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Laura Lippman speaks to Ayo Onatade for Shots Ezine© Ayo Onatade |
Laura Lippman is the author of the acclaimed series featuring Jewish-Irish former journalist turned private investigator, Tess Monaghan. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, she moved with her family to Baltimore where she spent her childhood and where she now lives and where her Tess Monaghan series is set. Laura Lippman is one of the few authors to have won every single mystery award going for this series. A former journalist, Every Secret Thing is her critically acclaimed first standalone novel and is told from the point of view of each of the various characters. Her books are published not only in the UK but also Japan, France, Norway and Portugal.
Ayo: | You’re pretty well known in North America but not so well known in the UK apart from in the crime fiction scene. Would you like to give us a bit of detail about yourself? |
Laura: | I was a journalist for twenty years and in the 1990s I began doing what I always wanted to do which was to try and write novels. I began what became the Tess Monaghan series about a young private detective in my home town of Baltimore. I actually managed to find an agent, sell it and launched on a career although it took me another eight years before I could leave my job. So I wrote seven books while working full time at the Baltimore Sun. In late 2001 I was finally able, thanks to my US publishers, to do it full time. I left the paper and I have been writing full time ever since, although I teach a little bit. |
Ayo: | What made you go into journalism initially? |
Laura: | I wanted to write for a living. I always wanted to write novels but sort of looked around and saw how the world worked and said, “Well, you know, it seems like the people who want to write fiction all end up being teachers and that seems a little frustrating to me.” That was a good hunch on my part and I later found out that it’s really hard if you are teaching full time to write. You are just wrung out. It is a very difficult thing to do. I thought that at least I could be a journalist and I would be writing everyday and I’d be getting paid to write. |
Ayo: | I understand that you worked together with your dad at some stage? |
Laura: | My father was a long time editor and writer at the Baltimore Sun and we overlapped there by about six years. I came in 1989 and he took retirement in 1995. He is still really active as a writer, still freelances and does book reviews and all sorts of things. But it was too good a deal not to leave when he was offered that retirement package. |
Ayo: | So what made you choose to write a crime novel? |
Laura: | I had tried to write a lot of those typical first novels that are coming-of-age stories. Very autobiographical, really boring, nothing ever happened and I would write like three chapters and run completely out of steam because even I was bored with by it. There is a thing for young writers, especially where you have written a couple of pages that you think are really good and you want to go round and show them to people, but I thought that if you are writing a crime novel you can’t have an unfinished crime novel. You’ve got to finish it, because if you show it to someone when it’s unfinished they will either say where is the rest of it, or worse yet they won’t care. But if it is any good then you have got to follow the story to the end. That’s why I did it - I had an idea and I just thought that if I tried to write something that is very story driven it will solve this problem that I’m having. Tess Monaghan was a former reporter, quite like me in temperament and intellect and probably world experience but she had a reason to be involved in these stories. I tried to give her reasons and I just had always read crime, always loved it. It’s kind of like the chocolate of my reading life! I have always liked reading to be a little bit on the subversive side. I read Lolita when I was twelve years old because I heard that it was a really dirty book. I saw reading as a very adult activity when I was the youngest in my family and I wanted to do what everyone else was doing. I wanted access to that world. When I was grown up and in college I would read a lot of “serious” literature, but it was too wholesome almost. I just always needed something in my reading life that wasn’t good for me or other people didn’t think was good for me, because something that people don’t say is that it is so fabulous that you are reading Lolita, you’re reading James Cain. If you walk around with Henry James under your arm you get great props - oh, that’s so amazing. |
Ayo: | Every Secret Thing is your first standalone novel after the first seven Tess books. What made you decide that the time was right for you to write a standalone? |
Laura: | The story decided it. The story did not fit Tess’s world, it didn’t fit Tess; it had to be told in a way that would not have allowed Tess to be the major character. The point of telling a story about children who have killed is to try and understand the children and you can only do that if you can give them a large piece of the book to themselves. For them to tell it, to see it through their eyes. It is a question that can only begin to be answered in fiction. |
Ayo: | Was there a specific event that prompted you to write Every Secret Thing? It is such a dark subject. |
Laura: | When I was here four years ago the Bulger case was very much in the news and the judge had been asked to decide whether the boys had finished serving their juvenile time. As I recall he was asked to interpret the law in a way that would allow him to remand them into adult custody and it wasn’t something that could be done automatically, it was going to have to be created judiciously. He came back and said I’m not going to do it, there is a reason we have a juvenile system (paraphrasing a bit) and the thing he said that engaged me was that when they are released they will have new names, new national identity numbers and it would be a crime to reveal who they are and where they are. And I thought Oh, it would never work that way in the United States. Press law is so much different and, knowing what I know about United States and juvenile law, which was not an insignificant bit, I thought that it is possible to commit a crime when you are very young, no one would know your name and you might be able to re-enter society with initial anonymity, but if for any reason attention was drawn to you that anonymity would be stripped away if you are of age. |
Ayo: | Do you consider Every Secret Thing to be a literary novel as well as a crime novel? I remember reading somewhere that you didn’t want it to be considered solely as a literary novel. |
Laura: | I was really worried that someone might try… I don’t want to be ever be reviewed this way in which people used that dreaded term “transcending the genre”. I have too much respect for the genre to believe that it can be transcended. I mean how am I going to levitate above that plane which holds James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, and Jim Connolly? I can’t get higher than that. If I could just get even with it I would be quite happy, thank you very much. What I like to say in a sort of playful taunting way is that I felt that Every Secret Thing read the way a literary novel would read if more literary writers could plot. |
Ayo: | When Every Secret Thing came out it received a lot of critical acclaim, especially from your fellow authors. Were you amazed by all the reaction? |
Laura: | I was very happy and very proud of the book. I think the thing I was surprised about is that people had bought the book. In the planning stages there was some nervousness about the book: 'it sounds awful', and 'it sounds terrible.' It is a book about two eleven year old girls who kill a baby. People would shake their heads and say they didn’t want to read it but there was a surprising number of people who did and I was sort of gratified by that too as there was a big increase in my sales in the US. They really understood the story and no one ever said, gee I am so happy I read Every Secret Thing, but they would write me and tell me that it stuck with them. They were still thinking about the characters and no two people responded exactly the same way, it became a very personal litmus test. I swear I could build a psychology course around what character in Every Secret Thing they responded to. |
Ayo: | What’s your writing routine like? Have all your years as a journalist paid dividends in the way that you write? |
Laura: | I think so. I am disciplined about writing, I don’t romanticise the writing process; it’s a craft. Inspiration will visit every now and then and it’s ever so nice but you can’t wait for it and nor should you. Sometimes you sit down and have nothing to say and you feel as if you’re not even going to get through the morning session but something good might emerge; you might be surprised at what happens by forcing yourself to do it day after day. I get up every morning without an alarm clock and I pick up my laptop, go down to my neighbourhood coffee house and I set up camp there for two to three hours. No one bothers me. I like the hum - it’s like a newsroom again. During the first draft those two to three hours - which are the equivalent of a quota of a thousand words - is about the best I can do. Then I am wiped out. I can go home and do e-mail, I can do research but I don’t have another writing session that day. That routine should bring me to a first draft in four to five months. Second draft I can do two sessions a day and then I set the goal of trying to get through an entire chapter. If I’m lucky I do a polished draft before I turn it in during the autumn. |
Ayo: | Every Secret Thing has been nominated for a number of awards the most recent being a Barry Award. You are one of the few authors to receive an Edgar, Shamus, Agatha, and Anthony Award for the Tess Monaghan series. How gratifying is that? |
Laura: | The thing about awards is that I came out of a newspaper that was very award driven. Awards were the goal, they were really into it, and as a consequence a lot of people beat themselves up and feel bad about themselves because they weren’t winning awards. So I sort of figured out for myself early on that awards are really nice when you win them and when you win you should go yeah, yeah I won an award and then you should forget about it. I’m going to quote something really queer now from the movie Cool Runnings: ‘If you’re not enough with the gold medal, you weren’t enough without it.’ I think that was Candy’s best material when he says it. I love that movie, it’s one of my guilty pleasures, but that’s true. Awards are really nice but the one that means the most to me is when fans like George Pelecanos tell me how much he loved Every Secret Thing. That’s because he is a total no bullshit person and he is also really bright and smart and he has thought a lot about what we do for a living. |
Ayo: | Characterisation or plot - or do you think it should be a combination of the two? |
Laura: | That’s a good question. When I started off I thought I could do character but I am not sure I could do plot. So I thought I really better work on the plot thing. I pushed myself harder on plot and as a consequence got better at it. You have to have both. I will say that if you could only have one you should have character. |
Ayo: | What writers that are up and coming are you most excited about at the moment? |
Laura: | The new Pelecanos. Up and coming! Shaun Doolittle published by Ugly Town. I’ve got to think very hard as I have a bad memory. I wouldn’t really describe Eric Garcia as up and coming but I have just finished reading The Cassandra French Finishing School for Boys about a mid-level lawyer at a Hollywood studio who has kidnapped three men and has them chained in her basement where she keeps them doped up with morphine and is teaching them how to be better boyfriends. Very tough book to bring off and I thought that he did it really well. Not an up and coming writer but a very established writer whose next book I cannot wait to read is Katy Munger. She is working on a standalone novel, I have to think it is going to be knock your socks off terrific. |
Ayo: | Talking a bit about Tess now, for those who haven’t read any of the Tess novels how would you describe her to a novice reader? |
Laura: | Oh, she is very, very human. She makes mistakes. The Tess series is very much about watching someone learn to do what she does. I was surprised later to find out that fans were a little bit perturbed about how inept she was at first. I just thought that that would be normal, there is a learning curve to everything. Tess is smart, fiercely loyal, almost to a fault sometimes, but when she loves you she’ll do anything for you; cross her and she will probably never speak to you again. |
Ayo: | That leads me on to another question what is your relationship with Tess like? |
Laura: | Oh, it’s great. I spend more time with Tess than I do with any flesh and blood human being. Maybe that’s pathetic, but you know I’m a stay-at-home writer and my boyfriend works all the time. If my boyfriend were around more often he would probably edge Tess out, but he goes out and works an eighteen hour day so I’m hanging out with Tess. She’s great company, she’s interesting, she has that habit of asserting herself sometimes, and I try to make her do things that are really out of character. |
Ayo: | Do you sometimes feel your characters getting away from you when you are writing? |
Laura: | Ultimately I have 51% of the voting stock in Lippman Monaghan Inc. I always get to veto, but sometimes as I am working I’ll have a plan and I’ll realise that it doesn’t really work. It’s very nice on paper and it’s neat and it’s all wonderfully symmetrically dramatic but it doesn’t make sense in Tess’s world. She wouldn’t do that so I talk myself out of it just like the duet called You’re Nothing Without Me in the musical City of Angels: the character is famous, the character is dashing but the writer is in control and at the very end of the song, there is this wonderful battling duet. I am always surprised that more crime writers don’t reference it. It’s a terrific musical. |
Ayo: | By a Spider’s Thread has just been published in the States and will soon be published here. Could you tell us a bit about it without revealing too much? |
Laura: | It is based on a real story that happened in Baltimore when I was a reporter. A man came home from work one day and his wife and three kids were gone so he called the police and told them his wife had taken his children. |
Ayo: | Are you taking a break at the moment or are you working on something? |
Laura: | I take one break and it’s about three weeks. I am working on my novel for next year which is another standalone about three once fast friends who were school girls and they end up in a bathroom. One’s been shot in the head and the third one is telling a story that doesn’t match the physical evidence. Harold Lenhardt, who is Nancy’s boss in Every Secret Thing, is the primary investigator. I liked the idea of having this seasoned, battle-hardened cop who has seen everything, every kind of homicide, every kind of murder; there is an allusion early in the book to a case he had where this horrible torture is done amongst drug dealers and all that now seems vastly preferable to trying to investigate the world of teenage girls. He has a pre-adolescent daughter and throughout the book he is increasingly aware of the world that awaits his daughter and why he doesn’t want her to enter it. In a weird way this book is also about the pitfalls of amateur investigation. There are a lot of people in this book who are poking their nose in where it doesn’t belong and trying to do the police’s work for them and that is going to have pretty disastrous consequences. |
Ayo: | Part and parcel of being a crime writer is all the camaraderie that you get within the crime fiction genre. Do you enjoy going to conferences and book signings? |
Laura: | It’s great, it’s like really short sessions of summer camp, but more than once a year. You have these great people, nicest groups of people I have ever known. I give it like 99% rating for just good souls. The thing is it is always nice to be around people who truly understand what you do. When I left the papers to write full time my mother said not judgmentally, but kind of wonderingly, ‘So all you are going to do is write a book a year now?’ Ah yeah, and recently my parents for the first time went to an event with me - the Maryland Library Association. |
Ayo: | Where you won an award I believe. |
Laura: | I was named author of the year and I had to give a speech, I had to give a workshop and I had to do two signings. Because my mom was with me she saw for the first time that going to something like that was certainly pleasurable and fun and I was thrilled to death, I’m working. |
Ayo: | It is a lot of hard work, you have to be organised, and you need to know what you are going to say. |
Laura: | I used up so much energy. You have to be your very best self and you have to be able to focus on people one by one and try and make sure that you talk. It was held near my parent’s house so I went home with them. I all but crawled over the threshold saying, ‘Give me a drink, I’m exhausted.’ And my mother said, ‘I am not surprised’ and that felt really good. Other than that you know a lot of people don’t really understand what I do and even some of my old colleagues at the Sun think that my life is so easy, it sounds easy. |
Ayo: | What do you consider to be the best type of mysteries? |
Laura: | I like the mysteries that are moving increasingly into the territory of the social novel. I like mysteries that are concerned with inequities big or small and culture today. I care a lot about class as an issue, which people say isn’t an issue in the United States but it very much is. Class is more fluid in the United States, you can grease your way upwards with money but there is still very much a class system. I think that matters. I’m really interested in the nuance of human personalities - I often receive the most slack for allowing good people to have bad moments in my novels. In Every Secret Thing Nancy Porter and Kevin Infante have a conversation if they would ever date interracially? She says she would and she thinks to herself that she wouldn’t but then she immediately rationalises that it’s not the person she is prejudiced against but its because she likes a certain type of guy, big and blonde; actually a kind of prejudice. |
Ayo: | Do you consider that crime or mystery novels should be seen as imparting social documents or as moralists? |
Laura: | I don’t get the point of writing about crime if you don’t have a moral feeling; if you are only writing about murder because it’s a really great sensational subject and you know that you can get people to pick up your book because you come up with this really keen new serial killer. No judgment, but it is not for me. It’s not for me as a reader, it’s not for me as a writer. Crime is such a great subject because a lot is revealed about a community when a crime happens there. What you reveal about yourself is a licence to examine justice and morality and right and wrong. Instead you can write something that is purely escapist fare. I would be bored as a writer and I would be bored as a reader. No judgment. |
Ayo: | How would you like Tess to be remembered? |
Laura: | First I would like her to be remembered… This is one of my little pet theories. The reason why literary writers and crime writers end up pissing on each other sometimes; the real battle in literature is to write something that outlasts you - you have no say in the matter. There is not enough money in the world. You could be a billionaire and you could endow your own library and make it carry your books for the next three centuries but no one gets to determine what future generations are going to read, what’s going to have staying power. That’s outside our control. You just hope that you have created something that will be remembered. |
Ayo: | What do you do in your spare free time when you do have spare time? |
Laura: | I’m so boring. Actually, there is one thing I do with my spare time of which I am proud. Every Thursday I’m in Baltimore, which this summer is not much, I work in a soup kitchen that is run by two Catholic workers Brendan Walsh and Willa Dickens. They are married, he’s a former priest, she’s a former nun and they have committed their lives to social justice and they can feed three hundred people for three hundred dollars. They are amazing. I serve lunch there every Thursday I’m in town. They are only open two days a week - Wednesday, Thursday - and after I realised that I had all this free time from leaving the Sun I called and asked Willa when she needed me and she said come on Thursdays. I have been going on Thursdays ever since. |
Ayo: | OK, now for some off-the-wall questions: What one luxury item would you take away with you if you were marooned on a desert island? |
Laura: | Is an Ipod one item, because I figure I could download all these audio books on an Ipod. |
Ayo: | I consider an Ipod as being a luxury item. |
Laura: | But its one thing right? Even if I download a thousand novels into the Ipod? |
Ayo: | It’s still one thing. |
Laura: | That’s it. Clearly I would take an Ipod with a thousand novels. All the ones I haven’t read but I am supposed to - Proust, Ulysses. We have started this thing in my household where we are dividing up the great books. I don’t have to do Joyce. I did Cortrelli Ellis’s Young Man and I have read sections of Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses but I am done with it and The Dubliners now. So my boyfriend has to read that but I’m supposed to do Proust. So when I go to the desert island I’ll get it done on audio. |
Ayo: | You can choose five crime characters, dead or alive, who you can take to dinner., who would they be? |
Laura: | Oh wow! Okay - Angie from Dennis Lehane’s books. I’ve always liked Angie and Casey Jones, Sam Jones. Now we need a couple of boys. A couple of great guys. Terry from George Pelecanos books. Has to be from a crime novel? Could it be from a crime television show? Oh, um, I’m having a brain fart! They’re a little too loud anyway, they’re too loud. Some really sexy guys, the sexiest guy in crime fiction. Terry’s good but, Dortmunder, I’ll take Dortmunder. |
Ayo: | Who would be the third guy? |
Laura: | Um, Bosch is too serious. Can’t take Bosch. Whom were you thinking of? |
Ayo: | Ivan Monk because I adore Gary Philips. |
Laura: | That’s a good one. I like that too. It’s kind of a toss up - Spenser or Elvis Cole. Spenser; my favourite Spenser. |
Ayo: | Thank you so much, Laura. |
Laura: | Thank you, I loved that. |
Books by Laura Lippman -
Tessa Monaghan series
Further information about Laura Lippman and her books can be found on her website -
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In real life people, such as Mary Bell, who have killed as young people can’t really offer us a satisfactory explanation. This is a delicate subject because she never speaks of it. Anne Perry, who clearly has the intellect and insight into herself to talk about this, of course wishes not to speak of it. The people who might be able to tell us either can’t or won’t, and the people who might talk about it tend to be psychopathic and are therefore uninteresting to me. I don’t need to know their argument, they’re insane, that’s the end of the story. So fiction is probably the best place to examine this subject.
They said to him here’s the thing, you’re married, no legal separation, no divorce pending, right now your wife has presumed shared custody of your children, she can take them anywhere she wants to. He had to get divorced in absentia, he had to get custody in absentia, and only then could anyone help him.