Lady in the Lake

By Laura Lippman

In a 1945 essay in which he dismissed most detective and mystery fiction as little better than crossword puzzles, the critic Edmund Wilson asked a question that still rankles readers who enjoy the genre: “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” The answer, over the 75 or so years since, seems to be “millions of people do.” That would include me. I also care who killed Eunetta “Cleo” Sherwood and Tessie Fine. Theirs are the murders investigated by Madeline “Maddie” Schwartz in Laura Lippman’s haunting new novel.

What makes this book special, even extraordinary, is that the crossword puzzle aspect is secondary. Lippman, who is the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendell, is after bigger game. The arc of Maddie’s character — her mid-1960s “journey,” if you like — reflects the gulf which then existed between what women were expected to be and what they aspired to be.

When Maddie leaves her conventional and basically uninteresting husband to strike out on her own, she remains a Mrs. pending her divorce, but after going to work at an afternoon newspaper and taking a lover, she thinks of herself as something else, a thing for which she has no name. Ms. — the form of address that would create a narrow bridge between Mrs. and Miss — was then not in common usage.

Set in Baltimore, Lippman’s home stomping grounds, “Lady in the Lake” covers just over a year, from October 1965 to November 1966. Spiro Agnew will soon be elected governor, Maddie’s middle-class Jewish enclave is centered in the suburb of Pikesville and the town supports three thriving newspapers. Maddie goes to work for The Star after she and a friend discover the body of Tessie Fine, a young girl whose neck was broken. After pointing out a flaw in the supposed killer’s story and coaxing him into correspondence (Maddie is good with men), she finally gets a byline — but only after she’s rewritten by Bob Bauer, the paper’s popular columnist. Her paltry reward for this scoop is a job as the mail-screening assistant to Don Heath, a timeserver who writes a feature called Helpline. “The real joke is,” Don confides, “I have the stupidest column in the paper, but it’s also the most popular.”