Laura Lippman's Backstory

Over the course of 20 years I worked for four newspapers and two of them are dead. The San Antonio Light, a Hearst paper that battled a Murdoch paper, won the war in a weird sort of fashion, but lost all its soldiers. Hearst bought the competition and fired all its own people, except for a few columnists who had personal services contracts. That was about three years after I left for a job in my hometown of Baltimore, but I felt it keenly. The Light was the place where I grew up and seeing it disbanded was like seeing my family sent into exile.

About the same time The Light died, the Baltimore Evening Sun was quietly subsumed into The Sun, its bigger, older sibling. From the outside, this looked pretty quiet. Inside -- it was horrible, a bloodbath of buy-outs and career reversals and bitter feelings. There were talks of lay-offs and I was at the bottom of the list, which was based on seniority. What would I do, I wondered, if I couldn't be a reporter?

And, suddenly, I was writing about a slightly younger woman in the same predicament. Tess Monaghan had been an average reporter at the second daily in Baltimore. Now it was gone, and she was high and dry. What was she to do? Meanwhile, a friend of hers had been accused of murder . . .

For seven years, I rose at 6 a.m. and wrote about Tess before heading off to my job at the Sun, where things had actually turned out pretty well for me. I wrote seven books this way. Tess went from accidental detective to licensed professional. My books went from paperback original to hardcovers, winning some awards along the way. But I knew I would never face Tess's fate. I worked at the only newspaper in town. There was no way it was going to fold.

But then a day came when I had to choose -- fiction or The Sun? The backstory behind this choice would take many, many pages to tell, and it would still be incomplete. Suffice it to say, Tess had brought me to a place where I could, in fact, write fiction fulltime and I realized I would be crazy not to do it. I left newspaper life in the fall of 2001 and I never looked back.

So, in a sense, I finally did figure out what I would do if I ever lost my newspaper job. I just didn't realize that was what I was doing at the time. I showed Tess the way and she showed me the way.

Laura Lippman is the award winning novelist of elelven novels including EVERY SECRET THING and BY A SPIDER'S THREAD.