Laura Lippman novelist, reporter, and Baltimorean on her citys many lives and layered literary myths.
Lady in the Lakewill be published by William Morrow on July 23.
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Baltimore is layered with loss.
So do the people who live in Edgar Allan Poes Baltimore and H. L. Menckens and Brooks Robinsons.
We start out south of the Inner Harbor, in the neighborhood where Lippman and her family live.
(OnLongreadsearlier this year, she wrote movingly about the ups and downs of being an old mom.)
Waterss books are there too.
He married us, Lippman notes.
He has an amazing track record like 18 couples, and 17 are still together.
Even before we head out, Lippman cautions against reveling in the multiple lost Baltimores were going to see.
The city was explicitly segregated well into the 60s with whites-only amusement parks and brutal redlining.
Thats where Maddie lives, Lippman says as we turn onto Cathedral Street.
Lippmans books fall into two groups.
A dozen are a continuing series starring the private eye Tess Monaghan.
The rest are one-offs, and they are arguably a little more writerly and experimental.
(We will not be using that tiresome transcends genre fiction line here.
Good books are good books.)
Last yearsSunburn,for example, starts out as a shore-town just-passing-through femme-fatale encounter and then gets complicated.
And to have that freedom to go fromSunburntoLady in the Lake… she says, trailing off gratefully.
TheStars people are vivid and central in the new book.
(Old Baltimoreans still refer to the Sunpapers, one word.)
Ask her about her reporting jobs, and anecdotes about the texture and culture of newsrooms flow easily.
It was so loud!
And people still smoked.
Its co-founder Betty Cooke, a jewelry designer whos 95, still sells her work here.
In the book, Maddie admires Cookes jewelry but cant quite swing the investment.
Was her mother, who is just about Maddies age, a model for the character?
Lippman seems startled when I ask.
Its fair enough shed be a teeny bit younger, but I hadnt really thought about that!
But I did give her my mothers name, Madeleine, and my middle name.
She pauses, then comes back to the idea.
You really dont want to think about your mothers sex life, though.
We drive on, passing the Cylburn Arboretum, where that body turns up.
The book also incorporates inventive shifts in point of view.
Have you written anything this way before?
I ask Lippman, and she rolls her eyes and smiles, saying, Has anyone?
In the past decade alone, two mayors have quit owing to cheesy scandals.
(One had misappropriated gift cards;the other was self-dealing in bulk purchases of herHealthy Hollychildrens books.
In her honor, Lippmans pub-trivia team is called Healthy Holly LLC.)
Even amid all that, the .01 percent are in evidence.
Or maybe cover for something darker, something for Maddie and her editors to look into.
