I‘ve been threatening to start a mid-month addition to this newsletter in which I tell the story behind a particular outfit, but a) the first one I wrote was so sad it made me cry4 and b) I’m not sure I have that many wardrobe stories to tell. Besides, I’m not a fashionista, a person with elevated tastes. My teenager is the one who dreams of Vivienne Westwood and Maison Margiela Tabi shoes, who once gathered all the Vogue magazines in our house and put them in (my) bed with her “because I was sick and it made me feel better, being surrounded by Vogue.” Me? I’m a basic boho bitch, even if I’m the one paying for the Vogue subscription. My favorite brand turns out to be owned by people with not-great politics, a fact I’m struggling with.

Still, clothes bring me joy. Finally. I wasted so much of my life thinking that I didn’t deserve beautiful clothes because I wasn’t disciplined enough to torture my body into being a size/shape it was never meant to be. I wouldn’t tell this story if my mother was still alive, but when I was in college, she told me that I would never be a size 105, and this was meant as a dire prophecy, some serious Oracle of Delphi shit. Your son will kill you, then marry your wife, and, oh, you will never be skinny.

My mother, who was naturally thin, was committed to thinness as an almost moral imperative. Ditto, my sister, who learned the hard way that the only way a woman in our family could achieve a flat stomach was by embracing anorexia. As it happens, I have been more or less a size 10 for much of my adult life and on the rare occasions when I dieted my way to a smaller size, I was miserable and my face hollowed out in a most unattractive way. I gave up dieting in 2018 and I have remained the same size, if not exactly the same shape. Things may shift during the journey, in life as well as a plane’s overhead compartments.

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Anyway, until 2020, my closet tended to be a dark, somber place. Lots of blacks, grays and whites, the occasional pop of red. Then two things happened within five weeks — my marriage ended and a pandemic began. And I found that one way of coping with all the uncertainty was to get up every day and put on nice clothes. I was literally all dressed up with no place to go.

I work from home and I work out A LOT.6 It would make sense for me to live in leggings and T-shirts. But even now, more than six years after I first started using my clothes as a kind of sartorial anti-depressant, it’s a rare day that I don’t put on a capital O-outfit. Usually a dress, preferably a dress with pockets, often paired with wedges or boots, earrings, maybe a bracelet. They say that women disappear as they age and there’s a lot of truth to that.7 But I’ve noticed that my clothing choices make me more visible on the streets of Baltimore and New Orleans. Especially the latter for some reason. It’s gotten to the point where I seldom take a walk in New Orleans without someone commenting favorably on what I’m wearing.8

I’ve said/written this before, but it bears repeating: I believe that one of the most subversive things an old woman can do is like the way she looks. Actually, it’s subversive at any age. Yes, I know I’m a dead-ringer for Sweet Polly Purebred9 and I could enumerate my many “flaws” — but I won’t. There are always others who are willing to do that for me, usually men. A man on social media once complained about an outfit that showed off my legs, said I was far too old for certain hemlines.

I beg to differ.

Selfies are, inevitably, self-centric. Egotistical, vain. Yet my not-so-little gallery also is a treasure trove of memories. My daughter’s bat mitzvah, my stepson’s wedding, a dance party with my mom friends, Mother’s Day 2025, the premiere of Lady in the Lake, pub date for Murder Takes a Vacation, a solo movie excursion, a wedding I conducted, a pun I concocted in hopes of tickling Benjamin Dreyer.10

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The primary thing I notice about my recent New Orleans photos is that I’m happy.11 I think a lot about a selfie I took in a Dallas hotel bathroom in 2019, back when I simply could not face the fact that my marriage was dying. I was wearing a Brochu Walker sweater, shockingly chic Athleta trousers, an Ippolita medallion that my daughter now wears every day, and a pair of black Dinosaur Design hoop earrings that I still mourn losing. And even though I was having a wonderful time at a conference with my writer friends, I look melancholy.

So call me trivial, call me vain. You won’t be the first; you won’t be the last. But I think clothes saved my life when I was at my lowest point — and maybe that’s the only clothing story I need to tell.

Read/reading: The Seer, Samantha Jayne Allen12; The Vanishing Family, Robert Kolker; All the World Can Hold, Jung Yun; The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, C. Thi Nguyen (audio); Desi Arnaz: The Man who Invented Television, Todd Purdum (audio); The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout (audio).

Rereading: Kinflicks, Lisa Alther; The Group, Mary McCarthy; Angel in Heavy Shoes, Lenora Mattingly Weber.

Me, me, me: Murder Takes a Vacation is out in paperback and it was just announced that it is Barnes & Noble’s mystery/thriller pick for June! I’m doing two Baltimore-area events. I’m in conversation with Jung Yun on June 6 at Barnes & Noble on the Avenue in White Marsh; on June 14, I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble in Westminster.

Assuming I submit this book by month’s end — I do tend to meet my deadlines2 — I will have produced this novel about as quickly as I’ve written a book in almost three decades. For the first 10 or 12 years of my life as a novelist, I wrote a book every year, the prescribed pace for writers with series. In 1998, IIRC, I had to finish my fourth novel on an accelerated scheduled while covering the governor’s race.

But since 2019, I’ve been working at a more leisurely pace, publishing a novel every other year.3 I started Murder al Dente in late summer 20254, after abandoning a novel I had been working on for almost a year, so that’s about 10 months from start to submission. Turns out the old gray mare is still what she used to be.

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Here’s the story: I’ve led a charmed life as a novelist, one in which I’ve been successful enough to support myself from my eighth book on, but not so successful that my publisher relies on me to deliver big returns for its bottom line. As a result, I more or less get to write what I want. Yes, there are some parameters. It’s crime fiction, so I have to drop a body at some point. Crime fiction is commercial fiction, so my books need to be, well, commercial.

But I’ve been allowed to do some stuff that’s a little out there. Why not a book about two 11-year-old girls who kill a baby in the first chapter? Hey, what if I wrote a book with two major POVs, but threw in 20 one-off monologues from characters who had just interacted with my main character, including real people such as Paul Blair? What if the events of To Kill a Mockingbird were transported to a liberal suburb, circa 1980? How about a novel from inside the claustrophobic mind of a writer confined to his bed, whose thinking is becoming increasingly fragmented, even hallucinatory?5 I have been extremely fortunate to work with people who have trusted and supported my instincts.

Then last year, I published a (for me) unusual book, a straight-up cozy called Murder Takes a Vacation, in which a 68-year-old widow goes on a cruise, only to become embroiled in an art theft caper. With murder, of course, and even some sex! People really liked it, which created a (happy) dilemma. How should I follow it?

Excuse me while I jumble the timeline now, like every “prestige” show currently on television.

[Flashback to 1997] I had a full-time job, published my first two novels, and had a second contract to produce two more. I also was VERY ambitious and willing to do whatever it would take not to have a full-time job. Or, more correctly, to be a full-time novelist. This meant: 1) getting up every morning and writing for two hours before reporting to work at The Sun 2) starting the fourth book immediately after submitting the third book. No downtime, ever. Couldn’t afford it. That was the pattern for years. Submit one book. Start another.

Then, 19 years ago, when I had become kind of successful6, I decided I was going to play my diva card. I secretly proclaimed: One book in my head at a time. 7 I submitted my book, then did . . . nothing. This was inefficient, it meant lots of fallow time. I wasn’t working while waiting for notes for my editor, wasn’t working while waiting for copy-editing, wasn’t working while waiting for galleys to return to me. One book in my head at a time. IMHO, my books got better as a result.

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My other secret diva move was that I wanted — needed? — to write different books back-to-back. In 2003, I had started alternating stand-alones and Tess Monaghan books. Whatever I wrote, it had to be significantly different from what I had just written.8

So, in the autumn of 2024, when Murder Takes a Vacation had completed its journey through copy-edits and page proofs9, I started a SUPER WEIRD book inspired by one of my early short stories10. It’s a novel about the corrosive nature of boredom and nostalgia and I absolutely believe in it. But in spring 2025, weeks out from the publication of Murder Takes a Vacation, I did something I had never done before: I thought strategically, telling my agent and editor that I wanted to talk about the best follow-up to MTaV. I suggested that we talk in late summer about what made sense from a business perspective.

And after we spoke at summer’s end, I put aside the book I had been working on and returned to the world of Mrs. Blossom because she had the Big Mo, to use a very ‘80s term.

Look, Mrs. Blossom is no Jack Reacher. But she had engendered much goodwill and people wanted to see more of her — and it turned out I did, too. I also had the advantage of having spent months inside a very different book, different character’s head, so I had experienced the change of pace I needed.

When I first created Mrs. Blossom (2007), we were decades apart. Now, we are almost the same age and y’all, I know some shit about what it’s like to be a monied single woman in her seventh decade. I have traveled a lot. I have many thoughts about aging, art, money, tourism, love, sex, and marriage, and Mrs. Blossom is an excellent vehicle in which to explore these ideas.

The first pass of a Mrs. Blossom book is all about the plot, sort of like framing a house. I need a sturdy structure. But by the time I’m on the fourth or fifth pass, the whodunit is lagniappe. Yes, my novels work on the puzzle level (I hope), but they work on other levels, too. (I hope.) I’ve always seen the crime novel as a Trojan horse, capable of smuggling almost anything into the cultural conversation, while also providing pleasure to people who just want to, you know, look at a big wooden horse. 11

There are autobiographical aspects in this book — but no one will be able to pick out those parts. I don’t think I have ever cannibalized my own life the way I am doing here. Except, perhaps, in the previous Mrs. Blossom book. Which is odd, because we’re not that much alike, Mrs. B and I. She’s nicer, more self-conscious, a little less confident in her intellect, justifiably more secure in her kindness whereas I think I’m kind of an awful person. And, as I’ve said many times before, she’s sexier than I am. What can I tell you, men really, really like her. I think it’s because she’s ingenuous, which I am not. Mrs. Blossom has some relationship ups and downs in this book, but they’re not relevant to her size. Nor to her age, as it turns out.

Anyway, the book is due June 1 and I’ll be using May to do two more passes. (Twenty pages a day will allow me to meet that pace.) Fingers crossed, my editor likes it and it will be out next year. By then, I should be writing something else. Maybe a Mrs. Blossom — I have many ideas for her — or maybe the so-called Texas book.

tl;dr: It’s a wonderful life. It’s practically a nonstop party!

Meanwhile, we have a very special NON Mystery Box this month. As revealed in the caption above, I’m giving away two full sets of the Tess Monaghan series, one in hardcover, one in paperback. If you want to be entered to win, all you have to do is send an email to Lauralippmanauthor@gmail.com; please put “Mystery Box” in the subject line.

Read/reading: The Vanishing Family, Bob Kolker; Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead; Famesick, Lena Dunham (audio); London Falling, Patrick Radden Keefe (audio); The Score, C. Thi Nguyen (audio).

Rereading: My So-Called Life, Jay McInerney; I Met a Boy I Used to Know, Lenora Mattingly Weber.

Me, me, me: I wrote about The Man Who Wasn’t There for the Criterion Collection; I continue to interrogate the things I don’t know for Oldster; It has been announced that I will be a Guest of Honor (Lifetime Achievement) at Bouchercon 2027.

After tea…the children were set to mending. The meal had consisted of bread, dry this time, and a cup of water. Sylvia had contrived to save a half of her morsel of bread for Bonnie, and she pushed it into Bonnie’s hand later, as they sat working in the biggest classroom, huddled together for warmth. This was the only time of the day they were allowed to talk to each other a little.

“We can’t stay here, Sylvia.”

“No, we can’t,” breathed Sylvia in heartfelt agreement. “But how can we possibly get away? And where would we go?”

“I’ll think of some plan,” said Bonnie with invincible optimism. “And you think, too, Sylvia. Think for all you are worth.”

Sylvia nodded. Then she whispered, “Hush, Diana Brisket’s looking at us,” and bent her head over the enormous rent in the satin petticoat she was endeavoring to repair.

Whenever I visit my parents—not often enough, as they would be the first to tell you—I always end up thinking about Maude. Yes, that Maude. One of the many All in the Family spin-offs of the 1970s, Maude centered on an “uncompromising, enterprising, anything but tranquilizing” woman from Tuckahoe, New York. (By the way, several Internet sources claim it’s “that old compromising,” which makes NO sense.) Route 404, which winds through Maryland and Delaware, skirts Tuckahoe State Park, so every time I come to that part of the trip—well, then there’s Maude.

And now that I’ve got the Maude song fizzing around in everyone else’s head—what was really so extraordinary about this outspoken-but-privileged woman? Yes, she was mouthy, and, yes, she had one of television’s first legal abortions, but her restless intelligence now seems wasted to me. Did Maude work outside the home, or even volunteer? (In the home, she had Florida to clean for her, at least until Florida got her spinoff.) What did she do other than battle with her husband and pal around with future Golden Girl roomie Rue McClanahan?

I had a better role model closer at hand. In 1969, three years before Maude debuted, my mother enrolled in graduate school, intent on becoming a children’s librarian. There are many, many wonderful benefits to having a mother who wants to be a children’s librarian—weekly trips to the big library downtown, reading all the Newbery Award winners together, even Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon, God help us—but the thing that stands out for me was the wonder of my mother’s class project. Using knitting needles and index cards, she and a classmate created what can only be described as a non-computerized search engine. They notched the cards with a series of holes, some open at the top. The open holes corresponded to key search criteria—author, reading level, subject matter. With the help of a numeric code, you inserted the needles into the cards and lifted; the cards that fell out were the ones that matched your criteria.

I have been thinking about my mother’s class project because a chance re-encounter with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase convinced me that it is my personal platonic ideal of children’s literature, the card that would fall if I could set up a system controlling for all my favorite things in books: Clothing; Orphans, real or de facto; Villains; England; Nature Boys, a la Dickon; Specialized Schools—a boarding school, a school for the performing arts, an orphanage or—the dream that I have yet to find—an orphanage devoted to the performing arts.

Of course, there are lots of satisfying books that score in only one or two categories. I adore Maud Hart Lovelace’s happy families, thanks to the detailed descriptions of Merry Widow hats, shirtwaists, and jabots, but Deep Valley, Minnesota, is far from England. Elizabeth Enright’s four-book series about the Melendy family offers only tantalizing rumors of boarding school, and only in the final book. E. Nesbit comes awfully close, especially if you’re willing to consider the Psammead a boy with a special connection to nature. (Hey, he lives in a sandpit, it’s harder to get much closer to nature than that.) Noel Streatfeild’s “shoe” books qualify, although she often softened her villains in the final act. Except for Mrs. Winter, mother of Dulcie in Dancing Shoes. Remember how she turns away, at the end, when Rachel is revealed to be the big talent in the family? Could someone please tell me why the adorable Uncle Tom is married to that woman? This has bothered me for years.

But The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is the gold standard, the ne plus ultra of the Lippman COVENS Rule. Throw in an opening that reads like the YA version of James Joyce’s The Dead and…oh, excuse me, I passed out briefly from ecstasy. Here, see for yourselves:

“It was dusk, winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.”

And—damn you, Joan Aiken—it gets better. Chapter by chapter, event by event. Wolves has everything. A high-spirited rich girl (Bonnie Green), her virtuous poor relation (Sylvia Green), a tragic shipwreck, an evil governess, loyal retainers, an uncannily clever and gifted goose tender, a horrible boarding school—run by Mrs. Brisket no less, who rewards snitches with little pieces of cheese. And I’m not even going to tell you how the geese foil a dastardly crime.

Aiken, the daughter of Conrad Aiken, is a brisk tour guide. “Do try to keep up,” she all but demands as the story steams along, “we have so much ground to cover.” Sylvia, an orphan (O!) has left her Aunt Jane in London (E!) to go stay with cousin Bonnie, who will be de facto parentless (O!) while Lord Willoughby and Lady Green take a voyage intended to mend Lady Green’s fragile health. Sylvia, genteel but poor, worries that her sole doll, Annabelle, will be humiliated by Bonnie’s dolls for wearing only a “funny little old pelisse!” (C!) Sharing her train compartment with an odd man named Grimshaw (V!), she also frets about her aunt’s very Victorian edict that she never eat in front of a stranger, difficult to do when a train ride takes almost two days. And in the middle of all these little-girl anxieties, she has to deal with wolves, literal ones.

“. . . the train had stopped with a jerk. [Yes, his name is Mr. Grimshaw! Thank you, I’m here all week.]

‘Oh, what is it? Where are we?’ she exclaimed before se could stop herself.

‘No need to alarm yourself, miss,’ said her companion, looking unavailingly out of the black square of the window. ‘Wolves on the line, most likely—they often have trouble hereabouts.’

‘Wolves!’ Sylvia stared at him in terror.

‘They don’t often get into the train, though,’ he added reassuringly. ‘Two years ago they managed to climb into the guard’s van and eat a pig, and once they got the engine driver—another had to be sent in a relief engine—but they don’t often eat a passenger, I promise you.’’

If Sylvia was reassured by the notion that the wolves don’t OFTEN eat passengers, she is much braver than I. Yet the wolves turn out to be among the more benign forces that threaten Sylvia and Bonnie in this book. Nature can be thwarted, it turns out. People are much more trickier.

Things sour quickly at Willoughby Manor. Miss Slighcarp (V!), the new governess—and a distant relation—is about as nice as one would expect, given that her name is Miss Slighcarp. She wastes no time trying on Lady Green’s clothes—including (swoon) “a rose-colored crepe with aiguillettes of diamonds on the shoulders. It did not fit her exactly.” (Nice bitchy aside there from meek little Sylvia.) Mr. Grimshaw, the mysterious man from Sylvia’s train, is skulking about and no good ever came from skulking. Then news comes that the Willoughbys’ ship has sunk, and the girls are packed off quickly to the “boarding school” (S!) run by Mrs. Brisket (V!). The only coddled child in the place is Mrs. Brisket’s own Diana, a selfish brat, and there is a wonderful scene involving Bonnie, Diana, and some fresh eggs, in which you will cheer because someone does NOT get slapped.

A quick aside about orphans: For me, the “O” is the central letter in COVENS. Why do I love them so much? It’s true, I was a latchkey kid, but my mother didn’t start working until I was in junior high, so I had the best of both worlds. The simple fact is that most children’s books benefit when some sort of contrivance whisks the parents offstage. It doesn’t have to be death (although there are a lot of dead moms in my favorite books) or a demanding job (lots of widowers, too, throwing themselves into their work since Mom’s demise). An adults-only trip or troubling surgery (The Time Garden, Knight’s Castle) works just as well. And there’s always boarding school! (The Great Brain at the Academy, The Fog Comes in on Little Pig’s Feet, Apples Every Day.) But, of course, we don’t want them to stay parent-less. That would be much too bleak.

In Wolves, the real orphans finally receive much-deserved succor, while the hateful Diana Brisket finds herself quite alone in the world. Yet it is Aiken’s treatment of Diana, in the final act of comeuppances, that makes me love the novel even more.

The orphans, still dazed at their good fortune, sit at a table of their own, eating roast turkey and kindly averting their gaze from the pale cheeks and red eyes of Diana Brisket, who, having been in a position to bully and hector as much as she pleased, is now reduced to a state where she has not a friend to stand by her. Diana has nowhere to go and is forced, willy-nilly, to stay with the orphans (where, it may be said in passing, wholesome discipline and the example of Aunt Jane’s unselfish nature soon molds an improvement in her character.)

You see, there are no bad children—only bad adults. Otis Spofford, Dulcie-Pulsie in Dancing Shoes, even The Bully of Barkham Street all have all have their sides to the story. But grownups? Grown-ups can really suck. Possibly because they did not receive a timely intervention from Aunt Jane. I would add that to COVENS—No bad children, only bad grown-ups—but it would screw up an acronym that took me literally, hours to formulate.

The bad times started on February 20th, when Liz Bauer, the wife of my longtime trainer (and good friend) Todd Bauer, died from breast cancer at the age of 43. I was not close to Liz, but I am exceedingly close to Todd and I have watched him bear the unbearable with uncommon grace.

On March 10, I received word that Lauren Henderson, an important friend to me for more than two decades although we had been estranged for several years, had been found dead after a wellness check was requested. She was 59.

On March 17, I learned that Eric Overmyer had died in hospice at the age of 74. Eric was the co-creator of Treme. I honestly don’t think I would have fallen in love with New Orleans — and therefore been open to becoming a part-time resident — if it were not for the times Eric let my family use his Marginy shotgun. Being a tourist in New Orleans was always fun; getting to cosplay a local made me love it so much more. When my family bought our own house in New Orleans, Eric sneaked in ahead of us and hung his housewarming gift. It’s still there.

On March 23, hardcore ModPo enthusiasts were notified by email about the death of C.J. Prince, a gentle soul who brightened every Zoom office hours and symposium she attended through Modern Contemporary Poetry, an online course that has become a big part of my life. Her latest book of poems, How to Dress for the End of the World, was published in March. I cannot believe I’m never again going to hear C.J.’s lilting voice and sweet laugh.

I’m in the final third of my life, mathematically, unless I make it past 100, in which case I’m still technically in middle age. Then again, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, it will turn out that I’ve been in the final third of my life for the last two decades, just blissfully ignorant of that fact. The world is terrible right now; there is every reason to despair on the macro and micro level. But I refuse. The Mrs. Blossom books1 are about trying to expand one’s life as we age — doing new things, meeting new people, embracing new interests. In the final lines of the first book, she imagines a life as “expansive as a canvas she had stretched for herself, a space for her to fill corner to corner with whatever colors she chose.”

The funny thing is, when I began the Tess Monaghan series, I had another rectangular metaphor in mind — a young woman trying to spread a picnic blanket on a windy day, sure that she could “solve” life if she could just get all four corners down. I was 32 when I started what would become the first Tess Monaghan novel, working by hand in a black-and-white composition book.2 I very much wanted to figure out everything — work, family, love, friendship.

I know now that not only do we never get all four corners of life down — we probably shouldn’t aspire to. Life is not a puzzle to solve; I don’t want to achieve Queen Bee of life, if you will, then sit around and wait for a new puzzle to show up.3 I want to be surprised. I want to take risks. Lord help me, I want to keep making mistakes.4

I have always been fond of “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story, but it is a young person’s song because, right? How old is Tony in West Side Story? Twenty?Heck, how old was Stephen Sondheim when he wrote the lyrics? When you’re young, you take it for granted that things are going happen to you. There’s something due any day . . .

Nora Ephron wrote about this in Heartburn, too, although she attributed that sense of anticipation it to being single: You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married, and the hair grows in.5

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But why not take it for granted that things can keep happening to us, maybe even good things, no matter how old we are? Maybe you’re due, too? I mean, yeah, death is always out there, that’s guaranteed. And there are so many ways to be unlucky, probably more ways than there are to be lucky, no matter one’s age. Health is never guaranteed, no matter what you do to take care of yourself. As the old proverb says, the only sure things are death and taxes, although apparently there’s a carveout on the latter for billionaires.

As a teacher, I’ve always told my students to find one “sentient human” and confess their dreams, no matter how grandiose. If you believe you should receive the Nobel Prize, share that with somebody. Decades ago, I got drunk and told my first husband that I didn’t see why I couldn’t be a NYT bestseller and, well, here we are. It is my firm belief that if you can’t articulate your dream, you can’t achieve it.

But, alas, there is a caveat: you can articulate a dream and still fall short. That also happened to me in March. Well, I confessed my dream to someone in March and there’s no expiration date on it. Theoretically, it could happen, but the odds are not in my favor on this one. Then again, what are the odds of becoming a New York Times bestseller? Come to think of it, I manifested another dream in 2025 and if it didn’t turn out exactly as planned — well, like the kids in an Edward Eager novel, I had to learn the rules of the magic I had summoned, then deal with the consequences when I thwarted those rules. 6 The biggest lesson in every Eager book is that magic has rules and is finite; you eventually have to pass the torch to someone else.

Still — maybe I am due. Who knows? Could be. It may come cannonballing out of the sky, a gleam in its eye, bright as a rose, etc. etc. etc.

BTW, Stephen Sondheim was 25 when he wrote those words. Here’s his first-ever Playbill bio. He had 66 active, trail-blazing years ahead of him when this was written; his final work, Here We Are, premiered two years after his death.

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Read/reading: Evensong, Stewart O’Nan; Lake Effect, Cynthia Sweeney; More Than Enough (audio), Anna Quindlen. London Falling, Patrick Raden Keefe (audio).

Reread: Several books from the oeuvre of Lenora Mattingly Weber, a Denver YA writer I prize above all other YA writers.

Me, me, me: I was back in Oldster on March 30. Also, I’ll have some good news to share soon.

Don’t forget to enter the annual monthly draw for a dozen books culled from my shelves by emailing lauralippmanauthor@gmail.com and putting “Mystery Box” in the subject line.

Lauren died last week. We had not spoken for three+ years. Our estrangement was something that made me quite sad and it’s hard to know whose choice it was. I had set some boundaries, but I believe I had left the door open to us still talking if we could avoid certain topics. I have to assume she felt differently.

Still: We had known each other since 1998. Our friendship started during my first marriage and lasted longer than my second. In fact, my (second) ex was one of the first people I texted when I learned Lauren was no longer with us. They had a genuine bond, perhaps because she was always ready to cheerfully take the piss out of him. Lauren and I spent time together in Baltimore, New York, London, New Orleans, and Italy, attended crime writers conventions in Philadelphia, Austin, Denver, Albany, Manchester (UK).1 Before the pandemic, it was rare for us to go a year without seeing one another, even though we lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. My daughter knew her as “Fake Mummy.”

Most memorably, we actually traveled the Orient Express together — and wrote about it for T magazine while sitting in the Tuscany countryside, where Lauren rented a small cottage. It was a rocky experience, editing-wise, but we pledged solidarity to one another and refused to let the editors play divide-and-conquer. The best anecdote, about the steward who tried to enter our room in the middle of the night, claiming I had leaned on the bell that summoned him, did not make the piece. (We believe that steward had an, um, side gig.) Truthfully, the Orient Express was a bit of a letdown, but Venice was divine.

Friendships end all the time, for all sorts of reasons — and sometimes for none. In 2025, I made several new friends; just 10 weeks into 2026, I have lost two. The second loss is circumstantial and not particularly emotional, a shipboard friendship, if you will, that always had an implicit expiration date. Lauren — Lauren is different. Lauren was sui generis.

Somewhere in my email, I know I have our last exchange. I cannot bear to search for it, although I think it was relatively restrained on both of our parts, respectful and compassionate. I prefer instead to think of our last conversation in the fall of 2022. I was in Boston for a wedding and we talked as I walked through those unfamiliar streets, the weather unusually chilly for October. Our marriages had ended about the same time two years earlier and she regaled me with her dating stories. I had a crush that was clearly going nowhere, but I nursed a small flicker of hope. She told me sternly that there was no chance — and she was right, although that crush would end up metamorphosing into a friendship that continues to this day. Lauren was extremely opinionated. Lauren was like a foul-mouthed Mary Poppins. In fact, one year, visiting me during my neighborhood’s raucous Halloween, she plopped a flowered hat on her head and told everyone she was Mary Poppins. That’s all she needed to be Mary Poppins: a hat, her accent, and her firm opinions on everything.

I think about friendship all the time. I once wrote an essay about being a shitty friend, but I also have written about the almost 20-year bond I have formed with a writer whom I envied in my youth. I have been ghosted by at least one friend, watched other friendships fade away because one of us — usually me — wasn’t providing enough nourishment for it to thrive. But I’ve never had a friendship end like this. I wasn’t the only person estranged from Lauren, sad to say. It was a common theme as the news of her death made its way into the world last week. Yet we all still loved her, too.

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And while I used the lyrics from Stephen Sondheim’s “Old Friends” as the title for this piece, the song I can’t get out of my head is “Old Friend,” by Nancy Ford and Gretchen Cryer.

“We sit in a bar and talk ‘til 2/About life and love as old friends do/And tell each other what we’ve been through/How love is rare, life is strange/Nothing lasts, people change.”

Do I have a favorite Lauren story? It’s hard to pick one, but I’ll settle for the day she visited the set of The Wire with me and briefly spoke to her countryman, Dominic West.2 They were amused, as Brits often are, at Americans’ skittishness over the word “cunt.” “Oh yes,” Lauren said to Dominic: “I’m a big cunt person.” We never stopped saying this to one another over the next almost two decades. “I’m a big cunt person.”

Lauren, you were a big cunt person, and wherever you are, I believe you know I’m saying that with the utmost respect. I have never known anyone like you and I probably never will again. I’ll just try to carry on, being a big cunt person in honor of your memory.3

Other friends have written lovely reminiscences about Lauren. They include Greg Herren and Sarah Weinman.

I went to my first Mardi Gras in 2001. And like many a newbie before me, I scoffed at the idea that I would raise my arms in supplication to masked strangers throwing cheap plastic beads. Minutes later, I had my arms up, screaming: “Throw me something, Mister!” Mardi Gras has that effect on people. It is hedonism distilled, yet I realized this year that it also had a few practical life lessons to offer.

1. Thinking outside the box is great, but there’s something to be said for staying inside your box — if it’s constructed with intent.

I am lucky enough to live within walking distance of the majority of the parade routes, a great perk — unless you want to go somewhere. On Valentine’s Day, although the parades were long over and I had scheduled a Lyft in advance, my daughter and I were ghosted for our ride to our now traditional Galentine’s dinner. That’s because we live inside “the box,” which can be inaccessible to anyone outside the box. A second driver arrived, a cheerful local — in New Orleans, almost all Lyft/Uber drivers are cheerful locals — who explained that his Mardi Gras strategy was staying inside the box for the duration of the night, which meant shorter/cheaper trips, but a higher volume and no traffic headaches. My daughter and I ended up dissolving into laughter as he happily rejected ride after ride that didn’t meet his criteria. “Nope! Nope! Nope! I’ll get what I want eventually.” And he did!

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Again, just a delightful person. But he also reminded me that it’s not a bad idea at times to define your comfort zone — and stay in it. A few days later, approached for a lucrative speaking deal, I didn’t jump at it right away, but asked for details re: travel, the true time commitment involved. It’s good money, but in a difficult-to-access place; I’ve been paid more to give talks 10-20 minutes from my house. (All my speaking fees go to the my local library system, so you can’t be mad at me for being focused on the bottom line.)2 I asked the lovely people who made the offer to consider inviting me in 2027 when I’ll be on book tour.

2. Work with what you’ve got:

   My long-standing practice when I’m in New Orleans on Mardi Gras day is to roll out of bed, check the weather, then assemble a costume from what I have on hand. Granted, the items were purchased at some point — I march in Krewe du Vieux, other people in my household have bought things over the years — but I like a grab-bag look that costs me nothing. Except, perhaps, my dignity.

   Here’s how this year turned out. It includes a headdress I bought in 2019; a wig from god knows when; a necklace from my 2023 KdV turn as Queen of Mama Roux; my “weed” boa from KdV 2012; fishnet hose from KdV 2018; my actual PJ’s, a polka dot camisole-and-boxers set; a silk robe from an Emmy’s gifting suite.3 I took this idea of repurposing back to the work-in-progress, focusing on what was already there, developing deeper, more complex biographies for the approximately 90,000 characters in it. (OK, it’s not quite 30.)

3. But if you want to be a star, planning is essential.

   I spent Mardi Gras with two friends I met through my ex-husband’s ex-wife. A. is a local and D. has been coming to Mardi Gras longer than I have, I think. They executed the kind of high-concept look that had people begging for their photograph as we followed the St. Anne Walking Parade: Andy Warhol and one frame of his Marilyn Monroe diptych. Their commitment to detail was laudable — note the yellow of the wig, the pink make-up, the Campbell’s Soup bag. Not everyone got it, but those who did screamed in delight.

   

   Other great costumes seen at St. Anne’s that day: A “tiki bar” — men dressed as giant tropical drinks, accompanied by a drinks trolley — a recreation of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance, and a lot of “NICE” agents. I also saw a novelist wearing the cover of her next book.4

   

   And then there was the brilliant father who managed to combine “work with what you’ve got” with “planning ahead/high-concept,” using a coiled sleeping bag to transform his daughter into a snail, who handed out little envelopes marked as “snail mail.” I DIED when she delivered one to me.

4. Try a new perspective.

   The friends with whom I took in the St. Anne parade allowed me to tag along to a private party at a bar on Bourbon Street and, for the first time ever, I found myself on a second-floor balcony, tossing beads to people below. And, yes, I saw a lot of breasts! (They were not intended for me, but for others on the balcony, which included a bachelor party from California.)5 I tossed beads to kids, older women, goofily earnest men, and anyone who made really good eye contact. I don’t think I’ve ever spent a Mardi Gras on Bourbon before, but I had a blast.

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5. Finally, there’s no shame in promoting others’ (better) work:

   Here are two excellent essays about Mardi Gras 2026 by real New Orleanians, Bradley Warshauer and Peter Adrastos Athas. And while I’m giving credit where it’s due — the portrait of me in my pink wig was taken by my friend D.; A. took the photograph of the world’s cutest snail.

Read/reading: Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson; Evensong, Stewart O’Nan; Murderland, Carolyn Frasier (audio); Character Limit, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac (audio); Mona Acts Out, Mischa Berlinski (audio).

Rereading: The Boyfriend School, Sarah Bird; Victory over Japan, Ellen Gilchrist; The 158-pound Marriage, John Irving.

Me, me, me: Murder Takes a Vacation was mentioned in a terrific O magazine piece about books centering on older women.

I am one of two finalists for the Libby in the mystery category. Winners will be announced today and I expect to lose, but it was truly an honor to be shortlisted.

There’s still time to see me at AWP March 6 with my friend of THIRTY-PLUS YEARS, Sujata Massey, with Angie Kim (also a friend!) moderating. Will Sujata and I finally tell the story of what happened on a highway outside Saratoga Springs, NY, in 1997? Maybe! Just need to see if the statute of limitations has passed. (You do have to be a registered attendee to see this.)

Don’t forget to enter the monthly drawing for the Mystery Box, a dozen books culled from my shelves. Just send your email to: Lauralippmanauthor@gmail.com with “Mystery Box” in the subject field, and you will be entered into the monthly drawing.

“Best year ever,” the WIP faculty say every year and it always is. How is that possible?

Not a rhetorical question, as I like to scribble on my students’ manuscripts. WiP has gone from strength to strength because current director Les Standiford takes student and faculty feedback seriously and keeps tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. So you know what? I try to do that in my classes. While I have a sturdy template for workshopping and a repertoire of “greatest” hits2, I try new things. Heck, they put me in a new classroom, Franklin Templeton 210, instead of Miller 101, and I almost fainted from the novelty of it all.3 One of my students agreed to an experiment on the last day: After a traditional workshop session, we transformed our class into a “writers room” and brainstormed where she might take her nascent pages.4

She was working on a doppelgänger story, an enterprise complicated by the fact that it was told through the POV of the neighbor, a most unreliable narrator. We talked about the choices that she could make, the doors those choices would open — and close. Did her character know he had an evil twin? Was it better if he didn’t know? Why did his doppelgänger hate him? What’s a good way to destroy someone’s life? What if the first-person narrator was kind of horny for her neighbor?5 What if her best friend started having an affair with the neighbor — only it was the doppelgänger, of course. I watched with delight as my student filled her notebook with our suggestions, clearly happy with the exercise. I hope to do it again.

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At the brunch that marks the end of this truly intense week for faculty and students alike, I was asked: “How do I know when my work is done?” I didn’t have an answer on the spot; I often tell my students I’d like to think about something rather than be glib. But I did tell them how you know your work is not ready: Never show “finished” work hoping for praise. Show it only when you’re so confident in it you can absorb criticism.

Once I was in Baltimore, I emailed my final thoughts: I am back with my own work, and I am in what I call the wrestling-with-God phase of my first draft. That’s a Biblical reference . . . Jacob wrestled with God and apparently fought him to a draw (weird, because God?) and said: “I will not let you go until you bless me.” And that was after God broke his hip socket. But he got God’s blessing.6

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the novel writing experience in whole. Don’t let go until your book gives you its blessing. This is not something I’ve ever said before, but you can bet I’ll be saying it again . . . That’s when you’ll know you’re done, when your book blesses you.

Some quick takes from WIP:

*My ‘fits were so on point. Maybe my best year ever, which is saying a lot, as I put almost as much planning into my packing as I do into my teaching. My Internet-famous velvet cargo pants; not one, but two ‘20s golf caddy ensembles; a green print dress paired with green boots for my reading, which added 5 inches to my height7; a Brochu Walker dress for the brunch that multiple people (women) asked about.

*I read my essay for I Have That on Vinyl and, in all modesty, I slayed, then Les Standiford double-slayed with a reading from his work-in-progress, Seven Dogs to Enlightenment. Finish that book, Les! We are dying for it.

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*I got a little angry one morning about a personal matter and delivered an absolutely profane diatribe while standing outside the faculty van, where my colleagues were patiently waiting to depart the hotel for campus. When I was done, Madeleine Blais, an extremely classy person who has a talent for mischief, said: “Laura, would you say that again, but louder? I want my mother to hear it in heaven.”

*The Hilton Hotel in downtown St. Petersburg had the sweetest staff, but the stand-out was bartender Rebekah. One night, I rattled off a long, complicated order for our very large party and said, “I feel as if I’m in A Night at the Opera.” To which she replied: “And two hardboiled eggs.” Turns out Rebekah, like me, was raised by a father who was crazy about the Marx Brothers, although she is much, MUCH younger. Given that my youngest student had never heard of Cary Grant — well, it was really refreshing.8

Reading/read: Almost 300 pages of student work; The Irish Goodbye, Beth Ann Fennelly; Evensong, Stewart O’Nan; more Taylor; Strangers, Belle Burden (audio); Murderland, Caroline Frasier (nominated for an Edgar!).

Rereading: Once is Not Enough9, Jacqueline Susann.

Me, me, me: A beautiful and brilliant woman is hoping to make a movie based on one of my novels. Actually three beautiful and brilliant women!

The latest essay was about how inexplicably happy I am and it ran on Dec. 29 — which happened to be a week into a less-than-felicitous holiday break, during which my daughter caught a virulent flu and, eventually, I did, too. Funny, in a black-humor kind of way, because 2025 had started similarly — daughter got the flu, celebratory plans were scuttled.

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There is a school of thought that I taunted the evil eye by daring to say in public that I was happy. I think that’s bullshit. For me, the big lesson of 2025 was to stop trying to twist everything (everyone) into a narrative, a professional liability with which I struggle. I understand the temptation to turn everything into a story — I mean, I REALLY understand the temptation to turn EVERYTHING into a story — but I’m trying to resist this tendency because it’s reductive/rude. My kid got the flu over Christmas break, gave me a milder version of it, and it sucked. Things happen. But then we both got better and went to see Marty Supreme and had a nice sushi dinner. I remain inexplicably happy.

On the last day of the year, I flew to New Orleans. The family joke is that I’m the only person who goes to New Orleans to get work done, but for whatever reason it has long been a place to which I retreat to write, going back to June 2015 when I finished Wilde Lake here. It was this experience that inspired me to create the oh-so-informal Lippman fellowship2, which has been offered to at least a dozen women (and one man) so far.

My flight was delayed and I found myself in the bar with two other New Orleans-bound travelers. One was going for a solo New Year’s Eve; the other was a young woman, a social worker in a New Orleans public school. It turned out she lives about a mile from me. We sat next to each other on the plane and chatted the entire way, exchanged phone numbers, agreed to meet up for walks or pickleball or drinks. New Orleans being New Orleans, there’s apparently a place with pickleball AND drinks.

It was kind of the perfect way to wind up 2025, a year in which I decided to open my life to new people, something I have had trouble doing historically. In fact, I made plans/tentative plans with three friends-of-friends in the year’s final week, all people I hadn’t known as of November 2025. That seems like a good harbinger for 2026, a small act of hope in what appears to be a never-ending shit show.

But today, I’ll look back at 2025 (good stuff only).

Movement stuff: I’ve maintained my Peloton streak for 299 weeks now, set several new PR’s, and, at my trainer’s insistence, bought new, heavier hand weights. I managed to up my daily walking to an average of 5.6, my highest daily average since 2022 — and also my highest daily average since I started trying to walk 5 miles daily in December 2020. The flu almost robbed me of this stat, as I had two very lackluster days in late December. But, to once again quote Coach Bob in The Hotel New Hampshire: You have to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

Career stuff: I was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. I published the first Mrs. Blossom mystery — my 26th novel in 28 years — Murder Takes a Vacation, and am now at work on a second book about Mrs. Blossom. A very cool project was announced in April.

Bucket list stuff: I bought art. (I will always buy art.) I also had the singular pleasure of lending one of the pieces I own to my beloved American Visionary Art Museum.

Social justice stuff: I attended two protests, one of the early anti-DOGE protests in January and a No Kings gathering in the summer. I am still unsure about the “best” way to mount an effective challenge to the authoritarian regime in Washington, but I remain convinced that we can’t stop trying.

Clothing stuff: Discovered ridiculously overpriced velvet cargo pants, bought a giant onesie for a Halloween costume and fell in love with it, but otherwise was generally moderate in my fashion consumption. I continue to embrace an aesthetic that is best described as middle-school art teacher with a modest trust fund. Highlight: I was declared “too fancy for the airport” when my vintage (used) Chanel bangle triggered a bag search.

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Friend stuff: I met Mick Herron and I now consider us besties although he may not. Better still, at the same event — Bloody Scotland — I was reunited with many old friends I hadn’t seen since pre-pandemic, including Mark Billingham and Martyn Waites. Most important — I had fun with friends all year long, helping me meet the one goal I set for myself in 2025.

It has long been my annual practice to select a single word to use as a goal for the coming year. In 2025, I chose “fun,” and I think I did pretty well by it. I’d like to choose “fun” again for 2026, but that would be cheating. Instead, I’ll go with “focus.” I have a book due and, fingers crossed, another writing project with new challenges for me. But also, I just need to figure out what to do with the focus issue on my beloved iPhone 12 mini, which has become wildly dysfunctional. And if I don’t get it fixed, not only will my sunrise photos remain kind of blah, I won’t be able to take selfies anymore and wouldn’t the world be a sadder place if that were true? 3

Read/reading: Havoc, Christopher Bollen; A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhirst; Heart the Lover, Lily King; One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (audio), Omar El Akkad; Murderland (audio), Caroline Frasier; She’s Under Here (audio), Karen Palmer; 30th Anniversary edition of First Comes Love (audio), Marion Winik

Rereading: Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk.

Me, Me, Me: CrimeReads included Murder Takes a Vacation on its annual best-of list and Library Journal named the cover one of the best of 2025, with which I can concur as its gorgeousness owes nothing to me.

Don’t forget to enter the monthly drawing for the Mystery Box, a dozen books culled from my shelves. Just send your email to: Lauralippmanauthor@gmail.com with “Mystery Box” in the subject field, and you will be entered into the monthly drawing.

I come to Spannocchia because my friend Ann Hood created a writers workshop here and eventually invited me to contribute in various ways — first, as a workshop leader, then as someone offering a la carte one-on-one manuscript evaluations. It’s a gig that comes with free room and board — a very charming room, very good board — but by the time I factor in travel, I basically break even. So why do I do it?

First of all, teaching has made me a better writer. While I had adjunct gigs at both Johns Hopkins and Goucher College, I prefer working in short, intense bursts as opposed to the slog of a semester.1 I started teaching at the week-long Writers in Paradise in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2006, which is where I met (and fell in love with) Ann2. I will return to WIP next month to teach a week-long course on the crime novel and Spannocchia is on the calendar for March 2027.

Ann’s not the only friend I’ve made through Writers in Paradise. Over the years, it’s been quite common for our “guest stars” to return as faculty in Florida, then show up in Italy. The overlap between WIP and Spannocchia includes: Luis Urrea, Andre Dubus III, and Stewart O’Nan (also their amazing spouses — Cindy, Fontaine, Trudy — all of whom are adored/vital members of the community). The story has been told many times, but when I was recruited by WIP co-founder Dennis Lehane for the conference’s second year, I demurred on the grounds that I don’t have an MFA or even an undergraduate degree in creative writing. Dennis said: “The only criteria is you can’t be an asshole.” This motto, now shortened to “No assholes,” is still invoked by our current director, the glorious Les Standiford; we should probably translate it into Latin and have it printed on T-shirts.

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Of course, not every guest speaker can join the faculty; there’s simply not enough students for that. But almost all of our visitors have joined in the late night give-and-take-and-drink in the common space of whatever b-and-b, Airbnb, or hotel that has housed us. Daniel Woodrell was one of the many storied guest stars who passed through WIP. His death, at the age of 72, was announced Sunday.

Woodrell3 was one of the greats, a writer who rendered moot the endless literary-versus-genre discussion. Every genre writer hates the “transcending the genre” trope (or should), but the fact is, it’s just not a very helpful bit of figurative language. I think it makes more sense to consider literature a vast territory, with some locations clearly marked, others more nebulous. Woodrell’s “genre” was Woodrell. As I wrote to someone yesterday, trying to categorize Woodrell was like looking at a griffin and getting caught up in a debate over whether it’s a mammal or a bird. Who cares? It’s glorious and it can fricking fly. You can’t go wrong reading any of his books; I am partial to Winter’s Bone and Death of Sweet Mister.

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Read/reading: Havoc, Christopher Bollen; Sonnets, Bernadette Mayer. The Uncool: A Memoir, Cameron Crowe (audio); Nobody Walks, Mick Herron (audio).

Reread: Reading Myself and Others, Philip Roth; Nothing Personal, Nancy Jo Sales; The Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann4. A Bright Star Falls, Lenora Mattingly Weber.

Me, Me, Me: Murder Takes a Vacation showed up on best-of-2025 lists compiled by the Washington Post and the Chicago Public Library.

Always read to the end, as here’s the monthly reminder that you, too, can win the Mystery Box, a dozen books culled from my overcrowded shelves. Just send an email with the subject line “Mystery Box” to: Lauralippmanauthor@gmail.com and you will be entered into our random monthly drawing.5

November is crazy, y’all. I leave for Italy Wednesday night, where I will be teaching alongside beloved friends. When I come back, I will be plunged into a week of getting my kid to and from school for costume crew for the school musical. Then comes Thanksgiving week, with more travel. Look, it’s all FUN, I’m not complaining1. But sometimes having fun is complicated. Hence this relatively quick bulletin from the Department of Shaved Meats, Piled High.

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I’m bringing back the Mystery Box. I play a long game (like Polly in Sunburn) and I’m about three years out from an intense downsizing.2 I am going to be getting rid of dozens, maybe hundreds, of QUALITY books from my library. Why not start now?

This is how the Mystery Box works. You send your email to: Lauralippmanauthor@gmail.com with “Mystery Box” in the subject field; there is a random drawing, if you win, you get a dozen books. We will ship anywhere in the world, albeit at the slowest/cheapest rate. There is one ironclad condition: You can’t reveal the books that you receive or post your stack to social media. It’s a mystery! So if that’s a dealbreaker for you, please don’t enter.3 (Sometimes I do slip one of my own books into the pile and that can be shared.)

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Anyway, please send happy thoughts to the travel gods on my behalf and I’ll see y’all on the other side of Thanksgiving. I am trying to figure out how to get my Harold-and-the-purple-crayon onesie into my suitcase; it is quite possibly my favorite piece of clothing now. It’s perfect for these cooler nights after I’ve changed into my relatively skimpy pajamas; I wear it over them until I go to bed.4

Read/Reading: Three student manuscripts; SO MUCH POETRY; The Uncool: A Memoir, Cameron Crowe (audio); Nobody Walks, Mick Herron (audio).

Rereading: The Winds of March, Lenora Mattingly Weber.

Me, me, me: Elle named Murder Takes a Vacation one of the best 25 mysteries of 2025, many of my favorite writers (and people!) are on this list.

Spoiler alert. Everything went right.

The thing is, I used to travel to the UK quite a bit for work, pre-pandemic. I think I might still have more appearances at the Harrogate Theakston’s Old Peculier Festial than any other American writer1. And I was invited in, IIRC, 2022, but I couldn’t make it, which was a bummer.

Since 2019, I have made it to only one crime-writing conference anywhere in the world, CrimeFest in Bristol. No Bouchercon, no Malice Domestic. This is largely a scheduling issue; again, a school-age child makes traveling more difficult. As a divorced mom, I don’t like to miss any of my time with my kid and I’m keen not to create disruptions to the family calendar.

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Still, my publisher thought it was a great opportunity and the organizers offered me an awfully good spot in the festival’s biggest venue, chatting with one of my favorite people, Mark Billingham. I also was one of 10 writers chosen to play a crime-y version of Family Feud.2 So at 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, I left my house in Baltimore to drive to Philadelphia, where I boarded a nonstop flight to Edinburgh. I returned 73 hours later, a very happy and not-that-exhausted woman.

My primary objective at Bloody Scotland was to stalk Mick Herron, as I am a huge fan. Hilariously, it never occurred to me that we had mutual friends in the UK’s tight-knit crime-writing community, including Billingham. I not only got to meet Herron and his partner Jo, we ended up at a Friday night dinner at Nando’s3 then shared many drinks in the bar.

A screen grab of an exchange with the friend who might love Mick Herron even more than I do.

Oh, yeah, I was big-time grumpy about going to Scotland. I knew Bloody Scotland would be great, but I was overwhelmed by the idea of a trip where the ratio of my conscious time in Scotland was almost 1-to-1 to my travel time.

But one of the great things about being a genre writer is that our readers want to meet us and interact with us. I guess that happens with literary writers, too, but maybe with a little more posturing, a commitment on the reader’s part to be cool, above it all. As a newspaper reporter who interviewed a lot of famous writers, I pretended to neutrality and I often was just doing a job, but there was also a lot of internal squeeing.4 As a “civilian,” I’ve never had a problem telling any writer how much their work means to me. And I never tire hearing from readers who like my work.

Also: One always comes away from a good festival with a new catchphrase as it were, usually something said in the bar, and Bloody Scotland did not disappoint on that score — but it’s so filthy I can’t repeat it. That is, three people, myself included, thought we heard something so pornographic our minds could not conceive why one of the sweetest readers I’ve ever met would say such a thing to me. But it was really just an observation that I had “cameo’ed Tess” in two of my recent novels.5

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Two weeks to the day after Bloody Scotland, I went to a book-signing for the very literary Tricia Lockwood in Jami Attenberg’s backyard in New Orleans. Lockwood is a poet, memoirist, and novelist who has been shortlisted for the Booker; she is now touring for her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You. If you “know” Lockwood from the glory days of Twitter — well, as one man at the reading asked: “Have you always been like this?” and Tricia responded: “Yes, I came out this way.” She is as one would imagine her from her delightful online presence.

The woman in front of me in the signing line was an engineer from Dallas. It was only the second time she had ever attended a book event; the first time was for a long-ago Rick Riordan appearance that she happened upon in a mall. Tricia listened to her intently and then bestowed a small gift on her. I don’t want to describe the conversation or the gift because that feels like invading a private moment. But it was nice to be reminded that earnest fandom has a place in literary fiction, too, at least with writers such as Lockwood.

tl;dr, I’m going to try to get out more.

Read/reading: A Reason to See You Again, Jami Attenberg; Will There Ever Be Another you, Patricia Lockwood; the ModPo syllabus; What the Night Brings, Mark Billingham (audio); Clown Town, Mick Herron (audio).

Rereading: A Bright Star Falls, Lenora Mattingly Weber; Heartburn, Nora Ephron (audio)

Me, Me, Me: Murder Takes a Vacation was the #3 most-borrowed cozy in U.S. libraries according to this.

I don’t consider myself wise and I despise unsolicited advice. But here’s one life lesson I seldom hesitate to share: Buy art. You will never regret it. As William Morris said: Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.1 Even if your tastes change and one day something you once loved no longer scratches that itch — well, it’s a lot easier than breaking up with a person. Sell it, tuck it into an obscure corner, trade it for something new.2

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You don’t have to spend a lot, or find emerging artists, or insist on original works. Prints, lithographs, posters — all good. Shop eBay, where I have found some amazing treasures. (Facebook marketplace may be good, too, but I don’t use Facebook.) If you’re a cinephile, consider tracking down old film posters. Foreign language versions can be amazing.

What you DO have to do is fall in love. You may not, per Daniel Stern’s character in Hannah and her Sisters, look for art that goes with your puce ottoman. You’re an idiot if you buy art as an “investment.” YOU HAVE TO F’LOVE IT.

By my calculation, I spent more on art than I did on travel in 2025. That’s not a high bar — the only trips I took on my own dime were to New York and New Orleans, places where I don’t have to rely on hotels. The works I bought ranged from $25 to — none of your business. (But, as original art goes, relatively cheap.)3

I found two paintings through serendipity. I treated myself to an embroidered piece by the amazing Chris Roberts-Aniteau, my third work by her. I bought two works by Dana Ellyn, one by her husband Matt Sesow. I think that’s the total. So far. There are four months left in the year, after all. Then again, I am running out of wall space.

A good friend (who happens to have great taste) asked me why I have so much certitude about what I love. I don’t know. I just know that the art I’ve fallen for has never let me down. Things that cost, literally, a dollar, mean as much to me as more costly works. When I moved from San Antonio to Baltimore, a few boxes went missing and I cried over the loss of five crudely carved women from Nuevo Laredo, which cost maybe a dollar. Total. We were ultimately reunited and they live in my office to this day. My heart sings every time I see them.

As I try to mention as often as possible, I’ve been a docent at American Visionary Art Museum since 2023. I also used to be a Smuggy McSmuggington when going to AVAM with my ex, who would say “That looks familiar” and I’d reply, “Oh yes, we have a Ruby C. Williams” — or a Purvis Young, or a Howard Finster, or a Mose Tolliver, you get the point. AVAM’s imprimatur gave my tiny collection some credibility. Look, I get it. There are people who walk through AVAM and say: “I could do that.” To which I reply, gently as possible: “But would you?”

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During the pandemic, when we were all buggy and I was doubly buggy because the aforementioned husband had left me, I noticed I was saving a lot of money — no travel, no restaurants, very little shopping — so I bought art. This included a piece by the Rev. Mary Proctor, who produces mixed media work on doors, among other surfaces. I tracked down one of her doors at a Florida gallery and struck up a lovely correspondence with a young woman who did everything she could to make the shipping affordable. (She’s mentioned in the acknowledgments for Prom Mom because she also was gracious enough to answer my questions about what it’s like to work in an art gallery.)

Since 2022, that door by Mary Proctor has hung on the exposed brick wall of my stairwell landing. But now it’s gone. Because it’s on loan to my beloved AVAM for an outstanding exhibit of Proctor’s work, The Strength to Be Joyful, that went up last month. And every time I see it — four times so far! twice during tours I was conducting! — I squee internally. Courtesy of Laura Lippman. I’m FAWNCY. Also, the exhibit is just flat-out beautiful. Come visit! And then stop by our gift shop, Sideshow, which has wonderful — and affordable — art.

Read/reading: Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz; Bug Hollow, Michelle Huneven; An Impossibility of Crows, Kirsten Kaschock: The Float Test, Lynn Stegner Strong; Come Closer and Listen, Charles Simic; What the Night Brings, Mark Billingham (audio); The Secret Hours, Mick Herron (audio). Lots of poetry as ModPo is back in symposium mode.

Rereading: The Boyfriend School, Sarah Bird. Little Me, Patrick Dennis.

Me, Me, Me: Murder Takes a Vacation was published Aug. 14 in the UK to lovely reviews. And I will be in Stirling, Scotland, Sept. 12-13 for Bloody Scotland, reunited with one of my favorite people on the planet, Mark Billingham. Finally, I wrote — obliquely — about the anniversary of my mom’s death here.

“And they found a baby. A baby whose mother didn’t love her. And they took her away from her mother and they made a . . . safe place for her. But the baby was sick . . .

“His hand stopped moving.”

My ex said something like, “Jesus, where did that scene come from?” And I said: “Oh there’s nothing more hardboiled than being a 14-year-old girl who looks 18 walking down a street alone.”

I was 5-foot-9 by my freshman year of high school. The school bus — technically a city bus that the city’s public school students could ride for free with a monthly book of tickets — dropped me off on a busy thoroughfare about a mile from my house. Forest Park Avenue was a gantlet, a place where I was approached by males of all ages on my short walk home.

Most of them lacked finesse, just rolled down their car windows and gestured impatiently for me to get in, pretending they were doing me a huge favor by offering me a ride. Some were high, others drunk.

But one man waited for me along the fence that bordered a baseball field and launched into a speech about how he he had seen me walking there, day after day, and I looked (IIRC) so “nice” and “polite” and he just wanted to meet me and, oh, by the way, how old was I?

“I’m 15,” I said.

He began to stammer, unnerved. He said he assumed I was at least 17. His name was Ben. His face lives in my brain. (So do the other faces, actually.) I also remember exactly what I was wearing that day — a white skirt, a bright blue T-shirt. And I know I should like him best, but maybe I hate him the worst?

At the end of my walk was an empty house because my mother worked.2 I would let myself and, on the days I encountered these men, I would go to the bathroom and lie on the bathmat and cry. Clearly something was wrong with me because why else would these men be trying to get me into their cars?

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I don’t think it was coincidental that this also was a time when I read a lot of novels written in the 1950s and early 1960s. Lenora Mattingly Weber, Anne Emery, Rosamond DuJardin. These books were relatively chaste, although Weber took on the subject of petting — referred to as “more-thanning” — and made it pretty clear that her heroine, Beany Malone, did not have sex before marriage. (Her eventual fiancé, the literal boy next door, would say “Brakes” when things got too intense.) One of the vicarious pleasures in these novels was that there were clear rules for female behavior. These rules were made even more explicit in Ruth Doan MacDougall’s The Cheerleader, which was definitely not a children’s book3, but still laid out the schedule of sexual activity for what was acceptable if one wanted to be known as a nice girl.

I wanted to be a nice girl and a nice girl needed a rule book. Meanwhile, I had a few friends who were dating men in their 20s and we all thought that was just SO COOL.

Beverly Cleary, better known for creating Henry Huggins and my beloved Ramona Quimby,4 also wrote several books about teenagers. Fifteen, which I barely remember, was relentlessly pleasant, a nice novel about a nice girl who met a nice boy and, IIRC, the most traumatic experience was her first meal in a Chinese restaurant? (The far more interesting Cleary YA book is Jean and Johnny, in which a nerdy girl figures out that the popular boy she yearns for is actually kind of a piece of shit.)

I wish Cleary had lived long enough to write about an adolescent Ramona because I believe Ramona’s confusion and anger about the baffling rules of courtship could have bubbled over into something truly transgressive. This is a girl who once took a single bite out of every apple because the first bite was the best. She stole a dude’s lollipop. She was unapologetic about her appetites. (Older sister Beezus, not so much.)

My daughter is 15 now, encountering the confusion I encountered, although she’s seven inches shorter than I was at her age. Why are these men looking at me? she has asked me repeatedly. Has this always been happening or am I just beginning to notice? I don’t have any answers. I showed her The Last Days of Disco recently, which is rife with slut-shaming and double-standards, and she asked me: Was it really like this? And I said: Oh, yeah. And then I tried to explain what a big deal herpes was in the early ‘80s.

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Recently, we were walking through a mall together and a salesman at Zales locked eyes with — well I thought it was me (because I make it a point to look VERY well-heeled when I am out and about) and she thought it was her (because she’s frigging gorgeous, although she doesn’t realize it) and now I think maybe it was both of us, as in: Hey, rich lady, come in here and buy that pretty girl a piece of jewelry.

As if we would ever shop at Zales.5

I took only one selfie this month, but it’s my Summer 2025 MVP, a Staud dress in linen that I bought after renting it from Rent the Runway. In fact, I think it’s what I was wearing at the mall that day.

Reading/read: Kaplan’s Plot, Jason Diamond; The Big Short, Michael Lewis; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein (with illustrations by Maira Kalman; Carousel Court, Joe McGinnis (audio); The Spinach King, John Seabrook (audio).

Rereading: The Serial, Cyra McFadden; Never Let Her Go, Ann Rule.

Me, me, me: The Wall Street Journal’s Tom Nolan released his list of the 25 best crime novels of the 21st century (so far) and What the Dead Know made the list alongside oodles of people I know and love.

On the last “official” day of the tour, I did two events with Park Books, which runs two outstanding stores, one in Severna Park and now one in Sykesville, the former A Likely Story. At both events, I was interviewed by Sean McDonald, who asked me about my most memorable moment from tour. I mentioned the Lyft driver in Rhode Island who told me quite a bit about his . . . butt. Like, a lot. It started when we were bonding over shoulder injuries; it was the three-year “anniversary” of the time I fell down a flight of stairs in the NYC subway. He told me he had a shoulder injury, too, and said the doctors were urging him to get surgery, but, given that it was his right shoulder, he was reluctant: “How would I wipe my butt?” He had more to say about his butt, involving the side effects of certain medications. To be be clear, he was a very nice man. Lovely, personable. Talked some serious shit about Judge Judy, who apparently spends her summers in Newport, and I am always down for gossip. Just maybe a little less butt.

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But (!) my single favorite moment on the tour was at BWI airport, where my carry-on was flagged. I was heading to a (FANTASTIC) event at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library and I had decided to repeat my launch look, but with different jewelry. The TSA agent asked me if there was anything dangerous in my bag and I said definitely not. After a quick frisk, he uncovered a large Chanel cuff (purchased used). He zipped up my suitcase and sent me on my way, saying only: “You are too fancy for the airport.”

And now — the summer of our content made hideous by the sun. I will be staying home, writing, chauffeuring a teenager, tying up some loose ends from my mother’s estate. These days, when asked how I am, I tend to reply: “Micro good, macro —” [makes helpless gesture]. I don’t think it’s a partisan statement to admit that I’m terrified right now. I was the last reporter on the poverty beat at the Baltimore Sun. Oh, the beat remained after I decamped to features, but it shifted its focus to the nonprofits that helped the poor. More stories about nice white people, fewer stories about the people who were actually suffering. My memory is that our top editor wanted to de-emphasize poverty because it was such a — and I am quoting — bummer. To read about.

All I know is that I did some of my best work on that beat, 1989-1994. I was particularly proud of a story I wrote after a social worker was fatally stabbed, a day-in-the-life about a work in that same office, which detailed how frustrating it was for everyone, worker and client. The paperwork, the bureaucracy. The average middle-class person could not endure what we put our poorest citizens through.

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I still don’t understand the desire to target some of our most vulnerable citizens. I am baffled by the cruelty, the lack of empathy, the “we’re all going to die"-ness of it all. Look, sometimes, inside my head, I am the meanest person who has ever lived. During our interviews on June 28, Sean asked me: “Are you the hero or the villain?” and I replied without hesitation: “The villain.” Heck, I even wrote a book about it.

But villains are inherently boring. Dangerous, but boring. I was about seven books into my novel-writing career when I realized that very few people wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and laugh an evil laugh while twirling a mustache. Hannah Arendt had it right, man. What can I do, but keep writing increasingly escapist fare and show you one more pretty dress?

See you next (first) Tuesday!

Read/reading: Selected Poems, Robert Creeley; The Classroom & the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Citizenship, Al Filreis; Seven Deaths and Disasters, Kenneth Goldman; Without Consent, Sarah Weinman. How to Lose Your Mother, Molly Jong-Fast (audio); The Best of Us, Joyce Maynard (audio); I Want to Burn this Place Down, Maris Kreizman (audio).

Rereading: Possession, A.S. Byatt; Where Love Goes, Joyce Maynard; Zuckerman Unbound, Philip Roth.

Me, me, me: When I didn’t see a Kirkus review before publication, I assumed it was crummy. Not so! It was even starred. “Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal . . . Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.”

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I used to share an excerpt about publication day from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird about the world’s overwhelming indifference to one’s pub date, but that’s one thing that social media has made better: Lots of people check in. You get to take a little victory lap. You can post your order link one more time, even if the world is kind of a shit show.

This is my 28th year as a published writer and I often feel like Tom Grunick in Broadcast News. (Tom: What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams? Aaron: Keep it to yourself.) I’m going to break Aaron’s rule and share a few of my best memories from touring. Also some of the worst!

2000: My first real tour after four books and three years of “self-touring.” At the end of my event in Thousand Oaks, CA, I went into the bathroom and changed into a ballgown for the Emmys, which I was attending with someone I had just begun dating. He won two Emmys that night, which meant I spent more time with seat-fillers! But, hey, I was across the aisle from John Stamos.

2001: I was EVISCERATED in a People magazine review. It was so bad that my mother, who didn’t even read People, reacted as if she needed a crisis PR consultant: “What should I say if anyone asks me about it?” Within a week, 9/11 occurred, so no one was talking about my bad review in People. They probably never were. And In a Strange City ended up being named a New York Times notable book.

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2003: You know what’s worse than an evisceration? The sorrowful review that totally understands your book’s ambitions and concludes you have fallen short of the mark. I’ll probably be quoting this review on my deathbed: “Laura Lippman may write the Great American novel. Every Secret Thing isn’t it.” But, hey, it was adapted for film by Fran McDormand, whom I got to know well enough that I get to call her Fran! Also, I once made Joel Coen laugh, which rendered my then husband envious, as he was uncharacteristically silent during that dinner.

2007: Twelve books in, I made the New York Times bestseller list. I was in Aspen, drinking martinis with a librarian from Dundalk, a true Rocky Mountain high. Better yet, the next day in the airport, a woman asked: “Are you Laura Lippman?” And then she introduced me to her toddler daughter — Tess.2

2009: Got up at 5 a.m. to travel from El Paso to Phoenix where I had two events. I was trying to return to my natural hair color at the time (brunette is so hard to maintain after you start to gray) and I guess I also looked a little tired. (See: “Got up at 5 a.m.”) This resulted in: a) a man writing a plaintive email saying: “You don’t look like your author photo. Do you think that’s fair?” and b) someone online commenting unfavorably about my looks and the librarian from that event defending the commenter. Possibly the only librarian I have ever disliked.

2010: I had an infant, so I left home for only 36 hours, flying to Los Angeles to tape interviews with Craig Ferguson and Tavis Smiley. I wore the only pair of Louboutins I’ve ever owned, but what I always remember were two female producers dropping to their knees to apply tinted moisturizer to my oh-so-pale legs, sort of an aesthetic pit crew. This was my second time on Ferguson’s show, which I did three times overall and of course I had a crazy crush on him. Who wouldn’t?

2015: I was doing an event in Southhampton and JULES FUCKING FEIFFER came through the signing line and gave me a gift for a rave review I had written of his first graphic novel, Kill My Mother — and it was an original drawing by JULES FUCKING FEIFFER. 3

2019: Stephen King reviewed Lady in the Lake for the New York Times Book Review and I was a guest on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, real bucket-list stuff. I stood on a hilltop in Tuscany, Aperol spritz in hand, taking calls from Hollywood suitors — and go figure, the dang thing actually got made with Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram starring.

2000-2022: No touring because of Covid. But CBS Sunday Morning visited me in Baltimore. I knew enough to have my makeup done professionally, but I’m not doing that on the road and there’s no way I can apply fake lashes by myself, so no plaintive emails, please. I yam who I yam.

2025: Let’s make some memories, folks! Preferably good ones, although the bad ones are funnier. I’ll be doing events in the Baltimore area, Washington D.C., Lewes DE, Newport RI, Brooklyn, and Toledo. Complete schedule here.

My 29th book, by some counts my 30th1, will be published two weeks from today, on June 17. It is a seemingly light-hearted mystery with nods to several classics — Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, the film Charade — but it’s also a story about a 60-something woman whose life is not turning out the way she thought it would. The big twist? Maybe it’s going to be better.2

The second twist: This is perhaps the most autobiographical novel I’ve written. Oh, I’m far more worldly than Muriel Blossom, who has, per the first sentence, never been upgraded. I’m an old hand at upgrades and airport lounges. I know my way around a finger bowl.3 And, unlike Mrs. Blossom, I have had the privilege of moving through the world in a straight-size body, although let me tell you — it’s been five decades of commentary, cat-calling, “constructive” criticism, destructive criticism, creepy compliments, the occasional sincere encomium. And that’s just inside my head! Y’all, it’s just my meat sack, let’s all leave it be.

As a reporter, I interviewed touring authors and it looked pretty great from where I sat. Nice hotels! Reporters asking you thoughtful questions about your work! Fans lining up for your autograph! And to be sure, I have experienced those things on tour. As a job, touring author is great, the second-best job I’ve ever had. The best job is: actual novelist. Yes, these are two separate jobs.

Even for extroverts such as myself, touring can feel unnatural. So last week, I ran away from home to my other home, New Orleans. For the most part, I reveled in solitude. I made time for two good friends, but otherwise spent my days taking long walks, enjoying solo meals, rereading Marjorie Morningstar, decluttering like a beast.

As a parent, I can’t really afford to travel for more than two weeks and I keep pretty close to home because that’s a) efficient and b) where my most loyal readers are. The schedule follows.4 If it’s convenient for you, please show up for one of the signings. If it’s affordable for you, please pre-order/order. And if you see a really bad review — for God’s sake, keep it to yourself. It was a “friend’s”5 alacrity in emailing me only about my bad reviews that led me to stop self-Googling 20-plus years ago because, trust me: The good news always gets to you. So does the bad. What you have to do is pay attention to who brings you which.

I’m going to break the rules around here and publish another newsletter on my actual publication date, on which I will almost certainly be wearing the dress below, a rental that I can’t rationalize buying. Yet. The dress has become somewhat infamous in my household for its very rude nickname, which I coined.

Update: Over the weekend, RTR offered 50 percent off, which means this dress, which retails for $780 was already discounted to $482, so it ended up costing $241. Still not cheap, I know! But it fits like a dream.

Tour schedule for Murder Takes a Vacation

June 17, 7:00 pm: The Ivy Bookshop at Whitehall Mill. 3300 Clipper Mill Road, Baltimore.

June 18, 7:00 pm: Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW Washington D.C.

June 19, 3:00 pm: B&N Midday Mystery Event w/Megan Abbott: VIRTUAL

June 20, 5:00 pm: Browseabout Books at the Lewes Public Library, 111 Adams Ave., Lewes DE.

June 23, 3:15 pm: Craft talk as part of the Newport MFA program at Salve Regina University, Newport RI. Details here.

June 24, 7:00 pm: Books are Magic w/Megan Abbott, 122 Montague Street, Brooklyn NY.

June 26, ticketed fundraiser for the Toledo Public Library. (Sorry, I can’t find any additional info online!)

June 28

11:00 am: Exploration Commons, Carroll County Public Library, 50 E. Main Street, Westminster MD

6:30 pm: Parks Books, 555 Baltimore Annapolis Boulevard, Severna Park, MD.

(The first event is free, but requires registration; the second is ticketed, you can find more information here.)

July 8, 7:00 pm: The Central Library in conjunction with Greedy Reads, 400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore MD

July 10, 5:00 pm: Ticketed event for the Harford County Bar Association. Details here.

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Read/reading: The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler; The Classroom & the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Citizenship, Al Filreis; She Kills: The Murderous Socialist, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales, Skip Hollandsworth; Mad Wife, Kate Hamilton (audio); Second Life, Amanda Hess (audio); How to Lose Your Mother, Molly Jong-Fast (audio).

Rereading: Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk: The Love Machine, Jacqueline Susann.

Me, Me, Me: Murder Takes a Vacation has appeared on summer reading lists in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among others. I can’t link to every review, but I love this one by Oline Cogdill and this Substack by Greg Herren, who definitely helped inspire this book — and is one of only two people who know the rental dress’s nickname.

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“This is a night of winners — and winners. I’ll come back to this, but I don’t think I’m up here because I won an Edgar once, but the fact that I lost six times — that probably counted for something.2

Acknowledgements usually go at the end, but I think the roll call of people who helped and sustained me over the last 30 years is important to shout out first.

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I’ll begin with Michele Slung, who offered to read my first novel and recommended me to literary agent Vicky Bijur, who sold my first two books to Carrie Feron, who ultimately brought me to HarperCollins, where I remain to this day, working with a stellar crew of people –Liate Stehlke, Danielle Dietrich and Sharyn Rosenblum.3 Gratitude also to Michael Morrison and Lisa Gallagher, who invested much time and energy in my career when HarperCollins acquired the Hearst Book Group.

I am grateful to the foreign agents and foreign publishers, Hollywood agents and Hollywood producers. The booksellers – so many booksellers! — but especially the late Paige Rose and Kathy Harig of Mystery Loves Company. The ex-husbands — only two! — each supportive in his own way. I owe my career to more friends than I could ever name, but I’ll reference an emblematic few from across my various group chats – Alafair, Alison, Greg, Kellye, Megan4, Sarah, Sujata, Wendy — go Table 20! — and everyone in the so-called Teabud chat, which happens to include [MWA executive director] Margery Flax.

Todd Bauer has never read a single word I’ve written, but he lets me work out plot problems between sets of Romanian deadlifts, which is very helpful. If I’ve shown up on time in the right place – Molli Simonsen gets the credit. I was lucky to be born into a bookish family – my late writer dad, my late librarian mom, and my bookseller sister all helped me become a reader, which is, after all, how you become a writer.

Finally, I cannot imagine life without my daughter Georgia Rae Simon, who gives me a reason to get up every morning.

The thing I love about our genre is that our best writers believe that every death matters. I went to a summer camp that took the John Donne line “No man is an island” as its theme song, and those words imprinted themselves on my teenage brain. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.

When Columbine happened in 19995, I assumed the shooting would be an anomaly. Now there have been so many mass shootings in the United States that we can’t keep track of them or even order them chronologically. Did Sandy Hook come before or after Las Vegas? When was Uvalde? I can remember the month that Parkland happened, but not the year. If you Google “mass shootings in the United States,” you may get a result that confidently asserts the first was in New Jersey in 1949.6 Yet I stand before you as a descendant of Rexford Napoleon Deaver, a rookie police officer killed in Brunswick, Georgia, in 1915, when an angry man with a shotgun killed five people and wounded 32 in a 10-minute rampage before he himself was killed. Just seven years ago, I lost a dear friend, Rob Hiaasen, to a shooting at the Annapolis newspaper where four of his co-workers also were slain.7

I mention these events not to score a political point, but because I believe that in a world with so much chaos, violence, disorder, and, yes, evil, the crime novel offers us an escape, but not in the way we normally think of escapism. The crime novel requires a moral universe where people die for a reason – and other people care about that death, cannot rest until they understand it and achieve some kind of justice for the dead. The crime novel is, perhaps counterintuitively, one of our most hopeful entertainments because it hews to this idea that every death matters.

For years I wrestled with Raymond Chandler’s observation that “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.” I’ve always been skeptical of redemption, conflating it with art that centers the protagonist to the point where we almost forget that a crime has even happened. I see now that the redemption in crime fiction is as much for the reader – and the writer – as it is for the main character. The best crime fiction reminds us that the worst thing can happen to anyone at any time -- and then demands to know what we’re going to do with that information.

I am extremely proud to be part of this genre and I am over the moon to be named a Grand Master, although I can’t help thinking about what Lorne Michaels said about such honors: “One way the cultural industrial complex traditionally helps shuffle aging worthies offstage is by giving them lifetime achievement awards.” OK, fine, memo received. But I’m not going to shuffle. I’m going to do what every winner AND every nominee here tonight should do: I’m going to strut.8

Thank you.”

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Read/reading: Zeal, Morgan Jerkins: The Fourth Girl, Wendy Corsi Staub; Rental House, Weike Wang; The Secret Hours, Mick Herron (audio); Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live: Susan Morrison (audio).

Reread: Betsy and the Great World, Maud Hart Lovelace. Cadillac Jack, Larry McMurtry.

Me, me, me: Oh there’s been quite enough of that. But may I interest you in a preorder?

(A gift from my publisher to celebrate the Grand Master award: a leather-bound copy of my first novel, a paperback original that retailed for $5.99.)

March 15: Train from Baltimore to NYC. Tone for the week was set when a) pre-scheduled Lyft didn’t show up on time and b) I brought the wrong keys to our New York lodgings. We somehow transcended these missteps and had a lovely delivery dinner of soup dumplings and scallion pancakes.

March 16: My kid had said: “I’d like to see dancing.” I couldn’t find any ballet that fit our schedule, but there was a Twyla Tharp recital at New York City Center and OH MY GOD!. We then bopped around Bergdorf’s like it was a museum in which you’re allowed to touch the art objects. Daughter tried on a pair of Gucci ballet flats — only $1,100! — and professed her love for “Tabis,” extremely chic shoes although I personally do not to aspire to a cloven-hoof. Fancy-but-light sushi dinner.

March 17: Although somewhat stymied by the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and a calamity involving my daughter’s toe colliding with one of my weights, we made our way to a ladies-who-lunch type restaurant on the Upper East Side, where we split potato chips with caviar3 and some duck. Then went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where the Philip Guston exhibition was an absolute salve. Dinner at an Upper West Side tapas place we love.

March 18: “A “lazy day” with no set plans. Daughter requested dinner at a UWS omakase joint that my friend Geraldine DeRuitter turned me onto, followed by Crumbl Cookie, which my daughter loves because you can order without speaking to an actual human.

March 19: Midtown dinner (Martini cost more than the price of a bottle at Beefeater’s at the Wine Source in Baltimore.) Gypsy with Audra McDonald, a performance I’m grateful to have seen, especially as I have missed all the other great Mama Roses.4

March 20: Last year, I attempted to make a patty melt from a New York Times recipe inspired by The Commerce Inn in Greenwich Village. It was a surprising amount of work and I found my results meh. The real thing is sublime — and costs less than a Midtown martini. We window-shopped our way through SoHo, but the only place we bought anything was McNally-Jackson, now my daughter’s favorite bookstore. I told her she could buy one book, but allowed her two: Joan Didion’s Play it As it Lays and the A24 companion to Lady Bird. I selected Marcy Demansky’s Hot Air.

March 21: Lunch at an Italian place in Murray Hill, then onto the Museum of the Moving Image. A visit to Bloomingdale’s home goods department as we are on the hunt for sushi plates, but it’s more about the quest. And then I actually cooked dinner, something of an adventure in a narrow, not exactly well-equipped NYC kitchen. (Roasted salmon, salad, leftover lasagna from lunch.)

March 22: Flea market in Dumbo — my daughter knew about it from TikTok, wanted to check out the digital cameras and rings made from old watches. Bizarrely, or maybe not so bizarrely, Google Maps, given the absolutely correct address, kept trying to send us to the wrong location, but we persevered. Pizza slices at Scarr’s on the Lower East Side, followed by browsing in a gorgeous homewares store on Canal Street. Drinks and snacks with good friends, then The Sound of Music sing-along at Symphony Space. So much fun to sing and yell at Nazis, but perhaps my favorite part was the man who yelled at the Baroness: “You can do better, girl!” Later, I texted my daughter this classic McSweeney’s piece.

March 23: Took the train home. One more mishap — daughter left the digital camera that she bought at the flea market on the train. But Amtrak found it the next day, all we had to do was retrieve it from Union Station in Washington D.C. All’s well that ends well and sometimes ending well just means having a good attitude about the things that go wrong.

I’ve thought a lot about what made our week work. For one thing, it was truly collaborative. My daughter chose the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the flea market. She asked for dance, but I decided what we saw. I finally got my Gypsy5, but I generally avoided late nights, making lunch reservations in various parts of the city so would have different jumping-off points. We planned ahead when necessary — theater, certain restaurants — but kept things relatively loosey-goosey.

I recognize this kind of vacation represents a tremendous amount of privilege: Dining out and theater are expensive. New York is expensive. But there are discounts to be found and browsing — our preferred form of shopping — is free. The Italian place I chose had a prix fixe lunch for $38 — antipasti, hearty pasta, and dessert, and the leftover lasagna became our dinnertime side. My daughter and I also often split a meal, so that patty melt at the Commerce Inn came out to $9 per person. The Sound of Music was $18 for my daughter, but $17 for me because I always check for the senior discount. That’s not much more than I would have paid to see Wicked in a movie theater, and if I had tried to sing, they would have dragged me out. (As it was, the woman in front of us moved about 15 minutes in. My daughter has the voice of an angel, so I blame myself.)

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Read/Reading: Where Did You Sleep Last Night? Danzy Sessa; The Fourth Girl, Wendy Corsi Staub (out today, happy book birthday, Wendy!); Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams (audio); Sucker Punch, Scaachi Koul (audio); Back After This, Linda Holmes (audio).

Rereading: Once is Not Enough, Jacqueline Susann.

Me, Me, Me: Another starred review for Murder Takes a Vacation, this one from Publishers Weekly: “Lippman (Prom Mom) triumphs with this charming mystery featuring Muriel Blossom, a Baltimore widow—and former assistant to PI Tess Monaghan, star of another Lippman series—who finds an $8 million lottery ticket abandoned in a parking lot . . .”

Here is the obligatory pre-order link, followed by an obligatory selfie. And be forgiving of errors, typos, as I’m filing this from a train and cannot read it aloud, as is my usual practice.

I’m talking about finding series books you loved, you filthy animals.

The Happy Hollisters were my first. I tried Nancy Drew, too, but never really warmed to her. Instead, I gravitated to the wonderfully imperfect Trixie Belden. While Edward Eager never wrote a series per se, his most ardent readers know the secret thread that connects Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, Knight’s Castle and The Time Garden. About the time I turned 10, my annual Christmas haul always included one of the books in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. (I also read most of the Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz books.) To this day, I re-read Betsy-Tacy, the Beany Malone books, and the interconnected high school stories of Rosamund DuJardin and Anne Emery.

At Northwestern, I began to read the Toby Peter series, written by film faculty professor Stuart M. Kaminsky.1 I also discovered James M. Cain, who never wrote a series, but if you read Double Indemnity closely, you’ll notice Walter Neff’s scoffing disapproval of people who try to stage accidents in bathtubs, which is how Frank and Cora first tried to snuff out her husband in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Then one day, in 1990 or so, I found myself mooning around the mystery section at the Enoch Pratt and picked up Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only, the first in the VI series, wistful for Chicago. About the same time, I grabbed I is for Innocent from my grandmother’s pile of books. Hooked again. It was a great time for PI series, which had been moribund for much of the 1970s but was reinvigorated by women writers in the 1980s.2

When I sold my first novel in the mid-1990s, the conventional wisdom was that aspiring crime novelists needed to write series, so I did.3 By 2001, when Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane broke out with very different books, stand-alones became the rule of the day. I resisted for a year or two, then published my first stand-alone in 2003. Through 2015, I went back and forth between stand-alones and series, but I added few series to my own reading. It was hard just keeping up with my friends/peers.

Flash forward to December 2024. I had been watching Slow Horses on Apple+ TV, then reading the books afterwards, a curious choice, I admit. At some point late last year, I asked myself: Why wait? In less than eight weeks, I read (or listened to, sometimes a combination of both): London Rules, Joe Country, Slough House, Bad Actors and the trilogy of connected novellas, The List, The Marylebone Drop, and The Catch.

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Look, the world doesn’t need me to sing the praises of Mick Herron, who has just been named this year’s Diamond Dagger recipient. But perhaps I can remind you how lovely it is to abandon yourself to the closed world of a series. Something can be escapist without being lightweight. I’ve spent so much time over the last two months thinking about the Slow Horses. I’d find myself wondering: How is Luisa doing? What’s going on with River and his grandfather? Oh my god, am I rooting for Diane Taverner? Did I actually cry a bit when a milquetoast bureaucrat briefly found his inner action hero? I did. And — alas — the books are strangely prescient, especially Bad Actors in which the PM has an egomaniacal adviser who believes he should be in charge of everything.

It remains to be seen if I’m going to return to series-writing, although if the world loves Mrs. Blossom as much as I do — well, I’ve got a few ideas.

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Read/Reading: A whole lot of Mick Herron, as mentioned above. The Fourth Girl, Wendy Corsi Staub. Shattered, Hanif Kureishi (audio).

Rereading: Fiona Range, Mary McGarry Morris.

Me, me, me: I’ll be at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans at the end of the month, talking memoir and mystery. I’m a Grandmaster in case you missed the news. Also, Murder Takes a Vacation has received a starred review in Library Journal, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to quote from it yet. Preorder here. Please?

Finally, these are the runner-up looks for the Edgar ceremony on May 1. You’ll have to wait to see the winner. Who knows, maybe I’ll change halfway through the ceremony, like a bridezilla or one of those kids on My Super Sweet 16.4

So I love my face and I love my birthday. My birthday, MY BIRTH.DAY, a day I technically share with a big swath of the public, but I plant my flag and declare it MY day. Mine, mine, mine. I’m not crass enough to stretch it across a week, but if it falls on a weekend, as it did this year, I might make a two-day event out of it.

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I had big plans for my most recent birthday, my 66th. My daughter and I traveled to New York City, which I hadn’t visited since July.3 We had theater tickets, brunch, lunch, and dinner reservations, plans with friends. But my daughter developed a virulent virus five days before the trip. She asked me not to cancel — “I’ll want to go to New York when I’m on my deathbed4” — so we went.

She left our lodgings exactly once, for a short walk to a Housing Works thrift shop where we found a $200 Diptyque candle on sale for $30. I do not understand the concept of a $30 candle, much less a $200 candle, but it made her happy, so I bought it. Happy birthday to me and my candle-less cake, but at least I had the foresight to pre-order one from Milk Bar.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure — hopeful? — I’ve already had my worst birthday ever and it will be hard to dethrone that particular champion. It was so bad I even wrote a poem about it, an abecedarian5 titled “An Aquarian in Paris,” which I have forced a few unlucky souls to read and a few more to hear. I don’t want to taunt the universe into topping itself, as it were, but I’m hopeful that I’ll never have a worse birthday than that one. So far, so good, knock wood.

“I always want to celebrate my birthday with you,” I told my daughter while we huddled together and watched the latest episode of Elsbeth. At that moment, we still nurtured a wan hope that we might manage to do some of the things we planned. Nope, it wasn’t to be.

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A bummer, but a very small, lower-case b, privileged kind of bummer in the scheme of things. Our existential rights weren’t threatened — we weren’t facing deportation or being deprived of hormones/medical care we need, to cite just two very real examples from our current hellscape. I told my daughter that while I don’t agree with a lot of what Brene Brown says, I do believe there is no point in catastrophizing. I hope for the best and when I’m wrong, I’m disappointed, but I never regret having been hopeful. The way I see it, being hopeful reduces the number of hours one spends being miserable.

I was eager to have a fabulous birthday this year because it would be my first birthday without my mom. On my 65th birthday, I took her to an outstanding French bistro in Baltimore, the same bistro where two characters share a meal at the end of Murder Takes a Vacation.6 The book was far from finished, although I had no inkling of that in the moment, could not foresee how much work I still had to do. There was so much I couldn’t foresee. My mom and I would have another birthday celebration in April, when she turned 93 and my sister turned 68, a rather lackluster lunch that we tried hard to pretend was better than it was. Did my mom and I share a meal after that? I honestly don’t recall. Maybe Mother’s Day? By September she was dead.

Over my lost birthday weekend, I yearned to “treat” myself — Internet shopping anyone? — but I didn’t actually want anything. I just felt compelled to do something, anything that felt celebratory. Yet when it became clear that we were going to miss every planned event, I relaxed, felt all my anxiety ebb away. The point wasn’t doing things, the point was being with my daughter. My only disappointment was that I couldn’t wave a magic wand and rid her of her terrible virus. (Almost gone now, ten days later.) We resolved to attempt a birthday do-over later this year.

On the night I turned 66, I cuddled with my daughter on the sofa and said, no, this birthday wasn’t great, but it was memorable. I confessed I couldn’t actually remember my birthdays from 2022 and 2023 — although I assume both featured grocery store cakes, which I adore — but I’d never forget this one. I told her an abridged version of the Worst Birthday Ever, ending: “tl;dr, this isn’t close to the worst birthday ever.”

She then asked me to explained what “tl;dr” means.

Tl;dr: Man plans, God laughs, even if you don’t believe in God.

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Read/reading: The Note, Alafair Burke (Amazing!) ; Eldorado Road (Brilliant!), Megan Abbott; The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara; London Rules, Joe Country, Mick Herron (audio). Slough House, Mick Herron.7 Three hundred pages of student work for Writers in Paradise.

Rereading: How Firm a Foundation, Patrick Dennis. Campus Melody, Anne Emery.

Me, me, me: Oh, god, there’s so much me in this that I should be a Schedule II Controlled Substance. But I would like to add here, for those who are still reading: My students at Writers in Paradise this year were grand.