Laura Lippman is a woman with a plan. As the newly minted Mystery Writers of America Grand Master explains in a wide-ranging, highly entertaining call with BookPage from her Baltimore home, “I always tell people that when the apocalypse comes down, first I’m going to go pick up the woman who tints my brows and her husband and son. And then we’re gonna drive to my trainer’s house out in the country, because he knows how to hunt with a bow and arrow and he has a generator.”
Fortunately, the much-lauded (and attractively eyebrowed) bestselling author hasn’t had to put those plans into play just yet. But that particular combination of survival savvy, finely tuned humor and appreciation for the intrinsic value of personal aesthetics has served her—and her indelible characters—undeniably well, from no-nonsense PI Tess Monaghan, star of 12 books (beginning with Lippman’s 1997 debut, Baltimore Blues, and last seen in 2015’s Hush, Hush), to the other badass women who’ve populated her 13 standalone novels thus far.
A plan of a different sort is central to Lippman’s witty and winning new cozy mystery, Murder Takes a Vacation. While Mrs. Muriel Blossom may not be contending with the end of the world per se, her life is undergoing a seismic shift—more than one, in fact.
“I found out how hard it is to write a cozy. . . . it can’t just be deadly serious.”
It’s been a decade since Harold, Mrs. Blossom’s beloved husband of nearly 40 years, died just after her 58th birthday. Three years after that, the Baltimore native followed her daughter, son-in-law and three young granddaughters to their new home in Phoenix. Alas, when her son-in-law’s employer transferred him to Tokyo, he informed Mrs. Blossom that she was not invited to move with them. A few weeks later, still reeling from this abrupt change in circumstance, Mrs. Blossom suddenly became a woman of means when she found a winning lottery ticket in a Circle K parking lot. The prize? An astonishing $8.75 million.
As Mrs. Blossom muses in the book, “everyone seemed to think it was fortuitous, a harbinger of her new life. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that she had been fine with the old one.” But begin a new life she must, and so, after doing practical things like buying a condo back in Baltimore and setting aside money for her family, she decides to embark on her very first holiday abroad.
What will happen after the trip? Mrs. Blossom doesn’t really know. But while her future may seem unnervingly hazy, her vacation itinerary is gloriously clear: She’ll spend a week solo in Paris, followed by a weeklong Seine river cruise on the MS Solitaire with Elinor, her best friend of 60 years. There will be sightseeing, fine dining and excursions to museums and historic sites in and around the City of Light—a host of new experiences for a woman entering a new phase of her life.
Murder Takes a Vacation represents a change for Lippman, too, a departure from the darkness of gritty noir and a foray into the brighter world of the cozy mystery. “I’d just come off writing Prom Mom and none of the characters were likable,” says Lippman. She wanted to do something different, with “a character I really like.”
But the change of pace wasn’t exactly easy. “I found out how hard it is to write a cozy. I knew that, but somehow I’d blocked it out.” After all, she notes, “You can’t fall back on having a really big violent moment on the page. You have to find that tone where murder is happening so things are serious, but at the same time, it can’t just be deadly serious.”
Lippman sees writing a cozy as “a little political,” explaining that “So much of women’s writing is always being demeaned and diminished, and as somebody who’s been in the crime world a long time . . . excuse the profanity, I’ve heard a lot of shit-talk about Agatha Christie. A lot of people are like, [scoffs] she wasn’t a very good writer. It seems to me that of all the Golden Age writers, she was the one that people liked to put down. . . . Maybe her success makes her an easy mark.”
Mrs. Blossom also might seem a convenient target for dismissiveness, Lippman says. “She’s someone who could get lost in a crowd, someone you wouldn’t notice, and not just because she’s old. To center a book on a 60-something woman who is determined to have an adventure for the first time in her life, even if it’s not initially her idea, it felt like something was really opening up. And you know, almost a little secret manifesto.”
She adds, “I just wanted to write a book in which a woman who is old by almost any standard could be seen as the heroine. And she’s not cute, she’s not crackin’ wise, she’s not super randy, which seems to be a weird thing that people do with old people. She’s just a person who, like the vast majority of people, has never been upgraded in her life.”
But on page one of Murder Takes a Vacation, Lippman makes sure that Mrs. Blossom gets her first-ever seat upgrade on the initial leg of her grand excursion: a flight to London, to be followed by another to Paris. While she’d been worrying about getting stared at or inconveniencing someone by “FWF: flying while fat,” Mrs. Blossom certainly wasn’t counting on meeting a man, let alone the dashing and attentive Allan Turner. But there he is, laughing at her jokes and solicitously offering tips on avoiding jet lag. “She did not expect a man like this, a catch by almost anyone’s standards, to be interested in her,” Mrs. Blossom thinks. “He must be uncommonly kind, she decided. Which only made her like him more.”
After a lovely long dinner date in London, the two part ways and Mrs. Blossom goes on to Paris the next day, where she’s shocked to be approached by police who inform her that Allan has been found dead. Danny Johnson, another new acquaintance, is with her when she receives the strange and terrible news, and seems to appoint himself her guardian: He warns that her life may be in peril, too, and subsequently pops up seemingly everywhere Mrs. Blossom goes for the rest of her trip, much to her exasperation.
Read our starred review of ‘Murder Takes a Vacation’ by Laura Lippman.
Although she might be new to luxury travel, Mrs. Blossom isn’t a complete novice when it comes to untangling complicated situations, thanks to contract surveillance work she did many years ago for Tess Monaghan. This time around, it seems as if she’s the one being surveilled, and she doesn’t like it one bit. To add insult to injury, Danny keeps hinting that she knows something about a stolen antiquity Allan was supposedly carrying, but she has no idea what he’s talking about. And every time she returns to her room, both in her hotel and on the MS Solitaire, it looks as though someone’s rifled through her belongings. What on earth is going on? And how can she know whom to trust?
Mrs. Blossom does her best to enjoy her trip despite these strange goings-on, taking time between bouts of amateur sleuthing to go on memorable outings, including a fitting at a plus-size couture atelier accompanied by the bossy but very stylish Danny. “Who doesn’t love a makeover montage?” Lippman says. “It’s one of the great tropes!” There’s also an excursion to the Vétheuil homes of French impressionist Claude Monet and American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell. The latter is especially important to Mrs. Blossom, who considers Mitchell’s work “bold, enormous; this was a woman who clearly was not afraid to take up space. And so much color, so many evocations of flowers!” The first time Mrs. Blossom saw Mitchell’s art, she felt “as if this work had been created explicitly for her.”
Surely, then, the fictional Mrs. Blossom would be surprised and thrilled to learn that in the real-life Lippman had in fact created Murder Takes a Vacation to give her center stage at last. As Lippman explains in the book’s Author’s Note, readers first encountered Mrs. Blossom in 2008’s Another Thing to Fall. And from time to time, Lippman writes, she has been called out by readers “for being ageist—that was in response to a specific reference to Mrs. Blossom being low-tech—and antifat.” (This second criticism was regarding a POV in a 2005 novel, but Lippman thought “the reader had a valid point.”)
Lippman elaborates in our conversation, “It was the perfect kind of reader feedback in that it was . . . not cruel or unkind, it was just like, ‘Do better.’ So that was lodged in my head for a long time.” As she wrote Murder Takes a Vacation, she says, “I was like, OK, I can finally do right by Mrs. Blossom.”
“I was like, OK, I can finally do right by Mrs. Blossom.”
Part of this process involved sensitivity readers so Lippman could know that as “a relatively, what they call a straight-sized person—am I getting this right?” While Mrs. Blossom’s internal monologues are initially peppered with negative self-talk, as she broadens her horizons, meets new people and starts taking risks (some more dangerous than others), the critical voices gradually simmer down. “Right,” Lippman says, “she’s gaining a new sense of herself, she’s gaining confidence. And something to remember contextually is that, for 20 years, she was in a good marriage where she felt loved, and desired and adored.”
As for Mrs. Blossom’s potentially ageist tech aversion, Lippman explains, “It’s like, well, I’m really writing my mom. She’s a very smart woman, she really just dislikes tech.” But she admits that even now at 66, ageism can be hard to avoid. “I think I still struggle with it as an old person . . . because we’ve all grown up in this culture that has stressed the idea that we don’t want to get old. And if you’re in good health and have the luxury of not having profound financial troubles, why wouldn’t you want to get old?”
Lippman considers that question with compassion and humor in Murder Takes a Vacation as Mrs. Blossom ponders who she was during her marriage and who she might become. Some regrets linger, but they coexist with a renewed sense of hopefulness and possibility, whether in solving the mysteries that have rudely cropped up on her Parisian adventure or thinking about what lies ahead.
It’s a state of being that’s familiar to Lippman, who feels a kinship to her heroine. “I mean, she’s widowed, I’m divorced, we’re both making our way through life changes.” Indeed, she laughs, “I’ll quote Flaubert: I’ll say ‘Mrs. Blossom, c’est moi.’ But she’s really not! We are so different in terms of our personalities and our temperaments.” She adds, “I hope to write more about her. I certainly have a lot of ideas.”
In the meantime, she says, “I started another book that’s really different, and it’s dark and weird. I do kind of miss the experience of my writing time being a bit of a respite from the real world, because writing a dark and weird book right now feels really in tune with the times, even though half of it is set in the early 1980s.”
But after that, she says, “I’m totally open to writing a series about Muriel Blossom. The marketplace will have a say, that’s just how it works. . . . I guess the readers will decide.”
Photo of Laura Lippman by Vickie Gray.