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NY Times, July 18, 2019
Stephen King Reviews Laura Lippman’s New Novel, ‘Lady in the Lake’
By Stephen King
Lady in the Lake
By Laura Lippman
337 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins. $26.99.
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.”
One of the letters Maddie screens is a complaint about the lights being
out in the fountain at the center of Druid Hill Park. It’s not juicy
enough for the Helpline column, so she passes it on to the Department of
Public Works guys, who find the problem’s grim cause: A decomposing
body, dumped in the fountain months before, has shorted out the wiring.
Thus does Cleo Sherwood become the Lady in the Lake, and Maddie
Schwartz’s new obsession.
Maddie believes she’s at least partially solved the murder of Tessie
Fine (she’s not entirely right about that and will suffer the
consequences), and wants to feel that high again. More, she wants to
beat and trick and charm her way past the men who are trying to keep her
from fulfilling what she sees as her destiny: becoming a columnist in
her own right.
Her pursuit of that destiny is far from lovely — she will badly hurt one
person who loves her before she’s done — but the times weren’t lovely.
After a fruitless attempt to rattle a wealthy businessman who may have
been Cleo’s lover, Maddie muses, “The men made the rules, broke the
rules and tossed the girls away.” Maddie refuses to be tossed. More than
one person around her pays for that. Lippman’s point — which takes this
book far beyond the works of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout, although
Lippman does not fail to honor her genre roots — is that Maddie also
pays, and in blood.
Interspersed with Maddie’s story are a chorus of voices straight out of
“Our Town,” most of them unhappy. Don Heath fears he’s suffering from
dementia. The newscaster Wally Wright (actually Weiss) still carries a
torch — and a resentment — for Maddie, whom he once dated in high
school. The political fixer and the nightclub owner are unhappily
closeted gay men, so-called “Baltimore bachelors.” The only optimistic
voice we hear is that of the legendary Baltimore Orioles outfielder Paul
Blair, and he seems unnecessary here from a narrative perspective (so,
for that matter, does the masher who fondles Maddie’s knee during a
movie). Even Cleo Sherwood speaks from beyond the grave, sort of like
Joe Gillis in “Sunset Boulevard,” another murdered floater. That
parallel may or may not have been intended.
It’s the Lady in the Lake who opens the story, in fact, and it’s Cleo’s
ambivalence about her place in what James Brown called a man’s, man’s,
man’s world that sets the tone of this angry but craftily crafted book.
“Men need us more than we need them,” Cleo says on the first page, but
almost immediately contradicts herself: “A woman is only as good as the
man at her side.”
Maddie, victimized by a much older man while still in her teens, is
similarly conflicted; although Cleo is black and Maddie is a white
middle-class Jew, they are eerily alike. Maddie uses her looks to flirt
her way into the newspaper business, but must keep her actual (and very
powerful) sex drive carefully hidden, even after she leaves her husband
and son, which she does with coldblooded calculation. Lippman walks a
fine line, balancing a cracking good mystery with the story of a not
always admirable woman working to stand on her own. Lippman never loses
sight of Maddie’s options and her obstacles. Both turn out to be men.
“Women … learned early to surrender any idea that life was a series of
fair exchanges,” Maddie thinks. “A girl discovered almost in the cradle
that things would never be fair.” Maybe not, but Cleo, the Lady in the
Lake, sees another side, pointing out that the source of both of
Maddie’s scoops was a man: “Wasn’t it, Maddie Schwartz? A woman like you
— there’s always going to be a man.”
Although Lippman’s heart clearly rests with Maddie and her struggle to
become more than just Mrs. Milton Schwartz, and although she gives a
splendid picture of the newspaper business in an era when newspapers
mattered a lot more than they do today, she never loses touch with the
twin mysteries at the center of her story. We care about Maddie, sure,
but we also want to know who helped Tessie Fine’s killer move Tessie’s
body from the place where she was murdered. And as for the murder of
Cleo Sherwood? Apologies to Mr. Wilson, but we care quite a bit. Lippman
answers all outstanding questions with a totally cool double twist that
your reviewer — a veteran reader of mysteries — never saw coming.
There are even glints of humor, a trick Ruth Rendell rarely managed.
When Maddie asks a bartender which Baltimore paper he prefers, he tells
her he likes The Beacon. “It’s the thickest,” he says, “and I’ve got a
parakeet.”
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