Hesse Phillips’ debut novel, “Lightborne,” is about the final days of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Raised in Pennsylvania and now living in Spain, Phillips has an undergraduate degree in theater history from Marlboro College and a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts University. Here, Phillips takes the Q&A and shares the origins of the novel.

Q Please tell readers about your new novel, “Lightborne.”

A “Lightborne” begins in the spring of 1593 when poet, playwright and former spy Christopher Marlowe is arrested on charges of treason, heresy and sodomy. He is then released on bail through the help of a man he presumes to be his friend, but who has in fact hired assassin Robin Poley to “take care” of Marlowe out of fear that the charges might come back on him. Now, alone in London, and with Queen Elizabeth’s spies and Poley closing in, Marlowe first befriends and then finds himself falling in love with Ingram Frizer, a total stranger who is obsessed with Marlowe’s plays and has some dark secrets of his own. Just 10 days after they meet, Marlowe will be dead, and Frizer will be charged with his murder.

“Lightborne” contains a murder mystery, but because the story of Marlowe’s death is so well known, the defining question becomes not “whodunit,” but “why?” There’s a story in here about espionage as well — really the beginnings of intelligence gathering as we know it today — and war, and the human consequences of unchecked tyranny. But at the heart of “Lightborne” is a love story, and a queer love story at that. The central characters of Marlowe, Frizer and Poley are three queer men up against an age and a society that ruthlessly quashes difference, forcing them into decisions that are by turns selfless, heartbreaking, cowardly or cutthroat, all in the name of survival — survival for themselves and for the ones they love.

Q Can you talk a little about how you researched the novel?

A By the time I arrived at college I was already interested in Marlowe — my parents are both voracious readers, and there had been a copy of his “Doctor Faustus” on the shelves back home — but as a theater major, I ended up reading Marlowe’s explicitly queer play “Edward II,” which got me hooked. My undergrad thesis was an attempt to contextualize “Edward II” within the queer culture that existed during Marlowe’s lifetime, which entailed diving into court and criminal records and scouring private letters, diaries, popular song lyrics, satirical and religious poems and, of course, plenty of plays and literature about the theater.

Researching queer history often forces you to seek out negative images: places in the historical record where queerness is hinted at, mocked, suppressed or punished. It’s often very hard to find instances of queer people writing about themselves as openly as Marlowe does in “Edward II,” or Shakespeare did in his sonnets written to men.

After that, I eventually started working on my Ph.D. in drama, where I kept my focus on the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Being in a doctoral program gave me access to materials which I ended up using not only in my dissertation, which was mostly about the horrendous animal blood sports that were so popular in this era, but also in writing “Lightborne.” I spent a lot of time talking to archaeologists who were excavating the remains of Elizabethan theaters around London and learned a lot from them that helped me build “Lightborne’s” world — from the dirt up, literally.

Q Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s and a spy. But is more known about him than Shakespeare?

A The notion that we know next to nothing about Shakespeare has become a cultural shibboleth, but in fact we know a great deal about him compared to many of his contemporaries, thanks to the fact that the Elizabethans were scrupulous record keepers and extremely litigious people. We can reconstruct a great deal of Shakespeare’s life largely through various legal records, especially as his wealth and status increased and he grew ever more concerned with protecting them.

Much of what we know about Marlowe also comes from legal documents, although in his case he was more often on the wrong side of the law — but unlike Shakespeare, who was the middle-class son of a local politician and businessman, Marlowe began life in a shoemaker’s humble house, and despite attending university on scholarship, never found his fortunes much improved by either education or success in the theater. Marlowe lived life “close to the knives,” I like to say, and very well may have taken work in Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network in order to make ends meet. But entering that world came at a cost. In fact, for the last several years of Marlowe’s life we can create a pretty accurate timeline of events just based on his various stints in court or prison, both in England and abroad.

Q What are you reading now?

A My friends are probably getting tired of my relentless evangelizing for Julia Armfield, whose first book, “Our Wives Under the Sea,” ruined all other books for me for a good long while. I recently finished her follow-up, “Private Rites,” and am now suffering from another book hangover that just won’t quit. Her prose is so weird, so unsettling and yet so beautifully constructed. She’s a master at creating vast worlds within claustrophobic spaces, such as a submarine trapped in an abyss or a city succumbing to rising sea levels. Armfield is one of those writers who is not at all afraid to lean into her own strangeness, which is exactly what makes her so damn good.

Q Is there a genre you read the most?

A Because I write historical fiction, I naturally tend to read a lot of it. I can remember being in junior high school and staying up late with Mary Renault or Robert Graves — these whopping big tomes about monarchs, conquerors, emperors, usually male and always white. That all changed when I read Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in high school and discovered that historical fiction can be so much more than dead kings and queens, and can do so much more than simply novelize biographies of the “great and good.”

Nowadays, I prefer stories about people who existed in the margins of history, and a book always gets bonus points from me for defying narrative or stylistic expectations. I adored Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life,” which is a tour de force in genre-bending; same with Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad” and George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo.” Then you have books like Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” which is great first of all because it is not about Shakespeare; or Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” books, which are great first of all because Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, et al., are secondary characters. Historical fiction has a reputation for being stuffy, but in fact it’s a genre where the possibilities are endless, because deep down it’s really all about time.

But back in those formative years, I was also reading a great deal of gothic horror, which is a genre I’d like to return to. I’ve never lost my taste for the creepy and unnerving, so I’m trying to reach now and then for books that make my hair stand on end. I love atmosphere; I love an unhinged protagonist; I love a house full of nasty surprises. Shirley Jackson is an old fave, and now Tananarive Due, not least of all because she combines horror and historical so seamlessly — but I know there’s a world out there to explore.

Q What’s something about your book that no one knows?

A “Lightborne” was very briefly a play. There was a Greek chorus, a countertenor, some dancing, tableaux vivants — every bad idea imaginable all in one script.