Laura Lippman is the multiple award-winning best-selling author of (currently) twelve books in the acclaimed private investigator Tess Monaghan series and now eleven New York Times bestselling standalone novels. Her most recent book published in the UK is The Lady in the Lake (Faber &Faber). She has won numerous awards for her writing including the Anthony, Edgar®, Shamus, Macavity, Nero, Barry and Agatha Awards to name a few! Her books are published all over the world to great acclaim.
I grew up in a newspaper family, the daughter of an editorial writer at The Sun, as the Baltimore morning newspaper was known then. The Sun was a grand old institution, with a noted Washington bureau and foreign bureaus. Its sister paper, the Evening Sun, was slightly more raucous, as afternoon newspapers tended to in the 1960s. But it had the better comics page by far and I was often the first person in the family to grab it from the sidewalk.
The year I turned 10, a terrifying murder made headlines. A girl not much older than I had disappeared on her way home from school. Her body was found in a vacant lot a few days later. The crime was solved quickly, thanks to a detail that would have been at home in the forensic-driven television dramas of today: A sandy substance, one not indigenous to Maryland, was found on her body. It was something used in aquariums and that led to the man, a tropical fish store clerk, who had murdered her. The killer remains in a Maryland prison to this day.
Another twenty-plus years would go by before I learned about another tragic death in 1969. A woman's body was found in the fountain at the large, manmade lake near the park that houses Baltimore's zoo. She had been missing for weeks, but that wasn't news. And even the discovery of her body, strange as it was -- the cause of her death was never determined, so her death wasn't even officially a homicide -- didn't make news. The woman, Shirley Parker, was African-American. My colleague, David Michael Ettlin, dubbed her "Lady in the Lake" and included the story on the "crime tour" he sometimes gave new reporters.
If Americans can agree on anything these days, it's that the presidential election of 2016 was extremely emotional, its outcome unexpected. Baffled and disturbed by my country's present-day situation, I couldn't see how to write a novel set in contemporary times. So I looked to the past. Embedded in my own detective series was this nugget: Tess Monaghan's parents had met while working as volunteers on the 1966 governor's race in Maryland. A quasi family member, Spike, had been convicted of a felony that prohibited from having a bar license. Strange as it may sound, I was never quite sure what Spike had done. Maybe it was time to find out.
"Does it have to be about Tess's parents?" my long-time editor, Carrie Feron, asked over lunch. I wasn't sure if the question was an open-ended one or a gentle nudge toward doing a stand-alone. But it opened my mind to all the possibilities inherent in a 1966 crime novel. I found myself imagining a story in which two deaths, very similar to those 1969 ones described above, would be linked.
Only what would link them? I didn't want to write some big coinkydinky novel in which a serial killer roamed the city, protected by a vast conspiracy. It has always been my tendency to create human-scale stories, where the stakes seem small to everyone but the players. What would connect the high-profile murder of a child and the quickly forgotten death of a black woman?
Meet Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz. If you know Marjorie Morningstar, you will recognize her as an homage, down to her maiden name and married name. But unlike the eponymous heroine of Herman Wouk's 1955 novel, she yearned to be a writer, not an actress, an ambition that is reawakened by a series of chance encounters when she is 37. She finds the body of a murdered 11-year-old, then leverages that discovery for a clerical job at the evening newspaper. To break in as a reporter, Maddie needs another big story. She decides the "Lady in the Lake" is her ticket. But the "lady," a cynical young ghost keeping tabs on Maddie's investigation, is not pleased.
It always sounds woo-woo to say this, but so much of the novel was unknown to me when I started. I didn't know it would be a newspaper novel. I didn't aniticpate the first voice heard would be a ghost's. I didn't realize a chorus of other voices, all the people seen and yet not seen by the heat-seeking missile that is Maddie Schwartz, would join in. And, lo and behold, there were also Tess Monaghan Easter eggs for the readers who have been reading me for the past 20 years. Here is Tess's mother, working in her brother's jewelry store. She introduces Maddie to Tess's uncle, a closeted gay man with a job in the Maryland legislature. And, finally, there is Spike. All of these people bounce off Maddie Morgenstern, interesting to her primarily as the means to an end.
Just this morning, a reader tweeted that she was sorry to say goodbye to Maddie when the book was over. I know the feeling. But I'm not sure I've said goodbye to her. In some ways, Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz -- born in 1929, a libertine disguised as a suburban Jewish housewife, a woman whose ambition makes her careless and selectively curious -- is the most autobiographical character I have written to date.
The Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman (Faber & Faber) Published on 25 July 2019 (£12.99)
Cleo Sherwood disappeared eight months ago. Aside from her parents and the two sons she left behind, no one seems to have noticed. It isn't hard to understand why: it's 1964 and neither the police, the public nor the papers care much when Negro women go missing. Maddie Schwartz - recently separated from her husband, working her first job as an assistant at the Baltimore Sun- wants one thing: a byline. When she hears about an unidentified body that's been pulled out of the fountain in Druid Hill Park, Maddie thinks she is about to uncover a story that will finally get her name in print. What she can't imagine is how much trouble she will cause by chasing a story that no-one wants her to tell.
More information about Laura and her work can be found on her website.
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