We see Laura Lippman before she sees us. The 45-year-old author of a crime series that has won the Edgar, Shamus, Agatha, Anthony and Nero Wolfe awards (some twice over) is standing in the waiting area of the Baltimore train station, scanning the crowd coming off the Acela express train from New York. It is a very hot June day, and Lippman is wearing a red skirt and a yellow sleeveless top that shows off toned arms. The casual summer outfit suits her tall, blonde girl-next-door looks, but her expression is far from casual. In the half a minute before we catch her eye, what we see is focus, attentiveness, anxious expectation. It is the expression of a runner in the starting blocks—or of a competitive rower and former reporter like Tess Monaghan, the fictional private investigator Lippman introduced in 1997 in the Avon paperback original novel Baltimore Blues.
We wave and a big smile spreads over Lippman's face. She strides towards us, extending her hand and thanking us for coming to Baltimore. Later, she will tell us (though it hardly needs telling) that unlike many writers she is truly not shy. All day long, Lippman will show a balance between private thoughtfulness and extroversion, bookishness and an appreciation for plot, and for the press.
As we pass another gate on our way to the parking lot, Lippman greets a big African-American guy who is sitting waiting for a train. She explains that he is a member of the cast of The Wire, the acclaimed HBO crime series set in Baltimore and executive produced by her boyfriend, David Simon. "This kind of thing tends to happen here," Lippman explains. Our sense is that it happens because she and Simon are local celebrities. Simon was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun who became a nationally famous name after his 1991 nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets became the basis for an HBO series. Since 1997, Lippman, who spent a dozen years at the Sun, has been winning praise, fans and fame as one of America's—and certainly Baltimore's—bestselling crime novelist.
We emerge into steam bath heat, pile into Lippman's black Volkswagen Jetta and head to North Baltimore to Petit Louis, an appealing French bistro that has figured in her books. On the way, Lippman keeps up a wry, running commentary on the town that has become an endearing if dangerous character in her books. Baltimore, she says, is the kind of place that is northern to southern people and southern to northern people. It isn't that Baltimore isn't a glamorous place in itself, she explains, but that it simply seldom serves as a backdrop for the glamorous people, as do New York or Los Angeles. "Occasionally, we see eerily good-looking people eating in a restaurant and we know they're from out of town."
But it turns out that North Baltimore, where Tess lives (and Lippman lived for years) is very beautiful, all spacious, tree-shrouded lanes and big Victorian houses. This is Anne Tyler's neighborhood, and over a lunch of chicken salad and white Cote du Rhone Lippman regales us with the story of a friend who befriended the famously shy Tyler. We also learn that this crime writer has more in common with the revered literary author—for instance her keen sense of place.
Lippman was born in Atlanta, in 1959, and moved to Baltimore in 1965, when her father took a job as an editorial writer at the Baltimore Sun. After attending Northwestern University and serving stints as a reporter at little Texas newspapers, Lippman found her way back to Baltimore and eventually to the Sun, where she was her father's colleague until his retirement in 1995. Her mother was a librarian here, and her sister now works at the Barnes & Noble on the Johns Hopkins campus.
What does it take for a writer from Baltimore to stand out in the world of paperback original publishing, to break out of the pack and be elevated to that elite group who makes it to hardcover and beyond?
"First and foremost, Laura Lippman is a great writer," says Michael Morrison, publisher of William Morrow. "She comes across as girl next door but underneath she's very smart, savvy, thoughtful. And she is also a great comedic writer." Morrison explains that Morrow decided to make Lippman's fifth book, The Sugar House, a hardcover because "she had won all the awards and we knew that her audience would be willing to pay for it."
But can she make that next step and hit the national bestseller lists?" It can take six or seven or eight books to grow a readership," says Morrison. "It takes time to get a readership hooked and to establish a section in the bookstore." It's not so much a matter of stamping an author into a brand, as attracting a pair of eyes to an impressive back list, he explains. "A lot of people who browse in a bookstore look for somebody who has a series. But the real key is establishing a readership that is hooked to an author's books so they stay with it." Lippman has been known to joke that series fiction that starts off as mass market paperback original and then moves into hardcover is "the crack cocaine of publishing: You get readers hooked at a low price, then mark it up steeply."
These days, Lippman shares a beautifully renovated brick townhouse with Simon in South Baltimore. We comment on how the sunflower yellow walls go perfectly with Lippman's red couch and with a beautiful abstract painting that turns out to be the work of Simon's late sister. Lippman confirms that she is indeed a fan of television home-decorating shows like Trading Spaces but that the chemistry in this house has to do with her stuff and Simon's stuff "just fitting together." She clasps her hands to demonstrate. Lippman's office and study is at the top of the house. It is light-filled and immaculate and she maintains that it is only slightly neater than usual. She leads us out to a rooftop deck from which we can see the harbor and in the other direction the stadium that is the home to a football team called—by popular demand and to Lippman's immense delight—the Ravens, in honor of that Baltimore homeboy, Edgar Allan Poe.
Lippman's house is full of books. A glance at the bookcase that fills a wall shows titles that range from Infinite Jest to Lolita. There are books by Dennis Lehane and by authors that Lippman herself interviewed for the Sun, among them Walter Mosley, Sue Grafton and George Pelecanos. Indeed, she and Simon have so many writer friends that they have had to institute a ranking system that diplomatically has no friends among the books on the big bookshelves downstairs in the living room, only "classics"—which, we can't help noticing, include Richard Price's Clockers.
Morrow publisher Morrison insists that one of the things that makes Lippman stand out as a writer is the way she "has used the skills that she honed as a reporter to peel back her characters' motivations and emotions layer by layer until they are really exposed." Journalism has been huge in Lippman's life, both in text and subtext. In 2001, Baltimore Magazine named her "best local Sun reporter" in their annual "Best of Baltimore" roundup.
Lippman's Tess Monaghan series began as an alternative, imaginary path for the author. Twenty-nine-year-old Tess was a reporter for a fictional Baltimore paper that folds, forcing her to take a freelance sleuthing job to pay the rent. "The series started with a chance encounter," Lippman tells PW after we settle together in the living room. "Somebody's boss was really rude to me and I said to my friend, 'Your boss is so rude, some day somebody is going to kill him and there will be way too many suspects for anybody to ever figure out who did it.' We began batting the story around and I realized that it was a story I really could write. I made Tess a former journalist because I could imagine how a journalist could become a private detective drawing on what she knew as a journalist and other skills she'd picked up along the way."
While some fans later complained to Lippman that Tess didn't seem to know what she was doing at first, it is the way that Tess searches around for solutions that allows Lippman to raise larger questions and explore larger themes about human nature, about good and evil. Lippman concedes that this was always her aim. "You have to be so presumptuous to even start to do this. There is this almost hilarious conceit about saying, 'I'm going to write a novel,' because of course the more you read the more you know that everything has been done. So why stop there? Why not make every book about something more than who did it?"
But, Lippman says, "The Baltimore Sun was not supportive of people who wanted to write outside of the Sun—that's why so many of us are gone. My experience was that the more I wrote outside the paper, the more I had to work inside the paper. I felt that if I wrote an 8-inch story about a sewer main break it had to be really good because I didn't want someone to say, 'Oh, Laura Lippman writes these novels but this is really turgid....' " Lippman was eventually transferred out of the city she loves to the suburban Baltimore County bureau; she also was forced to see a staff psychologist. In 2002, she terminated her contract. Lippman believes that management, and most probably one envious and vindictive editor in particular, were trying to make an example of her and make the point that "outside work meant nothing." But she concedes that it may have been a necessary heartache. "The bizarre thing is that if they had treated me really well and said that they were proud of me for what I was doing, I might not have been able to leave." Lippman wrote her first standalone novel, Every Secret Thing, in 2003, after she left the Sun. Part of what it made it a breakout for her as a writer is how the book portrays the way the media can play out a sensational story, riling up and then appeasing our deepest fears and prejudices—how horrible and how thrillingly remote a possibility it is to have a baby stolen and murdered; how inconceivable it would be to raise a child who kills. The novel helped Lippman to stand alone. It helped her grow technically in her writing and also to become bolder about exploring deeper themes. Discussing her return to Tess in By a Spider's Thread, published last week by Morrow, she has no problem telling us that this is a book about identity, particularly her own partly Jewish identity.
We ask Lippman if she feels pressure from her publishing house to write books that sell big. One notable who has kept an eye on her and her work for years is Jane Friedman, CEO of HarperCollins Worldwide. Friedman first encountered Laura Lippman not as an author but as a reporter seeking quotes for an article. "I was really doing very few interviews at the time," Friedman tells us by phone, "but my maiden name happens to be Lippman so I felt simpatico. Then I found out that she also happens to be tall and blonde [like Friedman]. I don't think we're actually related but there is this resemblance."
Of course Lippman's appeal as an author is more compelling to Friedman than the hint of some remote family bond. "She is a real writer," Friedman explains. "Her characters really draw people in and once they're hooked, they're hooked." We ask Friedman why critics and interviewers seem to insist that breakout authors have "transcended the genre," as if they had struggled to leave behind a life of crime. Friedman laughs. "I love to read mysteries and thrillers. But I see Lippman as a novelist who happens to write about crime. Would you call P.D. James a crime novelist?"
Lippman insists that she doesn't feel pressured. "I try never to forget that I'm lucky," Lippman tells us. "I am being published very smartly and well. I'm getting paid enough so that I don't have to have a day job any more. I want to do well for them but I could be published by a very small press for no money, and still have the same ambitions for my work."
Which are?
"I want to write books that work on two levels. I want people who like crime fiction to come to my books and be satisfied, but I would also like to write books that stay with people—where one scene, one moment, one line lingers with someone. After that, the dream would be to get one person, literally one, to think about things differently. I know I've said this many, many times but I'm proud to be a crime writer." In the hands of writers like Richard Price or Walter Mosley, Lippman insists, crime fiction can rise to the level of Theodore Dreiser, portraying society and social injustice in ways that aren't, well, boring.
"On some level, for me reading has always been a subversive activity, the thing you do when you should be doing something else," she says. Lippman relaxes back in the red sofa cushions and smiles. "I remember what it was like before I could read, seeing everyone in my family lost in a book. I remember thinking. 'That's what grown-ups do, that's the secret world. I must get into that world.'" Lippman wonders why it is that prolific popular authors are said to "crank things out" while literary authors get to "pour things out," working in the white heat of inspiration. "I say, go for the author who can be read for pleasure and for ideas. And that's the crime genre right now. We've got it covered."
