You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones, and today I'm

talking to Charles Nicol, whose many books include The Reckoning about Christopher

Marlowe's Murder and The Lodger Shakespeare on Silver Street. He's written three dozen or so

pieces for the LRB over the years, and the latest and the current issue is on Elizabethan true

crime drama. Hello, Charles, and thank you very much for joining me.

Great pleasure, Tom, to see you again.

So these plays, dramatizations of real-life crimes, usually murders,

aren't what we usually think of or what first brings to mind

when most people think of Elizabethan drama.

They aren't set in Elsinore or Venice or Malta.

The characters aren't dukes or princes.

And you write in the piece that the chief frisson of true crime is not suspense but recognition.

And then is now the stress on the everyday familiarity of the settings is at the heart of the true crime genre.

So I don't know if you could maybe tell us about what happens in a typical one of these plays to give a sense of what

they're like. Well, as you mentioned some of those Shakespeare plays, of course, there's quite a few

murders in Shakespeare. And even, as we might talk about later, Hamlet has some echoes of the

true crime genre that was very much fashionable when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet.

But the plays that I focus on in this piece for the LRB

and in my general studies,

because I'm a bit of an addict of true crime,

and so where should I go,

but to 16th century true crime,

...