The Line Up (26 page)

Lisa and I had to make some decisions.

We felt we’d given LA a good try. I’d worked six years with my law firm, and in that time had published three novels. But living there was expensive and in many ways dispiriting. Our daughter was about a year away from kindergarten, and the public schools in our area of LA were dismal. Last but certainly not least, nobody was breaking down my door with any kind of a job offer. We decided we would move to northern California, where life was much less expensive, and that before I got another full-time day job, I would give full-time writing one last good try. This was really in my heart what I wanted to do; further, it was what I was getting to be good at. I thought that if I could just focus on the right kind of Plan A book—something like Dead Irish but with a bigger canvas and wider-ranging themes, I might have a chance of finding an audience.

By now, with the meningitis and recovery, I’d given Dismas Hardy nearly two years off. I knew from Dead Irish that he could carry the weight of a big story, and I would no longer sell him short, as I felt I had with The Vig. I would plumb the depths of his Everyman persona in this new book.

To do it, of course, I was aware that I had to find those last personal elements that I knew so intimately from my own life. I was a father of two, and now Hardy would be a father of two. I would know his home life, and it would be central to who he was. Since having my own children, I had come to understand something that no one can know until they have the experience—that children and family are the center of life for most people. Though these domestic relationships didn’t provide quite the zing of romantic entanglements, and although the role of husband and father certainly wasn’t the expected reality for a hard-boiled hero in a mystery, nevertheless it was central in everyday life. In the life of Everyman. As so it would be in that of Dismas Hardy.

Beyond that, I had worked in a business legal environment for six years and knew the basic routines of lawyers’ lives, the stresses of the job, the conflicts, the hours, the betrayals, the moral ambiguities. I didn’t know much, if anything, about criminal law, but then again, I realized that after ten years away from the law field tending bar, Hardy wouldn’t be so hot on the details himself. And, in fact, his interest was never so much in fighting crime and prosecuting criminals as it was in seeking justice.

As I started Hard Evidence, featuring no longer a bartender, but a married working attorney named Dismas Hardy walking a shark, trying to keep it alive in the Steinhart Aquarium, I knew that he had finally revealed the last secrets of his nature to me. He was not and could not be a larger-than-life superhero. He was a regular guy, a working-stiff, nonglamorous defense attorney with a closely knit (yet often conflicted) family and a coterie of loyal friends. You’d like him—he might beat you at darts, but he’d buy you a drink afterward. He was the kind of person you’d care about if he showed up in any kind of novel at all, not just a mystery.

And in fact, while I was writing Hard Evidence, I discovered to my joy and satisfaction that the distinction in my mind between so-called genre work and “real” novels had somehow all but disappeared. I was writing a Plan A novel now, a serious, grown-up novel about the human condition, and that’s what I’d be writing in the future.

And whenever Dismas Hardy came up and told me he was ready to shoulder the load again, he’d be my man.

art

There is a last chapter, a postscript, to the story of Dismas Hardy.

Hard Evidence was published to a minimum of fanfare with a relatively small print run. Nevertheless, because I believed that Dismas Hardy had become a fully self-actualized character, and because I had what I thought was a terrific plot idea for another book, I started working almost immediately on The 13th Juror.

The vagaries of publishing being what they are, there is usually a significant lag between sending a book to a publisher and its actual publication. Likewise, there is often a further hiatus between publication and the sale of any subsidiary rights, such as paperback or foreign deals. I sent Hard Evidence to my publisher in about March of 1993, and it was published in 1994, by which time I was nearly finished with The 13th Juror. In the summer of 1994, I offered The 13th Juror to Donald I. Fine, but the advance he offered was unacceptable—actually less than he’d offered for Hard Evidence—so I decided to take The 13th Juror to the open market.

It was a depressing experience.

Although twelve publishers had indicated that they would be willing to take part in an auction for the book, on the actual day, none of them made a bid. Eventually, I received more than twenty rejection notices. They were from just about every New York publisher except two, William Morrow and Donald I. Fine. In the end, Fine outbid Morrow, but my decision to accept Fine’s offer was a long, drawn-out, and exhausting one.

And reluctantly, with those twenty or so rejections of the best I could do with Dismas Hardy hanging heavily in my heart, I decided that much as I liked him, I would have to let him fade into the background. He was clearly not a commercial character. There was no sign that he’d resonated in any important way with readers or with publishers.

It was time to give another character a shot.

Abe Glitsky—Hardy’s long-standing friend from his days as a cop and already a major character in the earlier Hardy novels—couldn’t have been more different from Hardy, but he was a pretty fascinating guy in his own right. I decided to explore his life and character first in A Certain Justice and then, because I enjoyed being with his cursed and curmudgeonly self so much, in Guilt.

But a funny thing happened two years after I’d initially submitted The 13th Juror, when I was halfway through the process of writing Guilt. The 13th Juror finally came out in paperback and jumped onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed and stayed and stayed. By this time, I had changed publishers to Delacorte, and that house’s paperback imprint, Dell/Island, had published The 13th Juror, which was suddenly a very hot property.

And that made Dismas Hardy commercially viable at last.

Could Hardy, my publishers wondered, ever be coaxed into coming back again? Could he take another big novel with a big theme onto his big shoulders and carry it all—or mostly—by himself?

I allowed as how he could.

And that’s what he’s been doing ever since.

LAURA LIPPMAN

Laura Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1959. Her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1965, when her father took a job as an editorial writer for the Sun. It was here that she grew up, a couple of doors down from the Monaghan family, which included three boys and two girls. She went to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Seeking a job as a reporter, she landed a position in Waco, Texas, then another in San Antonio, before moving back to Baltimore, where she was hired by the Evening Sun, which soon merged with the morning paper. She was able to write a book a year about Tess Monaghan, the self-described “accidental private eye,” while working full-time as a Baltimore newspaper reporter, until she retired from that position in 2001.

Laura Lippman has been nominated for virtually every mystery-writing award that exists and has won most of them; she has arguably had more honors per book than any other mystery writer alive, winning the Edgar®, Anthony, Agatha, Shamus, Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe, and Barry awards. She was also the first genre writer to be recognized by the Maryland Library Association as author of the year. In addition to the Tess Monaghan novels, she has written numerous short stories, edited the anthology Baltimore Noir, and produced four stand-alone crime novels: Every Secret Thing (2003), The Power of Three (2005), What the Dead Know (2007), and Life Sentences (2009).

TESS MONAGHAN

BY LAURA LIPPMAN

The Accidental Detective

By Laura Lippman

Special to the Beacon-Light

BALTIMORE—Tess Monaghan spends a lot of time thinking about what she calls the relief problem. Not relief to foreign hot spots, although she can become quickly heated on almost any political subject you wish to discuss. No, Monaghan, perhaps Baltimore’s best-known private investigator, thinks a lot about what we’ll call feminine relief.

“If you’re a guy on surveillance, you have a lot more options,” she says, sitting in her Butchers Hill office on a recent fall morning and flipping through one of the catalogs that cater to the special needs of investigators and private-security firms. Much of this high-tech gadgetry holds little interest for Monaghan, who admits to mild Luddite tendencies. That said, she’s so paranoid about caller ID that she uses two cell phones—one for outgoing calls, one for incoming.

“Do you know that at the racetracks in Delaware, the ones with slot machines, they find dozens of adult diapers in the trash every day?” she asks suddenly. “Think about it. There are people who are so crazed for slots that they wear Depends, lest they have to give up a ‘hot’ machine. Do you think Bill Bennett wore Depends?” Monaghan, who assumes that others can follow her often jumpy train of thought, has moved on to the former secretary of education, reported to have had an almost pathological addiction to slot machines, even as he made millions advocating family values.

“No, no, no,” she decides, not waiting for answers to the questions she has posed. “That’s why he had the machines brought to him in a private room. Slots—what a wussy way to lose money. Give me the track every time. Horse plus human plus variable track conditions equals a highly satisfying form of interactive entertainment. With gambling, that’s the only way to stay sane. You have to think of it as going to a Broadway show in which you have a vested interest in the outcome. Set aside how much you’re willing to lose, the way you might decide how much you’re willing to pay to go to a sporting event. If you go home with a dollar more than you were willing to lose, you’ve won.”

So now that Monaghan has held forth on compulsive gambling, adult diapers, and, by implication, her own relief needs, could she share a few biographical details? The year she was born, for example?

“No,” she says with a breezy grin. “You’re a reporter, right? Look it up at the department of motor vehicles. If you can’t track down something that basic, you’re probably not the right woman for the job.”

Rumor has it that Monaghan loathes the press.

“Rumor,” Monaghan says, “isn’t always wrong.”

Baltimore Born, Bred, and Buttered

She has been called Baltimore’s best-known private detective, Baltimore’s hungriest private detective, and, just once, Baltimore’s most eligible private detective. (Her father went behind her back and entered her into Baltimore magazine’s annual feature on the city’s “hot” singles.) But although her work and its consequences have often been featured in the news, Monaghan, a former reporter, has been surprisingly successful at keeping information about herself out of the public domain. At least until now. Oh yes, Ms. Monaghan, this reporter knows her way around public documents.

Monaghan was born at St. Agnes Hospital, and while official documents disagree on the year, she’s undeniably a member of Generation X or Y, a post-boomer born to an unlikely duo who prove the old adage that opposites attract. Patrick Monaghan, described by his daughter as the world’s most taciturn Irishman, was the oldest of seven children. He grew up in a crowded South Baltimore row house and, later, the Charles Village area.

Meanwhile, Judith Weinstein was the youngest of five from a well-to-do Northwest Baltimore family. She was just entering college when her father’s eponymous drugstore chain entered a messy and devastating bankruptcy. Monaghan and Weinstein met via local politics, working on Carleton Sickles’s failed 1966 bid for the Democratic nomination for governor. The couple remain active in politics; Monaghan remembers riding her tricycle around the old Stonewall Democratic Club as a five-year-old. Her father worked for years as a city liquor inspector, then began running his own club, the Point, which has thrived in an unlikely location on Franklintown Road. Her mother works for the National Security Agency and says she cannot divulge what she does.

“I’m pretty sure she’s a secretary,” Monaghan says, “but for all I know she’s a jet-setting spy who manages to get home by 5:30 every night and put supper on the table.”

The family settled in Ten Hills on the city’s west side, and Monaghan attended public schools, graduating from Western High School’s prestigious A-course and then attending Washington College in Chestertown, where she majored in English. By her testimony, she discovered two lifelong influences on the Eastern Shore—rowing and Whitney Talbot. A member of a very old, very rich, and very connected Valley family, Talbot has a work ethic as fierce as the one instilled in Monaghan by her middle-class parents, and the two have long reveled in their competitive friendship.

Upon graduation, Monaghan joined the Star as a general-assignments reporter, while Talbot—who had transferred to Yale and majored in Japanese—landed a job on the Beacon-Light’s editorial pages. But Monaghan’s timing turned out to be less than felicitous—the Star folded before she was twenty-six, and the Beacon-Light declined to hire her. Cast adrift, she relied on the kindness of family members to help her make ends meet on her meager freelance salary. She lived in a cheap apartment above her aunt’s bookstore in Fells Point and depended on her uncle to throw her assignments for various state agencies. It was in Kitty Monaghan’s store, Women and Children First, that she met her current boyfriend, Edward “Crow” Ransome. When she was twenty-nine, she fell into PI work; she likes to call herself the “accidental detective,” a riff on Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist.