This season on Working, we took a trip to Baltimore to chat with some of the city’s residents about how they make a living there. We’re hoping to learn a little about the ways Baltimore shapes their work—and the ways they’re shaping Baltimore by working.
Listen to this episode of Working with special guest Laura Lippman:
Laura Lippman, a crime novelist with more than 20 books to her name follows an unusual route to work in the mornings. On days when she’s not stationed in a neighborhood coffee shop, she leaves her Baltimore home, turns the corner, and almost immediately enters a converted church. There, she winds her way up a few sets of stairs, landings piled high with volumes by other writers, to a quiet office illuminated by a massive peaked window—one of the few noticeable hallmarks of the building’s former sacerdotal mission.
Though it’s clearly her own space, it remains a sanctuary of sorts, an environment in which she typically writes at least 1,000 words a day—and sometimes many more. At that rate, she’s able to produce a book a year. Some readers, she fears, might scoff at her output. “The verbs that are used for people who write quickly are almost never flattering,” she says, citing terms such as “crank it out” and “churn it out.” But the quality of her work speaks for itself—as do the prizes that populate her crowded shelves, alongside a Wonder Woman figurine, an Edgar Allen Poe doll, and a small army of steampunk-looking robots.
Many of her earlier books literally loom over her as she writes at her wooden desk, some translated into a dizzying array of languages. For the visitor, that polyglot array is striking in part because Lippman herself remains so clearly bound to Baltimore. Though she, like her husband David Simon, has lived and worked elsewhere, this city is clearly her home, and like Simon, it’s her reflections on its spaces that resonate most dramatically.
Lippman grew up in Baltimore, and her childhood experiences provided her work with unavoidable context. “There’s something about this place where I grew up that’s really interesting to me, because you become aware that every place is two places,” she says. “There’s the place the child sees, and the place that the adult comes to terms with.” As a grownup, she spent eight years in Texas, aspiring to head home the whole time. When she finally returned, she felt obliged to grapple with the city’s pervasive racism: “I began to see Baltimore as this beloved family member. Doesn’t everyone have that one family member who drinks too much and says the wrong thing and is kind of an embarrassment and doesn’t get everything right, but you love him still?”
Lippman got her start in the newspaper business, as did Tess Monaghan, the tough and compelling private investigator who is the protagonist of many of her books. But where Monaghan had already been laid off by the time she began her investigative career, Lippman wrote her first novels after shifts at the Baltimore Evening Sun.
It took years, and multiple books, before she was able to leave the world of journalism behind to write novels full-time. Ultimately, though, it may have been her uncertainty about the news business’s future—there was already talk of layoffs back then, and she was one of the most junior reporters on staff—that drove her toward her current line of work. “The books were born out of interior panic,” she says.
Today, she’s far more financially secure than she was when her career was first taking off. “I sometimes allow people to infer that I’m much less successful than I am,” she tells us, joking that she occasionally lets people believe that she’s only able to indulge in the finer things because she’s married to a television producer. In truth, though, she says does quite well—whether or not every book shows up on the New York Times’s best-seller list. Her hard-won sense of stability shows in the way she’s able to approach new projects, under contract even before she knows what she’ll be writing. Still, she claims that she’s always focused on the book after the one she’s currently writing, forever worrying that one might be the last she gets to write, especially if this one flops.
A great deal of research goes into her novels. Though many publications’ archives are available online, she often visits the central library of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt system to trawl through old daily newspapers on microfilm. She pays special attention to the advertisements surrounding the articles, treating them as evidence of what life would have been like for her characters. As she explains, though, it’s important to her to do as much writing as possible in advance, first figuring out what holes she needs to fill, lest she inadvertently lose herself in the rabbit warren of the past.
As her loaded shelves suggest, Lippman is also an eager reader of fiction, and her time with the books of others further shapes her own. To some extent, her own time composing crime fiction has spoiled her easy appreciation of the genre, taking away some of the “unfettered joy” she once found in it. Other works, however, still yield rich rewards: Her current project, for example, took off when she started imagining it in relationship to Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, a book she claims to read every year, “much to my husband’s consternation.” Having originally imagined her next novel as a sort of prequel to her Tess Monaghan series, she eventually came to think of it as an informal sequel to Wouk’s work, one that would take off with a similar character where his left off, drawing on real developments in the racialized history of Baltimore policing along the way.
Even when she’s writing about the city’s past, its present still shapes many of the ideas she pursues most doggedly. “Increasingly, what I want to write about is how really well-intentioned people who are so sure they’re doing the right thing can go so horribly wrong,” she says.
You can listen to our full conversation with Lippman at the link above. Then, in a Slate Plus extra, Lippman talks a little about the original Baltimorean detective writer, Edgar Allen Poe. If you’re a member, enjoy bonus segments and interview transcripts from Working, plus other great podcast exclusives. Start your two-week free trial at slate.com/workingplus.
