美国国家公共电台 NPR Real Disappearances Are The Premise For Laura Lippman's 'Lady In The Lake'

 

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

At the heart of Laura Lippman's new novel are two murders - one a girl, one a young woman; one white, one black - both in 1960s Baltimore. In an author's note - very end of the book, Page 339 - Lippman writes, quote, "The book's small details are largely factual, except when they are not." Laura Lippman's book is "Lady In The Lake," and she joins me now from our member station WYPR in Baltimore.

Laura Lippman, welcome.

LAURA LIPPMAN: Thank you for having me.

KELLY: So let's start with the factual. This pair of murders in your novel were inspired by two real-life cases from 1969?

LIPPMAN: That's correct. I had known about the death of the girl who, in real life, was known as Esther Lebowitz since I was 10 years old. It happened when I was 10 years old. And when you're 10 years old and an 11-year-old girl has gone missing and then found murdered a couple of days later, it makes a big impression on you. And...

KELLY: And this was your town. You grew up in Baltimore.

LIPPMAN: Right. And I was the daughter of a newspaperman. So we got The Baltimore Sun in the morning - The Sun, as it was known then - and in the evening, we got The Evening Sun. And it was solved quickly. It didn't have that much suspense¹ to it. The other case involved the disappearance² of a woman named Shirley Parker, whose body was found in the fountain in the lake at the zoo. The cause of her death could not be determined³ because of the condition of her body at the time it was found. And until I went to work at The Baltimore Sun, I never heard about it.

And when I decided⁴ to write a novel set in the '60s, I very much wanted to look at these two different deaths and how different they had been portrayed⁵ in media. And I was like, well, what could possibly tie them together? I didn't want to create some huge coincidence. So I thought, well, a woman, an investigator⁶, someone who cared about both deaths could be the thing that connected them.

KELLY: And I will fill in the blanks here just a little bit for people who have not read the book yet. Your protagonist⁷, the woman who investigates, is a woman named Maddie Schwartz, who is this beautiful, bored 37-year-old housewife who decides one day to leave her husband and go be a crime reporter, which left you with the task of writing realistically about a woman in what must have been then very much a man's world - a big-city newsroom in the 1960s. How did you go about doing that?

LIPPMAN: I started by getting in touch with colleagues of my father who were still alive. My own father, who came to work at The Sun in 1965 as an editorial writer, had been gone since December of 2014. I was really interested in the feel of the newsroom. What did it sound like? What did it look like? What did Baltimore look like in 1966? I was here, but I was 7. So I didn't assume I knew anything. I first came into a newsroom when - well, it would have been the late '70s, early '80s in my college internships.

KELLY: Did the newsroom then fill recognizable to you now? I mean, as you nodded to, you worked at The Sun for a dozen years or so. That was your kind of pathway to then writing crime fiction.

LIPPMAN: I think so. I understood the deadlines, and I certainly knew the attitude. The thing that I've been asked about - and it's kind of depressing - and people would say, well, how did you find a way of getting into the mindset of how women were treated in 1966? And I would say, you know, I think that's one of the things that had changed the least (laughter) when I started at newspapers in 1980 (ph).

KELLY: Really? Yeah. You have talked, I've seen, about how a lot of crime novelists are very clever about sneaking⁸ issues into their work, and their gender⁹ is very much - gender issues on these pages, but also race and religion. Your protagonist is Jewish, and that's a factor - income inequality. You've got all these big issues pulsing through these pages. Was that intentional¹⁰? Are you trying to get us to confront stuff that it's hard to talk about in our society today?

LIPPMAN: I think it's been intentional for a while. I think the best crime novelist for a while figured out that the social novel didn't seem to have much traction¹¹ in literature, so why don't we just go ahead and pick up the pieces of that? And it makes crime fiction better when it has those things going on. And then if you're writing about a place, you have to be true to the place. I can't write about Baltimore and not write about race. That would be insane. That would be not about Baltimore.

KELLY: And that must be what keeps it interesting to you, I imagine. This is your 20-something-th (ph) novel, and you're still going, and something still - you've still got a bee in your bonnet¹² about something you want to get out there on the pages.

LIPPMAN: Oh, yes. I mean, basically, I sit down every year and I think, what am I really, really interested in right now? And I sat down in 2017 and I was interested in 1966. I wasn't particularly thinking about newspapers. But this is where Maddie belonged. I never set out to do this. I set out simply to write a novel about a woman who wanted to matter. And I think that was very much a story of that time.

And my own mother, she went back to school about this time, and she decided to become a librarian. I think the world in the mid-1960s was filled with women who were thinking, this can't be it; I think I would like to do something more with my life.

KELLY: Speaking of newspapers, you dedicate the book to the five staffers of the Capital Gazette who were killed in the newsroom shooting last summer in Annapolis. And you write about the timing¹³ of that, that you had just turned in the first draft of "Lady In The Lake," and the very next day, that shooting happened. I wondered why it was important to you to honor them that way, to dedicate the book to those five?

LIPPMAN: Rob Hiaasen was one of my best friends at The Baltimore Sun. We sat about three feet from each other. The day I sold my first book, he was the first person who knew about it. I was in my car, headed to the beach town where my mother lives, and I had just crossed the Bay Bridge, stopped for lunch with my daughter. And I called my mom to say that we were about 90 minutes away.

KELLY: Yeah.

LIPPMAN: And she said, oh, I thought you might get slowed down in Annapolis; there was a shooting. And I said, oh, where? And in that split second before she told me, I was so careless, so numb¹⁴, so accepting of this reality that there are shootings. And then she said it was at the newspaper, not knowing that Rob worked there.

I happen to believe that Rob and his four colleagues were very much victims of a coarsened rhetoric¹⁵ aimed at the media in this country. I believe words matter. I can't do what I do and not think that. I left newspapers almost 20 years ago. And I love being a novelist, but I am so proud to have been a newspaper reporter, and I am so proud of my friends who are still at it and still working in a really tough climate and doing amazing, amazing work. And I don't want to see anything thwart¹⁶ that or get in its way.

KELLY: I'm very sorry for the loss of your friend, of your friend Rob. Laura Lippman, thank you

LIPPMAN: Thank you.

KELLY: Laura Lippman. Her new book is titled "Lady In The Lake."

(SOUNDBITE OF KYSON SONG, "EVERY HIGH")

1 suspense   

n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑

参考例句：

• The suspense was unbearable.这样提心吊胆的状况实在叫人受不了。
• The director used ingenious devices to keep the audience in suspense.导演用巧妙手法引起观众的悬念。

2 disappearance   

n.消失，消散，失踪

参考例句：

• He was hard put to it to explain her disappearance.他难以说明她为什么不见了。
• Her disappearance gave rise to the wildest rumours.她失踪一事引起了各种流言蜚语。

3 determined   

adj.坚定的；有决心的

参考例句：

• I have determined on going to Tibet after graduation.我已决定毕业后去西藏。
• He determined to view the rooms behind the office.他决定查看一下办公室后面的房间。

4 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

5 portrayed   

v.画像( portray的过去式和过去分词 )；描述；描绘；描画

参考例句：

• Throughout the trial, he portrayed himself as the victim. 在审讯过程中，他始终把自己说成是受害者。
• The author portrayed his father as a vicious drunkard. 作者把他父亲描绘成一个可恶的酒鬼。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

6 investigator   

n.研究者，调查者，审查者

参考例句：

• He was a special investigator for the FBI.他是联邦调查局的特别调查员。
• The investigator was able to deduce the crime and find the criminal.调查者能够推出犯罪过程并锁定罪犯。

7 protagonist   

n.(思想观念的)倡导者；主角，主人公

参考例句：

• The protagonist reforms in the end and avoids his proper punishment.戏剧主角最后改过自新并避免了他应受的惩罚。
• He is the model for the protagonist in the play.剧本中的主人公就是以他为模特儿创作的！

8 sneaking   

a.秘密的，不公开的

参考例句：

• She had always had a sneaking affection for him. 以前她一直暗暗倾心于他。
• She ducked the interviewers by sneaking out the back door. 她从后门偷偷溜走，躲开采访者。

9 gender   

n.（生理上的）性，（名词、代词等的）性

参考例句：

• French differs from English in having gender for all nouns.法语不同于英语，所有的名词都有性。
• Women are sometimes denied opportunities solely because of their gender.妇女有时仅仅因为性别而无法获得种种机会。

10 intentional   

adj.故意的，有意（识）的

参考例句：

• Let me assure you that it was not intentional.我向你保证那不是故意的。
• His insult was intentional.他的侮辱是有意的。

11 traction   

n.牵引；附着摩擦力

参考例句：

• I'll show you how the traction is applied.我会让你看如何做这种牵引。
• She's injured her back and is in traction for a month.她背部受伤，正在作一个月的牵引治疗。

12 bonnet   

n.无边女帽；童帽

参考例句：

• The baby's bonnet keeps the sun out of her eyes.婴孩的帽子遮住阳光，使之不刺眼。
• She wore a faded black bonnet garnished with faded artificial flowers.她戴着一顶褪了色的黑色无边帽，帽上缀着褪了色的假花。

13 timing   

n.时间安排，时间选择

参考例句：

• The timing of the meeting is not convenient.会议的时间安排不合适。
• The timing of our statement is very opportune.我们发表声明选择的时机很恰当。

14 numb   

adj.麻木的，失去感觉的；v.使麻木

参考例句：

• His fingers were numb with cold.他的手冻得发麻。
• Numb with cold,we urged the weary horses forward.我们冻得发僵，催着疲惫的马继续往前走。

15 rhetoric   

n.修辞学，浮夸之言语

参考例句：

• Do you know something about rhetoric?你懂点修辞学吗？
• Behind all the rhetoric,his relations with the army are dangerously poised.在冠冕堂皇的言辞背后，他和军队的关系岌岌可危。

16 thwart   

v.阻挠，妨碍，反对；adj.横(断的)

参考例句：

• We must thwart his malevolent schemes.我们决不能让他的恶毒阴谋得逞。
• I don't think that will thwart our purposes.我认为那不会使我们的目的受到挫折。