(This article originally appeared in the December 2025 issue of the South Baltimore Peninsula Post.)
by Robert Hardy
“I would say that I’m just well known enough in Baltimore that I make it a practice to be exceedingly polite wherever I go.”
Laura Lippman, Baltimore’s best known crime fiction writer, is sitting at a sun-drenched table in a South Baltimore Starbucks this fall, unrecognized for the moment. She’s discussing her latest book, Murder Takes a Vacation (William Morrow, 2025), and musing on other recent projects and her writing life in the neighborhood.
“I live in Federal Hill South,” she notes, “because it’s south of Cross Street, which is a very South Baltimore distinction.” She’s lived in the neighborhood since 2002 and is co-parenting her teenage daughter along with her ex-husband, David Simon (The Wire, Treme, We Own This City), splitting time between Baltimore and a second home in New Orleans.
“I used to work here,” she says, glancing around the anonymous-looking cafe, “and before that, I worked at Spoons for a long time. Parents would gather there after dropping their kids off to school, and I felt comfortable parking there with a cup of coffee and writing for the entire morning. I had always been good working in public places because I worked in newsrooms for 20 years and it felt very familiar.
“During the pandemic, the room I used as a home office became my daughter’s schoolroom, and I worked downstairs at the dining room table. After a year and a half of working from my quiet dining room, I got used to that, and now that’s what I do. I like the peace and quiet.”
Murder Takes a Vacation is Lippman’s twenty-sixth novel since the 1997 publication of Baltimore Blues, the first book of the Tess Monaghan detective series, which now includes 12 volumes. The new novel’s main character, Mrs. Muriel Blossom, first appeared as Tess Monaghan’s assistant in Another Thing to Fall (2008). She takes center stage now as a 68-year-old widow who solves a murder mystery on a river cruise in France.
“At first, I just wanted to write about somebody nice,” Lippman says of her new protagonist. “I’d written two novels back-to-back about just pretty awful people [Prom Mom (2023) and Dream Girl (2022)], and I thought it would be pleasant for a change. I’m always looking to do something different, so I said, well, this will be different. I’ll write a much more traditional Agatha Christie-type novel. I’ll pull this character in from the early series and see where it takes us.”
Lippman began writing the book “very aware of the ways the character and I are different,” she notes. “She’s only two or three years older than I am, but in so many ways, we’re very different. She’s shy. She didn’t work outside of her home for most of her marriage. She’s widowed. Then as I worked on the book, I was like, well, we have as much in common as not. We’re both women on our own in our sixties. She won the lottery and is dealing with the weirdness of that. I walked away from my marriage with a divorce settlement that obligated me to become much more conscientious about finances and things. It’s a lot about starting over in your sixties.”
Aging is a theme that Lippman has addressed before, tangentially in the Tess Monaghan series and directly in her essays, notably collected in My Life as a Villainess (2020), which includes “Game of Crones,” focusing on late motherhood.
“I didn’t try to write first-person essays until 2018,” she says. “At this point, people who read crime fiction should know who I am. I wanted to explore getting my writing in front of people who didn’t know me, and it started with this online publication, Longreads. It had a section called Fine Lines, edited by Sari Botton, who had edited a book of essays about New York called Goodbye to All That. I wrote to her out of the blue and said I’ve got things I want to write about being old, and the first thing I want to write about is being a really old mom. So I wrote ‘Game of Crones.’”
Lippman wrote three more essays for Fine Lines, “and those essays were popular enough that my editor at William Morrow commissioned a book of essays from me, which is how My Life as a Villainess came together.
“I was definitely able to write about some things in the essays that I can’t write about in fiction. My mom died in September 2024, and I’ve written at least two pieces directly about my mom and about the sidewinder that is grief. Most of the writers I like best do more than one thing. One of my best friends is the writer Ann Hood, who writes a lot of personal essays, and she also writes fiction, and she’s written children’s books. She writes a lot about grief. She writes a lot about food. Everything informs everything else. It’s all cross-training.”
Lippman’s cross-training has involved translating her fiction onto the screen with an independent film version of her 2004 novel Every Secret Thing produced by Frances McDormand in 2014 and last year’s limited Apple TV series based on her 2019 novel Lady in the Lake.
“I had a great experience with Lady in the Lake and also with an earlier book produced by Fran McDormand for a small indie art film. And there are at least two other projects in process,” Lippman says.
“We’re now creating a new Tess for television,” she adds. “We’re just starting down a road that’s about a hundred miles long. All of the Tess novels and short stories have been optioned, and now my writing partner, who is also one of my dearest friends, Megan Abbott, and I are getting ready to start pitching a pilot. We’ve had to rethink the Tess world a lot, because most of the work appears in a pre-Internet, pre-cell-phone world, and we have to bring it up to modern day. There’s a lot to be done, but we’re pretty excited about it. We’ve got the beats down on our pilot. We’re rehearsing for our producers tomorrow. It’s all new to me. I’ve never done any of this.
“Megan Abbott has written a lot for Hollywood. She adapted her book, Dare Me, for Netflix. She was on the staff of The Deuce. She’s got many irons in the fire. I think of Megan as the show-runner, although there’s no show to run yet. And the odds are never in your favor. But we believe that Baltimore is one of the strongest calling cards for the series. It’s a big part of the pitch: why we think the city matters, what we feel the city has to offer as a setting.”
Does the move to television signal an end to the popular series of Tess Monaghan novels? “No, I just keep waiting for the right one to show up,” Lippman says. “I’m actually currently writing another Mrs. Blossom novel. From the moment I turned the first one in, the question was, can this be a series? And my answer was, probably, but I need a little break.
“Last fall, I started writing a different book, but I had a hunch that I would make everybody happy if I decided to write a sequel. So I made a deal that in June, after the book came out, we’d revisit and decide what was best. I had the idea, and I knew what I wanted to do, so in July, I started writing the second Mrs. Blossom book. She’ll be in Tuscany, which is an easy one for me. I’ve been there a lot. My friend Ann Hood recruited me to teach in a writer’s workshop that she does there, so I’m going next month for my sixth or seventh time. I’ve learned a lot about that part of the world.”
Teaching is an important part of Lippman’s “cross-training.” Besides being on the faculty of Hood’s Spannocchia Writers Workshop in Tuscany, she’s taught writing at Goucher College in Towson, and “since 2006, I teach in a program called Writers in Paradise at Eckerd College (St. Petersburg, Florida) every January. The crime fiction world is really super friendly, and I think all of us feel that we want to pay it forward. It’s good for your genre to bring in young people. If you don’t bring in young readers, soon you don’t have any readers.”
A newspaper reporter for 20 years, including 12 years at The Baltimore Sun, Lippman is one of a surprising number of Sun and Evening Sun writers to end up writing crime fiction, several of whom are represented in the anthology Baltimore Noir (Akashic Books, 2006), which she edited.
Skimming through the contents, she notes a few names: “First, there’s Rob, which breaks my heart,” she says of Rob Hiaasen, her friend who was killed in the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis in 2018. Other former Sun writers included are Rafael Alvarez, Dan Fesperman, Lisa Respers France, Sujata Massey, Sarah Weinman, and David Simon. “It’s pretty funny,” she observes. “I don’t know how it happened we all turned to crime writing. The joke was that we all wanted to kill people.”
Lippman is reflective about her time at the Sun and about the ways in which her relationship to Baltimore has changed over the years. “When I was at the newspaper, I was connected to the city in a different way,” she says. “I was in a room full of people and we were covering its various systems, and I really understood the interlocking political systems and bureaucracies. Well, I’ve been out of that world for over 20 years, and now I connect to the city as a mom and as a neighbor in a neighborhood.
“When I walk with my friend Joyce on the weekends, one of the constant themes of our conversations is that we’re so lucky to live where we live. There’s so much to do, there’s such a sense of community, and it’s lovely. And it feels like a pretty well-kept secret. I’m a city person. Some of my novels do take place in the suburbs, and those are the darkest ones, the ones most shot through with rot. [She cites Prom Mom and To the Power of Three.] The Tess books, which are the more urban books, are much more affectionate.
“When I have work done at my house, it’s often done by people who have kids in my kid’s school, so we know each other, and it’s a very different experience when you’re each other’s neighbor. When the guy who built my deck said to me ‘can my daughter come over and interview you for the school paper,’ I’m like, ‘of course.’ We all know each other. I was a regular at the Starbucks they just closed on Charles Street, and I would tell them when I was going out of town because I honestly believed that if I went more than like four days without showing up, they’d get worried about me.
“As I try to explain to people, especially with the current resident of the White House, I’m safer in South Baltimore than anywhere in the suburbs, because my neighbors know me and they look out for me.”
Laura Lippman’s South Baltimore
Laura Lippman clearly loves South Baltimore. Here are a few of her favorite SoBo spots that came up in our conversation this fall. – Robert Hardy
“At this point, I’ve probably seen about 1500 sunrises over Domino Sugars. It’s always interesting to do something over and over and over again and find out how much variety there can be.”
“I love Fort McHenry. When I have time, I love walking all the way down there. I went down there the week the bridge collapsed. I wanted to see what it looked like, and it was hard to take in. It was really overwhelming.”
“One of my mainstays for eating in the neighborhood is Hersh’s. Hersh’s was so smart during the pandemic. They immediately went to takeout only, and they also added I think a 20 percent service fee to take care of their staff. I love those guys. I love their food.”
“Shoyou Sushi is fantastic. My daughter loves sushi more than she loves anything on the face of the earth, and she loves Shoyou. And she’s had some pretty good sushi in her life.”
Asked whether she has any favorite local watering holes, Lippman has an immediate response. “Oh my god,” she says, “the Idle Hour. I’m not sure I want people to know. The Idle Hour is only like the most perfect bar in the world. It’s the platonic ideal of a bar as far as I’m concerned.”
“Something that’s really central to my life is the American Visionary Art Museum because I’m a docent there. I joined the docent program in 2022. I mention AVAM every time I get a chance. I spread the word about it. It’s not just that it’s a good museum, it’s one of the best visionary art museums in the world. The shop there, Sideshow, is one of the best museum stores in the world. Ted, who runs it, is a Baltimore treasure.”
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