been Sunday 27th, but another note says "delivered on Whitsun Eve" which would date it Saturday June 2nd. Nicholl points out that Marlowe's death is surrounded by these sort of troubles. And another report giving hearsay at second or third hand claimed that a Richard Cholmeley in turn claimed "that one Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity" and that Cholmeley claimed that Marlow had read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh & others.

In his second section, "Reactions", Nicholl details how Marlowe's death was referred to in the next few years - some of them horribly corrupt versions of what happened (these do get mentioned in the standard textbooks) and others tantalisingly indirect - like Shakespeare's line in As You Like It "It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room", which echoes a line from The Jew Of Malta "infiinte riches in a little room", but brings in that odd talk of the bill "le reckninge".

In part three "The Intelligence Connection", Nicholl begins to look at Marlowe and the world of Elizabethan spying. And that takes him back to Marlowe's life as a Cambridge undergraduate - and the first record of Marlowe's life in the shadowy underworld. On 29 June 1587, only six years before, the Privy Council wrote the famous letter about Marlowe being employed on Her Majesty's pleasure, when it was thought he had gone to Rheims (site of a Papistical seminary), so that there was no reason why he should not receive the MA the university were holding back. Nicholls is able to date Marlowe's absences, and the change in his spending by examination of the college buttery books (accounts).

Marlowe must have been active in some sort of anti-Catholic spying from about 1585 (when he was back at university he had lots of money to spend in the University buttery). Nicholl asks why and suggests one obvious reason "it is a way forward. It puts money in his purse, gets him noticed, gives him entree to influential circles". But suggests "another answer might be that Marlowe enters this devious, predatory company because he was himself a devious, predatory young man". In the fourth part, "Poets and Spies" he studies the background of many people coming out of the universities and going into service.

Marlowe's first success Tamburlaine was performed soon after he left Cambridge in 1587. He was peculiarly equipped - he had lived as a spy - possibly overseas, he had a great familiarity with exotic religious ideas, a skill with blank verse that required no apprenticeship (unlike Shakespeare, the quality of his verse scarcely changed), and he he had been lucky enough to get his first play accepted by the Lord Admiral's men - the role of Tamburlaine was played by Edward Alleyn. The only drawback was money - it is not known how much Marlowe ever received, but the almost forgotten Robert Greene, who may have been the best paid playwright of his day received 20 nobles (£6/13/4) per play outright. As Marlowe only wrote seven plays before he died he must have been looking for other sources of income.

And while this was going on those people who knew Marlowe and some of whom were to be at his death were engaged in other activities of the time - planning, opposing or pretending to plan Catholic invasions of England, the release of Mary Queen of Scots, the question of Elizabeth's successor, the wars in the Netherlands. All of them involved spies, agents-provacateur, double-crossers, treble crossers, men of such complexity that no number can be given to their machinations (Nicholl suggests that the government regularly used agents provocateur), and in small documents we find Marlowe involved too. Marlowe and Cholmely may have been involved with groups of religious dissidents as infiltrators, but Marlowe's ideas were probably even more outrageous to the authorities.

In part five "The Low Countries", Nicholls looks at events at home and abroad that followed the death of Sir Francis Walsingham in April 1590, pointing out that English interest moved from France to the Netherlands, and that Walsingham's spies became divided between Lord Burghley and the Earl of Essex, mainly because the Queen refused to appoint a direct successor, and the significance of an event only discovered in 1976 - that in January 1592 Marlowe was arrested in the English run town of Flushing (Vlissingen) with a group of Catholic conspirators engaged in counterfeiting.

Marlowe got out of it somehow after he was brought back to London. And so moving towards the end, in "The Frame", his sixth part, Nicholl's tries to bring all his elements together, by an analysis of the purpose behind the writing of the Dutch Church libel, and suggests an author - Richard Cholmondely, and its purpose - "to make the libel sound like it was written by an admirer of Marlowe".

Nicholl then goes onto show that this was probably because Marlowe was part of the group about the Earl of Northumberland and Sir Walter Ralegh, and in turn that Ralegh speaking as an MP in March 1593 complained about the growth of Dutch merchants in London. Who was Ralegh's great rival? The Earl of Essex. What had Essex in his service since 1590?

Marlowe was in an increasing vice. Who could be his only salvation? According to Nicholl, only Sir Robert Cecil, who had used Marlowe as a provocateur at Flushing.

Yet in his closing of the mystery Nicholl suggests another reason why Ingram Frizier invited Marlowe to meet him in Deptford. It was when Marlowe refused to see Frizier's point of view, and cease to be an annoyance to Cecil, too, that Frizier's anger gave way and lead him to stab Marlowe on his master's behalf, and since everyone there was compromised in some way but had the connections they could secure the inquest verdict they wanted.

How odd is it to write a biography in retrospect, not in media res but in termina res as it were? It is the nature of the material that leads Nicholl to write as he does, almost nothing (or only say short paragraphs, or pages - probably not chapters) is immediately clear, so that if at any moment we were to ask Nicholl 'Why are you telling me this?' he would reply 'In order to supply information necessary to understand the next-chapter-but-three-or-four'. Hugh Trevor-Roper does something similar but on a much smaller scale in Hermit of Peking : The Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, producing information in one chapter that only makes sense when it is combined with information in another later. This also causes some shifting to and fro between dates, as well. It is because his subject is so involved that his account of Marlowe's life and death must be.

Nicholl must have spent a long time with the original documents - the book has much more more detail than Hotson's The Death of Christopher Marlowe, and that in turn, makes it very different to read to many other biographies. By not depending on letters and recollections of the subject and his immediate family, Nicholl is able to suggest much more of the atmosphere of the times.