As with those books, part of the entertainment comes from the novelist laying bare the devices of his fiction. Burgess has not always put such palpable flesh on the skeleton of his conceits, but A Dead Man in Deptford, like MF and Nothing Like the Sun, is proof that his most 'difficult' novels can be his most entertaining. Yet the tale is strong and Burgess's authorial relish renders even his recondite moments splendidly readable. Moreover, the facts and apocrypha of the Marlowe case echo Burgess's fictional pre-occupations so clearly that the novel, which feigns to be an account of Marlowe's career by a minor Elizabethan actor, amounts to a thickly textured reprise of Burgess's own favoured themes. In one obvious sense, then, A Dead Man in Deptford is the work of a lifetime - no opportunistic jumping on an anniversary bandwagon that is already filled to overbalancing, but the fruit of an imaginative involvement with another writer's work which has spanned more than half a century. In the students' guide to English literature which he wrote in 1957 under the name J Burgess Wilson, he speculated that, had Marlowe survived, he might have eclipsed even the Swan of Avon and in 1940, as plain John Wilson, a student at Manchester University, he had sat up at nights typing a thesis on the playwright which the Luftwaffe's bombs would eventually burn to ashes. Burgess's fascination with Marlowe began well before the mid- Sixties, however. Anthony Burgess first planned a novel about Christopher Marlowe in 1964, he tells us in an afterword, but, noting that this year was also the natal quatercentenary of Shakespeare, bowed to the inevitable and gave us Nothing Like the Sun instead.
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