Laura Lippman

• Born: January 31, 1959
• Place of Birth: Atlanta, Georgia

TYPE OF PLOT: Private investigator

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Tess Monaghan, 1997-

Contribution

Laura Lippman achieved immediate success with her first novel, Baltimore Blues (1997), which was nominated for a Shamus Award for best first novel. Later books in the series have won every major award for mystery writing, including the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, Agatha Award, Nero Wolfe Award, Shamus Award, Strand Critics Award, Barry Award, Gold Dagger Award, Macavity Award for Best Novel, and the Quill Award she has earned many of these awards multiple times over. She is also a New York Times best-selling author. Lippman has written over twenty detective novels, numerous short story anthologies, and a memoir titled Summer of Fall (2023).

Lippman began publishing as a paperback original author, but since 2000, her novels have been released in hardback editions, and her reputation has grown accordingly. Her work is available overseas in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Lippman places herself in the middle range of American crime writers, no longer an obscure author with a strong regional following but not yet a household name with a string of bestsellers. She has been committed to advancing the genre of crime fiction and to discovering and encouraging new writers.

Lippman’s twenty years as a journalist and her intimate knowledge of state and local politics in Maryland and Baltimore contribute to the believability of her work. Both her series and her nonseries novels are known for their social realism. Her writing is informed by considerations of class, race, and gender but avoids any sense of shrillness, tokenism, or political correctness.

In 2024, Lippman's New York Times bestseller, Lady in the Lake (2019), was made into an Apple+ television miniseries.

Biography

Laura Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1959, the daughter of Theo Lippman, Jr., a journalist, and Madeline Mabry Lippman, a librarian. Two years later, her family moved to Washington, D.C., when her father became a correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution. In 1965, her father accepted a position with The Sun, then the morning newspaper of Baltimore, and the family relocated again. Lippman attended Baltimore city schools through ninth grade and graduated from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Maryland, where she was captain of the It’s Academic team. After studying journalism at Northwestern University, she began a career as a reporter, working in Waco and San Antonio, Texas, before joining the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1989. When that paper was taken over by The Sun in 1991, she and her father became colleagues until his retirement a few years later.

While in her twenties, Lippman began writing fiction. She credits a workshop directed by the novelist with encouraging her to pursue publishing her work. After abandoning several novels, Lippman completed Baltimore Blues in 1994. Later that year, even though she had yet to secure an agent, she began writing her second novel in what would become the Tess Monaghan series. She completed seven novels in the series while continuing to work full time at the Baltimore Sun. Although her years as a journalist/novelist were highly productive ones, the demands of maintaining a dual career placed enormous strains on her personal relationships. In interviews, she has attributed the breakup of an early marriage in part to her “workaholism.”

After leaving the Baltimore Sun, Lippman became involved in a relationship with David Simon, author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and producer of the Home Box Office series The Wire (beginning in 2002). Lippman avoids discussing personal matters, but she has contrasted her fictional version of Baltimore with Simon’s, which portrays more accurately the nature of crime in the city, which regularly registers five homicides a week and where the victims are frequently young black men.

The city of Baltimore is central to all of Lippman’s writing. Since becoming a novelist, she has lived in several different areas of the city, immersing herself in neighborhood culture and participating in community activities. She donates a portion of her appearance fees to Health Care for the Homeless and volunteers at a Baltimore soup kitchen. Although she shares a number of traits with Tess Monaghan, such as a fondness for greyhounds and a healthy appetite, Lippman has rejected the idea that her character is an alter ego. She has stated that any resemblance is superficial.

Lippman maintains a disciplined schedule, writing a thousand words every morning—most often at a local coffee shop, where the background noise reminds her of a newsroom—and exercising every afternoon. Once she has completed a first draft, she revises the entire manuscript several times. Her own writing practices are consistent with the advice that she gives to novice writers: establish a routine, finish the manuscript, and revise.

After completing seven books in the Tess Monaghan series, Lippman began alternating between nonseries crime novels and books featuring Tess.

Analysis

Laura Lippman follows in the footsteps of , , and Marcia Muller, all of whom broke new ground in the 1980s by introducing female private investigators into exclusively male territory. Lippman describes her series character, Tess Monaghan, as a second-generation feminist detective who, unlike her predecessors, Kinsey Millhone, V. I. Warshawski, and Sharon McCone, need not perform better than her male counterparts to pursue a successful career. In fact, when Tess is first introduced, she is an unemployed journalist who undertakes a surveillance operation as a favor for a friend. Lippman has referred to her character as “the accidental detective.” It is not until the third novel of the series that Tess obtains her license and sets up her own business. Neither her career choice nor her independence alienates her from the larger society. In contrast to the hard-boiled loner Kinsey Millhone, Tess enjoys family, friends, and house pets, and unlike V. I. Warshawski, she does not agonize over retaining her independence within romantic relationships. Having come of age in a culture more receptive to female autonomy, Tess is better equipped than her older sisters-in-crime to balance professional and personal interests. Lippman keeps her character on a human scale so that her problems are ordinary ones, so while her missteps may lead to heartache, they avoid melodrama.

Generally regarded as social realism, the Monaghan series encompasses a range of contemporaneous concerns. However, the novels do not foreground social issues at the expense of character, and the tone is never shrill. Lippman writes in third-person limited, restricting point of view to Tess and allowing her voice to dominate. The character’s sense of humor keeps the writing entertaining without trivializing serious subject matter.

Lippman’s experience as a reporter serves her well in this series. She gives Tess a remarkably similar background to her own, one that provides the character with the skills and resources to succeed as an investigator. One of the strengths of the series is how convincing Tess is as she tracks down information from public records and interviews contacts. She is comfortable with technology, but she does not rely on computer wizardry for answers.

Overall, Lippman has produced a body of fiction that, while staying within the boundaries of the genre, possesses a true-to-life quality. She frequently bases plots on actual cases. In addition, her intimate knowledge of Baltimorewhere all but one of her books is setallows her to place her characters in well-defined social and cultural contexts. Realism is also reflected in her plot resolution, which resists oversimplification and pat, happy endings.

In keeping with the genre, many of Lippman’s secondary characters are two-dimensional. Aunt Kitty, the femme fatale, and friend Whitney, the wealthy socialite, are predictable stereotypes, while boyfriend Crow, in spite of maturing as the series progresses, remains too good to be true. However, in later works, Lippman has shown an improved facility for character development as she has employed a more complex point of view. The increasing sophistication of her style is particularly apparent in Every Secret Thing and To the Power of Three (2005), which are less formulaic than the books in the Monaghan series.

Charm City

In the second book in Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series, Charm City, Lippman draws on her knowledge of the newspaper industry to set her story in motion. Tess, still an unlicensed investigator working for lawyer Tyner Gray, accepts an assignment from her former employer, the Beacon Light, to look into the unauthorized publication of a story that led to the suicide of a prominent citizen involved in a deal to bring a professional basketball franchise to Baltimore. A subplot examines the dog racing industry and the fate of retired greyhounds. Lippman brings plot and subplot together neatly in this traditionally crafted mystery, but the strength of this early work lies in characterization as Tess learns to apply her skills in a new profession.

The Sugar House

A variation on the conventional whodunit, The Sugar House reveals the identity of the murderer in the prologue. Tess’s challenge is to identify the victim. When the murderer is killed in prison, his sister hires Tess to find out why. The key appears to lie with the victim, a Jane Doe whose body was never claimed. The case leads Tess to a treatment center for eating disorders; Lippman provides a shocking view into the world of anorexia while examining Tess’s past problems with bulimia. Midway through the novel, Tess solves her case, but establishing who Jane Doe is raises more questions than it answers. As Tess continues the investigation, Lippman takes the story into Maryland’s colorful political history, adding another layer of sophistication to the story. The Sugar House, the first work of the series to be published in hardback, attracted international attention and established Lippman as a significant literary figure within the genre.

In a Strange City

Since the mid-twentieth century, Baltimoreans have been enchanted by the mysterious appearance of the Poe Toaster, a cloaked figure who makes an annual visit to the grave of on the night of Poe’s birthday, leaving an offering of three red roses and a half bottle of cognac. In a Strange City (2001) puts the identity—and life—of the Poe Toaster at risk. Tess, approached by a shady antiques dealer to track down the Toaster, turns away the potential client, then sets off to protect the Baltimore legend. While standing watch at the gravesite on the poet’s birthday, Tess witnesses the murder of a Toaster impersonator and finds herself involved in a dangerous entanglement. This book is notable for its tribute to Poe, the father of the modern detective story. Lippman’s considerable research is evident throughout, and she weaves into the plot a number of fitting tributes to Poe’s stories.

No Good Deeds

No Good Deeds (2006) reflects Lippman’s stylistic development as she grows more adventurous with point of view. In this work, perspective is focalized through several different characters: Tess; her boyfriend, Crow; and Lloyd Jupiter, a homeless black teenager whom Crow is trying to help. Lloyd is a particularly well-drawn character, whose distrust of white people undermines his opportunity to escape a cycle of poverty and violence. In this novel, Lippman defines for the first time “two Baltimores”: one affluent and white, the other poor and black.

Lippman’s unvarnished portrayal of racial tensions suggests how strongly her fictional worldview has been affected by the city’s problems with urban crime, drug-infested neighborhoods, and failing schools. The social realism of this work is enhanced by a plot with strong parallels to the unsolved murder in 2003 of federal prosecutor Jonathon Luna. No Good Deeds suggests that the Monaghan series is moving in a more serious direction as the principal characters become more fully engaged in larger concerns.

Lady in the Lake

A New York Times besteller, Lady in the Lake is one of Lippman's standalone novels. The story takes place once again in Baltimore, but this time, it is set in 1966. Protagonist Madeline "Maddie" Schwartz has left her comfortable, married life of twenty years to pursue her passions. When she finds out about a recovered body from a lakethat of a young Black woman, CleoMaddie sets out to uncover the truth of the woman's death at a time when little interest was paid to the deaths of Black women. Maddie, who is also marginalized as a female detective in the 1960s, reaches beyond her own abilities, though, and her missteps and interference in Cleo's life brings about the ghost of Cleo as well as an abundance of turmoil for those Maddie interacts with. While the messy protagonist and ghostly interactions are somewhat new territory for Lippman, the depth and dynamic of her plot and mystery hold steady. The book was made into an Apple+ television series in 2024 starring Moses Ingram and Natalie Portman.

Principal Series Character:

• Tess Monaghan, an unemployed newspaper reporter in her late twenties when the series begins, stumbles into detective work. As the novels continue in real time, she moves from part-time researcher to full-time, self-employed, licensed private investigator. In the process, she navigates complicated relationships with friends, family, and a boyfriend six years her junior. Unlike many of her private investigator counterparts, she does not grow jaded from her exposure to crime. Her sense of humor remains intact throughout the series, and she retains a guarded optimism while living and working in a city that averages a homicide every thirty-six hours.

Bibliography

Aguilera, Elizabeth. “Putting Anger to Work: There’s a Lot of Laura Lippman in Her Detective Heroine.” Denver Post, 14 Oct. 2002.

Dunkel, Tom. “What Her Fans Know.” Knight-Ridder Tribune Business News, 5 Apr. 2007.

Gross, Jane. “When Friendship Fails You.” Review of To the Power of Three, by Laura Lippman. The New York Times, 28 Jul. 2005.

“Lady in the Lake - TV Mini Series.” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt14022668/. Accessed 23 Aug. 2024.

Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers. 2d ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007.

Lippman, Laura. Laura Lippman.com. www.lauralippman.com. Accessed 23 Aug. 2024.

Lippman, Laura. “PW Talks to Laura Lippman.” Interview by Pat Koch. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 34 (August 20, 2001): 61.

Munt, Sally. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.