New York Review of Books Review

IN A1945 essay in which he dismissed most detective and mystery fiction as little better than crossword puzzles, the critic Edmund Wilson asked a question that still rankles readers who enjoy the genre: "Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" The answer, over the 75 or so years since, seems to be "millions of people do." That would include me. I also care who killed Eunetta "Cleo" Sherwood and Tessie Fine. Theirs are the murders investigated by Madeline "Maddie" Schwartz in Laura Lippman's haunting new novel. What makes this book special, even extraordinary, is that the crossword puzzle aspect is secondary. Lippman, who is the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendeli, is after bigger game. The arc of Maddie's character - her mid-1960s "journey," if you like - reflects the gulf which then existed between what women were expected to be and what they aspired to be. When Maddie leaves her conventional and basically uninteresting husband to strike out on her own, she remains a Mrs. pending her divorce, but after going to work at an afternoon newspaper and taking a lover, she thinks of herself as something else, a thing for which she has no name. Ms. - the form of address that would create a narrow bridge between Mrs. and Miss - was then not in common usage. Set in Baltimore, Lippman's home stomping grounds, "Lady in the Lake" covers just over a year, from October 1965 to November 1966. Spiro Agnew will soon be elected governor, Maddie's middle-class Jewish enclave is centered in the suburb of Pikesville and the town supports three thriving newspapers. Maddie goes to work for The Star after she and a friend discover the body of Tessie Fine, a young girl whose neck was broken. After pointing out a flaw in the supposed killer's story and coaxing him into correspondence (Maddie is good with men), she finally gets a byline - but only after she's rewritten by Bob Bauer, the paper's popular columnist. Her paltry reward for this scoop is a job as the mailscreening assistant to Don Heath, a timeserver who writes a feature called Helpline. "The real joke is," Don confides, "I have the stupidest column in the paper, but it's also the most popular." One of the letters Maddie screens is a complaint about the lights being out in the fountain at the center of Druid Hill Park. It's not juicy enough for the Helpline column, so she passes it on to the Department of Public Works guys, who find the problem's grim cause: A decomposing body, dumped in the fountain months before, has shorted out the wiring. Thus does Cleo Sherwood become the Lady in the Lake, and Maddie Schwartz's new obsession. Maddie believes she's at least partially solved the murder of Tessie Fine (she's not entirely right about that and will suffer the consequences), and wants to feel that high again. More, she wants to beat and trick and charm her way past the men who are trying to keep her from fulfilling what she sees as her destiny: becoming a columnist in her own right. Her pursuit of that destiny is far from lovely - she will badly hurt one person who loves her before she's done - but the times weren't lovely. After a fruitless attempt to rattle a wealthy businessman who may have been Cleo's lover, Maddie muses, "The men made the rules, broke the rules and tossed the girls away." Maddie refuses to be tossed. More than one person around her pays for that. Lippman's point - which takes this book far beyond the works of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout, although Lippman does not fail to honor her genre roots - is that Maddie also pays, and in blood. Interspersed with Maddie's story are a chorus of voices straight out of "Our Town," most of them unhappy. Don Heath fears he's suffering from dementia. The newscaster Wally Wright (actually Weiss) still carries a torch - and a resentment - for Maddie, whom he once dated in high school. The political fixer and the nightclub owner are unhappily closeted gay men, socalled "Baltimore bachelors." The only optimistic voice we hear is that of the legendary Baltimore Orioles outfielder Paul Blair, and he seems unnecessary here from a narrative perspective (so, for that matter, does the masher who fondles Maddie's knee during a movie). Even Cleo Sherwood speaks from beyond the grave, sort of like Joe Gillis in "Sunset Boulevard," another murdered floater. That parallel may or may not have been intended. It's the Lady in the Lake who opens the story, in fact, and it's Cleo's ambivalence about her place in what James Brown called a man's, man's, man's world that sets the tone of this angry but craftily crafted book. "Men need us more than we need them," Cleo says on the first page, but almost immediately contradicts herself: "A woman is only as good as the man at her side." Maddie, victimized by a much older man while still in her teens, is similarly conflicted; although Cleo is black and Maddie is a white middle-class Jew, they are eerily alike. Maddie uses her looks to flirt her way into the newspaper business, but must keep her actual (and very powerful) sex drive carefully hidden, even after she leaves her husband and son, which she does with coldblooded calculation. Lippman walks a fine line, balancing a cracking good mystery with the story of a not always admirable woman working to stand on her own. Lippman never loses sight of Maddie's options and her obstacles. Both turn out to be men. "Women ... learned early to surrender any idea that life was a series of fair exchanges," Maddie thinks. "A girl discovered almost in the cradle that things would never be fair." Maybe not, but Cleo, the Lady in the Lake, sees another side, pointing out that the source of both of Maddie's scoops was a man: "Wasn't it, Maddie Schwartz? A woman like you - there's always going to be a man." Although Lippman's heart clearly rests with Maddie and her struggle to become more than just Mrs. Milton Schwartz, and although she gives a splendid picture of the newspaper business in an era when newspapers mattered a lot more than they do today, she never loses touch with the twin mysteries at the center of her story. We care about Maddie, sure, but we also want to know who helped Tessie Fine's killer move Tessie's body from the place where she was murdered. And as for the murder of Cleo Sherwood? Apologies to Mr. Wilson, but we care quite a bit. Lippman answers all outstanding questions with a totally cool double twist that your reviewer - a veteran reader of mysteries - never saw coming. There are even glints of humor, a trick Ruth Rendeli rarely managed. When Maddie asks a bartender which Baltimore paper he prefers, he tells her he likes The Beacon. "It's the thickest," he says, "and I've got a parakeet." Lippman balances a cracking good mystery with the story of a woman working to stand on her own. Stephen KING'S next novel, "The Institute," will be published in September.