Baltimore Blues by Laura Lippman was the first book I read entirely on my Aluratek Libre eBook Reader PRO (see earlier review for more on the Reader). I downloaded it from the L.A. Public Library e-media page. The book was in Adobe epub format and I had to install Adobe Digital Editions in order to properly download it and transfer it to the Reader. I looked through all the epubs available from LAPL. Most of the available content consisted of mystery series, classics in the public domain, and, perhaps the majority, romance novel series. I hadn’t heard anything about Laura Lippman and her Tess Monaghan mystery series. I learned that it took place in Baltimore. I have to travel to Baltimore twice per year for work and I thought reading at least one of the series would teach me some things about this city that I am steadily getting to know. I chose the first book in the series, Baltimore Blues.
The book introduces Tess Monaghan, a single, unemployed, very athletic, literary, late twentysomething Baltimore native. At the beginning of the book she writes down her goals for autumn. “1) Bench press 120 pounds, 2) Run a 7-minute mile, 3) Read Don Quixote, 4) Find a job” (p. 11). She used to work for one of the two competing newspapers in Baltimore as a reporter. However, that paper went under and unlike some of her coworkers she was not hired by the competing paper. She has a male best friend, Rock, who is about to marry a woman completely unlike Tess. In fact, Tess has been chosen to be Rock’s best man at the wedding. She has an ex-boyfriend with whom she still has an occasional fling. Her chosen sport is rowing though she goes to the rowing club very early when no one is there. She feels “out of place among the Baltimore Rowing Club’s efficient grown-ups, professionals who rushed from morning practice to jobs, labs, law firms, and brokerage houses” (p. 12).
The mystery gets going when Rock’s fiancée’s boss is murdered and Rock is charged. Tess uses her investigative skills and family and work connections to try to clear his name. There are many characters involved, several false leads and potential red herrings. Tess is lucky to have an uncle with the state of Maryland, coworkers in the newspaper business, and a younger aunt who owns a bookstore above which Tess lives in an apartment. She makes mistakes in her amateur detective work, gets fooled and in some trouble, but also has some luck. There’s some suspense and ultimately Tess doesn’t figure it out until the end.
Initially I thought the book took place in the early 2000s since the epub said copyright 2006. However, when I checked amazon.com I found that the print edition was first published in 1997. This makes more sense because none of the characters uses cellphones. I don’t think Tess even uses the internet in her investigations. When working with a former coworker to look up past news stories she is enthralled because electronic databases are new to her. She does, however, know how to use the find text function in Microsoft Word. She instructs “her computer to look for the one word she knew was in everyone’s copy, the word one could not write without. Find ‘the,’ she told her Mac.” (p. 263)
The book does mention some of the places in Baltimore that I’ve visited or at least seen from a distance. Towards the beginning of the book Tess follows Rock’s fiancée into the Gallery mall in the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel. She loses her quarry because the escalator is “stacked with carefree tourists, the kind of people who don’t stand to one side because they assume everyone is on vacation” (p. 36). I have stayed at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel and been to the Gallery mall that’s two stories of shops with the food court on the third story. It’s across the street from the Inner Harbor where I’ve spent much time. I’ve seen the tall buildings of downtown Baltimore but I don’t think I’ve actually ventured there. The book states “once one got past the Inner Harbor, downtown had its usual ghost town feel. There are a lot of things one can do to make a city look good, and Baltimore had done it all. But they couldn’t put its heart back. Downtown was hollow at night.”
Some Baltimore eateries are mentioned in the book though I hadn’t heard of them before and they could be fictional. One place, Tio Pepe’s is described as “still the best restaurant in Baltimore” (p. 39). Another eatery, Tuscan Grille is described as “currently Baltimore’s trendiest restaurant” though Tess’ friend Whitney calls its offerings “food miscegenation. Pistachios and mint jelly. Fajitas with leeks. Goat cheese and peanut butter” (p. 90). At the bar Frigo’s, Tess and her friend Crow can have one dollar drafts and choose from a metal rack of Uty potato chips. The chips provide them “with a three-course supper: barbecue, sour cream, and onion, and, for dessert, crab-flavored” (p. 189).
The book revealed to me the existence of the Baltimore accent, something I never noticed while I was there. One character, Michael Abramowitz, is a personal injury attorney who has commercials on TV. His “lumpy face and thick Baltimore accent made him a celebrity of sorts.” The book only says a little bit about how the Baltimore accent sounds. I think it mentions that the word Italian is pronounced like eye-talian. One character, Cecilia is trying to shed her Baltimore accent and brags about how “I stopped pronouncing the second ‘r’ in ‘warter’ and the ‘r’ in ‘Warshington D.C.” (p. 129) I thought it was people from Washington State who put the r in Warshington.
Aspects of Baltimore’s history are mentioned frequently in the book. Baltimore’s longtime motto is “The City That Reads” though others had long twisted it to “The City That Bleeds.” At one point Tess mentions, “I haven’t gotten used to Friendship Airport becoming Baltimore-Washington International and that was 25 years ago” (p. 87). Now it’s called Thurgood Marshall International airport, though the code is still BWI. At the end of the book Tess’ friend Crow states about the Star Spangled Banner: “People, I mean Marylanders, Everybody. We sing the first verse, which is all questions. Francis Scott Key was asking if the flag still waved, if the United States had been victorious over the British. We should sing the last verse, when he knows they’ve won and is exultant” (p. 282). At the beginning of the book is a long quote from Dr. Thomas Hepburn, Buckler of Baltimore, in a letter home from his self-imposed exile in Paris published in “Baltimore: Its Interest—Past, Present, and Future,” 1873:
“While I love the dear old city of Baltimore and many of her people more, past experience has taught that, in their collective municipal capacity, they are the most silly, unreflective, procrastinating, impractical, and perverse congregation of bipeds to be found anywhere under the sun. Wise in their conceits they are impatient of advice, no matter how thoughtful and well-matured, from any one, preferring always their own crude extemporaneous conjectures to the suggestions of sound common sense which can only be elicited by the patient exercise of judgment, observation, and reflection” (p. 6).
Some other things I learned from the book were that there is a town in Maryland called Friendsville (possibly fictional) and that the people of Baltimore are big Elvis fans. I should have known this since we saw a Mexican restaurant called Elvis when we were there back in 2010. In the book, a character’s home interior is described as “early Graceland, decorated with ceramic monkeys and kittens” (p. 176). Later the author writes “Even the Elvis mural (at Patterson Park) had been defaced, so it had to be painted over. And when Baltimoreans started turning on Elvis, times were bad” (p. 263).
Baltimore Blues was a fairly enjoyable mystery mostly because of its setting rather than its story and characters. The author really seems to know Baltimore well. The book gave me some more insights about the city. Next time I go I won’t feel so much like just a visitor.
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