60 new york | july 8–21, 2019The CULTURE PAGESThe
Accidental
To u r
Guide
Laura Lippman—novelist, reporter,
and Baltimorean—on her city’s
many lives and layered literary myths.
By Christopher Bonanoslady in the lake will be published by
William Morrow on July 23.B
altimore is a city where
they give directions accord-
ing to what’s not there any-
more,” Laura Lippman says,
quoting an old newspaper
colleague of hers named Linell Smith.
Lippman ought to know because she, apart
from several years away in her 20s, has
spent her entire adulthood in town. She was
a reporter for more than a decade at the
Baltimore Sun, and in the past 22 years has
set 23 crime novels and thrillers in and
around the city. Her latest book, Lady in the
Lake, takes place mostly downtown in the
mid-’60s, and today she and I are headed
out to find some places that used to be here.
Baltimore is layered with loss. It was a
factory town with aspirations, one that was
built to house nearly twice its current popu-
lation with great civic imagery to match—
the Beaux-Arts monuments and crab
houses, Pimlico races and rowhouses with
white marble steps. If you’re searching for
Lost Baltimore, the city you find depends
on the one you were thinking about before-
hand. John Waters’s tacky-aluminum-TV-
tray city is one, where the fringe people are
the soul of the place. Barry Levinson’s ’60s
diner doofuses, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s radical-
black-intellectual father, Russell Baker’s
down-and-out Depression-era white folks,
Anne Tyler’s eccentric families—they all
pass one another on the streets in the city of
the mind. So do the people who live in
Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore and H. L.
Mencken’s and Brooks Robinson’s. (LinellSmith’s grandfather was Ogden Nash, who
left and came back, later writing, “I could
have loved New York had I not loved Balti-
more.”) All those images float over the con-
temporary vision of the dysfunctional city
indelibly laid down on The Wire, the HBO
series created by David Simon—who hap-
pens to be Lippman’s husband. It aired a
decade ago, but no matter how many
Brooklynish farm-to-table food halls open,
you can’t unsee it. Lippman made a wry joke
on Twitter the other day about the dudes
who approach her husband everywhere,
saying that she may end up writing an essay
called “Men Explain The Wire to Me.”
We start out south of the Inner Harbor,
in the neighborhood where Lippman and
her family live. It’s a low-scale area of brick
rowhouses—vaguely like Carroll Gardens—
and their house and nearby offices are
handsome but pleasantly non-palatial. In
their living room, I spot one bookshelf
where Simon’s books sit a couple of feet
away from a full set of Lippman’s novels and
alongside the books written by her father,
Theo Lippman Jr., who was a columnist at
the Sun. She’s 60, which is mildly surprising
partly because she gives off the vibe of
someone a decade or so younger and partly
because she has a 9-year-old daughter. (On
Longreads earlier this year, she wrote mov-
ingly about the ups and downs of being an
old mom.) Waters’s 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 cau-
tions against reveling in the multiple lost
Baltimores we’re going to see. “I can’t be
nostalgic for 1966,” she says, “because basi-
cally what you’re saying is Wasn’t Baltimore
great when it was white?” The city was
explicitly segregated well into the ’60s with
whites-only amusement parks and brutal
redlining. Swaths of the city thinned out
during the years of job loss, and many
blocks are near-ruins, but Mulberry Street,
where we pause on our tour, is in the mid-
town core, well kept and pretty. “That’s
where Maddie lives,” Lippman says as we
turn onto Cathedral Street.
At the start of Lady in the Lake, Maddie
Morgenstern Schwartz is living in Pikes-
ville, the city’s main Jewish inner-ring sub-
urb. She’s 37, in a comfortable but dull mar-
riage that has produced a crabby teenage
son, and at the start of the book she bolts.
She cashes out her engagement ring, rents
that apartment at Mulberry and Cathedral,
has a mostly-for-the-sex fling with a cop—
who is black, so their hookups have to be
discreet—and happens upon a corpse.
Maddie proceeds to some amateur sleuth-
ing and door knocking and leverages her
findings into a job at the Baltimore Star, a
second-tier daily. She doesn’t really know
how to report a story, but she plunges
ahead—“so ambitious and so focused on a
goal that [she] can miss so much,” Lippman
says to me.
Lippman’s 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 fic-
tion” line here. Good books are good books.)
Last year’s Sunburn, for example, starts out
as a shore-town just-passing-through
femme-fatale encounter and then gets com-
plicated. “My agent and I met yesterday,
and we were talking about the fact that not
a lot of crime writers, especially U.S. crime
writers, are being paid well to write what-
ever book they want to write—they’re not
being urged to do the same kind of book
over and over again. And to have that free-
dom to go from Sunburn to Lady in the
Lake ...” she says, trailing off gratefully.
The Star’s people are vivid and central in
the new book. That world of cynical report-
ers and editors is one Lippman knows
extremely well from her years at the Eve-
ning Sun, a looser afternoon sibling to the
morning paper. (Old Baltimoreans still
refer to “the Sunpapers,” one word.) She
took a stab at TV, too, co-hosting a CBS
travelogue series called Going Places when
she was all of 20. Lippman wrote her first
seven novels while on the paper and met“