Another complex code to be cracked

The Intelligencer

A Novel

Leslie Silbert

Atria Books: 338 pp., $24

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SIR FRANCIS Walsingham, founder of Queen Elizabeth I’s secret service, dug up dirt on many of England’s notables as a way to forestall Catholic plots against the Protestant ruler. Walsingham’s files disappeared when he died in 1590. Aspiring to replace him, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, and Sir Robert Cecil formed competing intelligence organizations. The handsome Essex tried to charm the queen directly; the hunchbacked Cecil schemed to undercut his rival. Playwright Christopher Marlowe, a spy for Essex’s organization, was murdered in 1593 under circumstances that remain mysterious.

Around this sparse history, Leslie Silbert has woven a complex thriller whose two plots, separated by 400 years, converge. In its opening scene, a burglar in contemporary London is killed in the act of stealing an ancient coded book that may be Walsingham’s long-lost files. Sleuth Kate Morgan is called in. Like Silbert, she “graduated from Harvard and studied Renaissance literature at Oxford. She then worked as a private investigator at one of [America’s] top firms, under the guidance of a former CIA officer.” With her rare expertise, Morgan may be able to crack the code and solve the case.

Similarly, we think, Silbert should have the background to deliver something richer and stranger than an ordinary thriller. But she fulfills this promise only in an afterword in which she summarizes the known facts about Marlowe’s last days and explains how and why she deviated from them, following clues in his poetry. “The Intelligencer” -- one of several recent novels to exploit the market opened by Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” -- is less sophisticated than Silbert’s notes about it. In place of depth, it offers us mere busyness.

Silbert is more successful with her Renaissance characters than with the moderns -- though human nature, she insists, hasn’t changed. As Morgan remarks: “When it comes to Elizabethan England, most people think of Shakespeare and royal pageantry. But beneath the glitter it was an ugly police state.... And so the words of spies -- the brokers of secrets and sins -- could send you to the torture chamber like ... that.” We can accept her Marlowe in the role of such a spy, or “intelligencer”; what’s harder is to imagine this slick and practical operator sitting down to compose “Dr. Faustus,” “The Massacre at Paris,” “Hero and Leander” and other works Silbert quotes to introduce her chapters. She labors to evoke the period, but the killer anachronism is never far away.

The contemporary characters are cool and glamorous and witty -- retreads from the James Bond novels. They include a billionaire Italian art dealer; an Iranian secret police chief who wants to trade a long-imprisoned American for help with his own defection; Morgan’s employer, the ex-CIA man, who cooks as well as he kick-boxes; and the London financier whose mansion was broken into by the burglar seeking Walsingham’s files. The financier is so charming that he almost makes Morgan forget that, since her boyfriend vanished in the Himalayas several years earlier, she can never love again.

Nobody, of course, is cooler than Morgan. She makes short work of Elizabethan ciphers involving “nullities” and invisible ink, and wherever else the trail of clues leads her -- to a London auction or an art tour of the Vatican or the lodgings of a murdered Oxford don -- she’s never at a loss for a snappy comeback or a change of designer clothes. Meanwhile, her private-eye colleagues, led by a computer expert able to ferret out suspicious movements of money around the globe, do the heavier lifting, including a commando raid on a safe house on the North African coast.

We feel a little for Marlowe, accused falsely on the basis of a confession wrung from a fellow playwright by the queen’s sadistic “rack master,” Richard Topcliffe. And we might feel more for Morgan and her father, a U.S. senator, if “The Intelligencer” were structured more as a story than as a puzzle. Genuine pain awaits them -- but by the time we get to it, we’ve long since decided that these characters aren’t worth caring about and it’s too late to change our minds. Puzzle-posing is Silbert’s priority, after all. She doles out information with just one aim: to make it as hard as possible for us to guess how the gears of her two plots, spinning centuries apart, will mesh. For whom in the modern world are Walsingham’s musty secrets still matters of life and death? Silbert, it must be admitted, keeps us guessing all the way.