INTERVIEW:Laura Lippman has produced a formidable body of work writing on crime in Baltimore, which means she has an awful lot in common with her husband, she tells fellow writer John Connolly
IT'S SAFE TO SAY that, until recent times, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, failed to occupy a singular place in the popular imagination of most people outside, well, the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Randy Newman sang an unflattering song about it ("Hard times in the city/ In a hard town by the sea"). Edgar Allan Poe was buried there, and it tended to rank highly among US cities with spectacular rates of homicide. Baltimore also provided a backdrop for the films of directors Barry Levinson and John Waters, and the novels of Anne Tyler, but that was about it in terms of its international cultural relevance.
Then along came The Wire, the epic HBO series that used Baltimore as a means of examining all that was wrong (institutions) and some of what was right (people) in the United States, and suddenly the city was, if not hip, then at least familiar to those who might otherwise have struggled to find it on a map.
But before The Wireemerged, Baltimore was already being chronicled in a series of fine mystery novels by the journalist-turned-author Laura Lippman. Like David Simon, the creator of The Wireand the earlier Homicide, similarly set in Baltimore, she is a former journalist with the Baltimore Sun. She is also, in a nice piece of circularity, Mrs David Simon.
They were married on the roof of their house by John Waters, who, in addition to having famously filmed the actor Divine eating dog poo, and therefore not perhaps being the first person who might spring to mind where matrimonial duties are concerned, is also an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. By coincidence, Waters has also been performing his one-man show in Dublin this same week, briefly making Dublin more of a focal point for Baltimore culture than Baltimore itself.
"The joke is that Baltimore has a southern pace and northern manners," says Lippman, sipping wine in a Dublin bar while her husband entertains a sell-out crowd at the IFI. "Very slow, rude people. I think that Baltimore is like my crazy uncle who gets drunk at the dinner table and says things he shouldn't say, but I still love him." Unusually for an author, Lippman is actually easy to interview, describing herself as "pathologically outgoing", which makes her sound a lot less balanced than she actually is. Tall and blonde, her self-confessed "smart mouth" has become more restrained as she gets older and is now less likely, she says, to get her into trouble. When she was 19, she was once punched in the stomach in a Chicago bar by a drunken yuppie who took issue with her attitude. It would be a foolhardy scoundrel who would try such a thing now.
While Baltimore is home, Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and is southern to the core. Four ancestors fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, one of them dying at Gettysburg, and she has two uncles named Bubba. Meanwhile, her great-great-great grandfather, the exotically-named Hardy Callaway Culver of Hancock County, Georgia, was a slave owner.
"It's an impossible legacy," she says of Culver. "There's nothing you can say about being descended from people who owned slaves other than to say that it is the fact. Years ago, the writer Edward Ball told me that any family that had owned slaves had to tell themselves a lie about it. His family's lie was that they were nice to their slaves, which was untrue because there was clearly rape. And I started thinking about that and wondered what lie my family told, and what I had always heard was that the family didn't own many slaves, but when we looked at the 1840 census it was 47 slaves. That's not a small number, by any means." Does she feel guilty about it, I ask? After all, it's hardly her fault.
"I don't feel guilt, necessarily, but I don't romanticise my family, just as I don't romanticise Baltimore. I think nostalgia is incredibly dangerous. It's important to face facts, and Baltimore is a city that is particularly susceptible to a nostalgic image of itself."
Thus the picture of Baltimore painted in her books is of a city that is both struggling yet defiant, ugly yet oddly beautiful. She namechecks places that she loves - parks, diners, restaurants - so that the city becomes a character in her novels in a way that it does not in the work of Tyler, for whom Baltimore could be any city in the United States. Lippman's latest book, Another Thing to Fall, which features her regular series character, private investigator Tess Monaghan, uses the filming of a TV mini-series to delve into the history of Baltimore, as well as making some pointed comments about the demise of the city's industries.
It's hard to overestimate how respected Lippman is by her peers. She began writing novels because one of her bosses at the newspaper told her that he didn't think she could write at all. ("I'm incredibly grateful to that man, and he didn't turn out to be nearly the worst boss I've ever had. He was democratic in his meanness. He was mean to everybody.") She has since written 13 books, has won nearly every major crime- writing award, and is a New York Timesbestseller, yet she remains virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
Lippman writes particularly well about children and childhood, perhaps unusually so given that she has only recently become a stepmother to Simon's son by his previous marriage. Last year, she published the extraordinary What The Dead Know, recently released here in paperback, the tale of two young sisters, the Bethanys, who disappear while on a trip to the shopping mall, only for one of them to resurface many years later in the aftermath of a traffic accident. Slowly, the book uncovers the truth about what really happened to the Bethany sisters.
"What interests me about children is that they are so inexpert at concealing what they really want," she says. "They think they're pretty good at it, but they're not. As people grow up, they get much better at covering up their desires and motivations. Children try to cover them up, but they can't. Maybe it's also because I was a particularly conniving little kid. I always had agendas and schemes, but I was always getting found out. It's just such an interesting time of life. You're trying on all these personas, and thinking you're so smart . . ."
This idea of concealment lies at the heart of What The Dead Know, and provides the book with a jaw-dropping twist that turns on its head everything that we have learned about the Bethanys up to that point. Inspired by the actual disappearance of two girls from Washington DC, Sheila and Katherine Lyon, who vanished in 1975 and have never been found, the book also has roots in Lippman's own life and experience.
"That's a novel that really came about from having been through a divorce," she says. "I wanted to write about grief. I wanted to write about grief and I wanted to say that there's no right way to grieve and there are some things that you're never, ever going to get over. There comes a point where people don't want you to talk about it any more.
They'd really like you to shut up about it, and you just want to bleed out. So I wanted to write about a grief that never ended." Now that she and Simon have tied the knot, I wonder if they influence each other's work in any way, or their perceptions of the city about which they have both chosen to write.
"I think we both love Baltimore but, as a writer, David has chosen to explore his belief that all institutions will let you down, and individuals mean less and less to them. Institutions will all screw you over, and that's the David Simon view of the world. It's set in Baltimore because that's where he worked, but he really does love the city.
"But what's probably not immediately obvious is that David is much, much nicer than I am, and more generous in his view of humankind than I am. I'm the mean one. David has a dark view of institutions and politics and the world, but I'm the one with the darker view of people . . ."
Another Thing to Fall(£9.99) and What The Dead Know(£6.99) are both published by Orion