The pre-eminent fictional Marlowe is still the hard-boiled detective created by Raymond Chandler, but novelistic treatments of the real-life Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe are running him a close second. The earliest, now seldom read, was a book called “It Was Marlowe,” published in 1895. Its author was an Ohio lawyer, Wilbur Gleason Zeigler. More recently there have been Anthony Burgess’s “Dead Man in Deptford” and Robin Chapman’s “Christoferus,” both published in 1993, the 400th anniversary of Marlowe’s death, as well as “Tamburlaine Must Die” (2004) by the Scottish thriller writer Louise Welsh. The list goes on.

The latest addition is Ros Barber’s “Marlowe Papers,” and while it is not the first to reimagine aspects of Marlowe’s life — and, more particularly, his mysterious death — it is almost certainly the first to do so in verse. Barber is an accomplished poet, and as a sustained exercise in nuanced poetic narrative this is a remarkable book. It is also a brave one, given that the public’s appetite for verse-novels has diminished rather drastically since their 19th-century heyday, when writers of the stature of Byron, Browning and Pushkin rattled them off with aplomb.

As raw material for historical fiction, the life of Marlowe — or the fragmentary records of it that remain — could scarcely be bettered. It has an arc of aspiration and downfall, a charismatic glow of loucheness and violence, a spicing of espionage. The son of a cobbler, he became the most popular dramatist of the day with such plays as “Tamburlaine the Great,” “The Jew of Malta” and that great Elizabethan spinechiller “Dr. Faustus.” A supposed portrait from 1585 shows a sardonic-looking young man in a snazzy velvet doublet, though the evidence that it is him is tenuous, and to identify the portrait as Marlowe’s is in itself a kind of fictionalizing. So too were the reports of state informers alleging his reckless blasphemies, dissident opinions and irregular sexual tastes. “All they that love not tobacco and boies were fools,” he was reported to have said (a recent spoilsport suggestion that “boies” was a mishearing of “booze,” which Barber repeats, is without foundation). And, of course, he came to a suitably sticky end, stabbed to death near the dockyards of Deptford at the age of 29, leaving us with a murder mystery whose secrets have yet to be fully untangled 400 years later.