her husband there, too, although they didn’t
get together till later. Ask her about her
reporting jobs, and anecdotes about the tex-
ture and culture of newsrooms flow easily.
“It was so loud! And people still smoked. I
literally had one of my editors, a woman sit-
ting close to me, burn a hole in my dress one
day.” Rob Hiaasen, her close pal from the
Sun features desk, was murdered at the
Capital Gazette last year, and talking about
him causes her voice to crack. In an after-
word to the new book, she writes, “I had no
idea that it was going to become a newspa-
per novel,” but it seems to have been nearly
inevitable. And I can tell pretty quickly why
Lippman was a good reporter: She is an
appealing person to talk to, upbeat and
bubbly but not in a trying-too-hard way.
We pull up into the Village at Cross Keys,
a 1960s open-air shopping mall, once chic
and now a little dated but still pleasant.
There’s a shop here called the Store Ltd.
that’s a beaut—a design store, full of
Marimekko and Alessi, that opened in- Its co-founder Betty Cooke, a jewelry
designer who’s 95, still sells her work here.
In the book, Maddie admires Cooke’s jew-
elry but can’t quite swing the investment.
Lippman owns a little bit of it—she’s giving
one piece away in a book-promotion
contest—and she says, “I finally gave my
mother some a couple of years ago.” Was her
mother, who is just about Maddie’s age, a
model for the character? Lippman seems
startled when I ask. “It’s fair enough—she’d
be a teeny bit younger, but I hadn’t really
thought about that! And—no. But I did give
her my mother’s name, Madeleine, and my
middle name.” She pauses, then comes back
to the idea. “You really don’t want to think
about your mother’s sex life, though.”
We drive on, passing the Cylburn Arbo-
retum, where that body turns up. Lippman
says she prowled the grounds, figuring out
where Maddie would have encountered a
body that had lain undiscovered for a fewdays. She also immersed herself in the pop
culture of the era—old ads, TV shows—as
well as news coverage of a pair of real-life
Baltimore murders from the late ’60s,
details of which infuse Lady in the Lake.
The book also incorporates inventive
shifts in point of view. There are about 15 or
so sidebars where a minor character gets to
break out for a few pages of monologue: A
news reporter enumerates his late-career
anxieties; a pioneering female cop recapsher career; Paul Blair, the Orioles’ (nonfic-
tional) center-fielder, narrates his at-bat as
Maddie and her lover watch in Memorial
Stadium. “Have you written anything this
way before?” I ask Lippman, and she rolls
her eyes and smiles, saying, “Has anyone?”
But it suits Baltimore, a fractured place
where cars and buildings burned once more
in 2015 after Freddie Gray was mortally
injured in the back of a police wagon and
the cops were acquitted. 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 her Healthy Holly children’s
books. In her honor, Lippman’s pub-trivia
team is called Healthy Holly LLC.) Harbor-
place, the waterfront mall that was the
focus of the ’80s downtown renaissance,
went into receivership last month. “And we
have a Republican governor, Larry Hogan,
incredibly anti- Baltimore,” Lippman adds,
noting that the city proper is one of only
three or four reliably blue counties in Mary-
land, the ones that usually carry the state.
Even amid all that, the .01 percent are in
evidence. Over in a development called
Harbor East, “the penthouse on the top
floor of the Four Seasons is on the market
for $12.5 million,” Lippman says, nearly
incredulous, suggesting that buying it
“would obviously be some sort of tax
dodge.” Or maybe cover for something
darker, something for Maddie and her
editors to look into. ■“I can’t be
nostalgic for 1966
because basically
what you’re saying
is Wasn’t Baltimore
great when it was
white?”Lippman at a union rally in 1996, when she was a reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun.PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM BURGER