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Laura Lippman, the proudest member of the blackcriminal tribe

2023-02-13T10:42:30.937Z


The author, one of the greats of the genre, reflects on racism, violence and the place from which she writes. She assures that she does not miss the world of journalism, which she passionately portrays in 'The Lady of the Lake'


“From the beginning it was clear to me that I was going to write detective novels and that, although no one else had to know, I needed to be aware of what was there beyond the mystery of who was to blame.

Anything else".

Laura Lippman thus summarizes the essential impulse behind her career in crime fiction.

She speaks in long sentences, a strong verbal stream, sweet and without a trace of a Baltimore accent, and an almost continuous smile.

She has just landed in Barcelona from Paris, where she has spent two days researching for her next book.

It's a cold Thursday but Lippman, one of the stars of the BCNegra festival, seems not to notice.

The American author (Atlanta, 63 years old) is in Spain to talk about her latest novel translated into Spanish,

La dama del lago

(Salamander), a noir and criminal story that chronicles Madeline Schwartz's struggle to make a place for herself in the world after leaving her husband and her pleasant upper-middle-class life.

"She has everything, but for her it is not enough," sums up her creator.

"And no one supports her when she makes that decision."

It's 1966 Baltimore and none of that is easy, even less if the woman wants to succeed in crime journalism.

"Maddie likes crime because she knows that she can't affect it," Lippman reflects with some sarcasm about her character.

Far from staying in an enigma novel or a detective to use, the author resorts to her initial purpose, goes further and writes a love letter to classic journalism, while describing a fascinating city but marked by a brutal classism, very related to structural racism,

and eaten away by violence.

All the perennial problems of the city that she loves and in which she still lives.

"Baltimore is bad, but those who love it, love it."

The two central crimes of the novel occurred in that Baltimore of the sixties in which she grew up.

The difference, she says, is that from the first, a white girl, she knew everything, she was everywhere, she concentrated the efforts of the police;

of the black girl of the lake (Cleo Sherwood in the novel) did not know anything until many years later.

Each book contains a particular challenge for Lippman.

This is "a kind of metal book" in which he puts a white woman looking for answers, something she has been doing with her all her life, and surrounds her with 20 different voices that contribute her grain of sand in the history.

“I am not one of those voices, of those characters, but Cleo could be many of the girls I went to school with.

What's more, she's inspired by a friend from my days at

The

Baltimore Sun

who now works at CNN."

The writer Laura Lippman pictured during her participation this year in the BCNegra Festival. Gianluca Battista

True to her style of approaching each topic as if it were the last, Lippman started from

Marjorie Morningstar

, by Herman Woke, a book she reads every year and with which she is so obsessed that her friends are already teasing her, to develop the point Starting point for Maddie's rebellion.

What would happen, she asked herself, if we saw it from the woman's point of view, if she was the one who is leaving, the one who sees that what she dreamed of in high school is far from being fulfilled?

Already in

Burnt Skin

, her previous novel translated into Spanish, there is a woman who leaves her conventional life behind.

"For a man to give up everything is not a story," she blurts out with a laugh.

“I have already used it twice, will I use it again?

I do not know, I do not know".

She also left a safe job but that she no longer filled in

The

Baltimore Sun

to jump into the void and try to make a living from literature after publishing his first novels at the end of the 20th century.

“I don't miss journalism.

No never.

I did things that I loved, very diverse and necessary, but I like writing much more and I do much better.

We were, perhaps, the last generation that had fun doing journalism, ”she says with a certain melancholy but without a trace of regret.

"I did what I have to do.

I wanted it with all my might and in the end I got it”.

An encounter with a classic of the genre, Donald E. Westlake, was essential in that giant step of this mythomaniac of the black novel.

“He is one of my great heroes and in 2001 I met him and he gave me advice: if you think with all your might about what you are going to do, he will turn out well.

He uses your imagination.

And that advice from someone I admire so much was worth a lot to me ”.

the open wound

Lippman has always lived in a minority, in black neighborhoods in cities with a black majority (Baltimore, New Orleans and two years in Houston), renouncing the wealthy middle-class white suburb, the majority option for his environment.

Nor was it easy to enter into the racial issue.

“I didn't do it until the third novel, and the way I talk about it continues to evolve.

I think you can write whatever you want, but then you have to be open to being told you're doing it wrong.

It is very difficult to write a novel about Baltimore that does not address racism, which is an endemic problem in the city and throughout the country."

The Lady of the Lake

was published in the United States in 2019, with Baltimore still wounded by the 2015 death of young black man Freddy Gray at the hands of police.

A racial conflict that quickly jumps to language.

Lippman proposes reflection, openness and calm.

“What is the problem of stopping for five minutes to think about what word we use?

Isn't that what a writer is supposed to do all the time?

It's not that the words change, it's not that they were better.

I don't mind hurting people's feelings, but I won't do it out of ignorance.

We can say it that way ”, she finishes off after a silence that is not very long but significant.

Lady of the Lake

has been adapted for Apple TV+ starring Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong'o, a process Lippman has stayed away from.

"It's too harsh," she jokes.

"I know him well.

Too many things to deal with: people, rainy days on set, overflowing budgets… I am a very sociable person, but if it comes to work, better leave me alone”

In 1997

Baltimore Blues was the first of 13 books starring detective and former journalist Tess Monaghan, a series that gave her her first appearances on

The New York Times

Best Seller list

.

She doesn't think she's finished with her, but she keeps waiting for her big story to emerge, “the one that will close the cycle, the last one”.

She, while she, has been building a Balzacian scheme by which some of Tess's relatives appear in

The Lady of the Lake

and the detective herself will have a cameo in Lippman's next novel.

The conversation returns to that story in the making, to Paris where the protagonist is looking for some happiness, before turning again to the classics, especially Ross MacDonald and his empathy with the characters, and the eternal discussion about the limits of the genre that, basically, they don't care.

“I am proud to be part of the tribe.

And I'm never going to leave her."

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Source: elparis

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