Setting is an integral part of any work of fiction, author Laura Lippman says, and the three years she lived in Columbia as a teenager inspired her to choose "Wilde Lake" for the title and location of her latest book.
The backdrop for the crime novel is the man made body of water in Columbia's Town Center, "created by people, but still capable of drowning a child and freezing in winter," said Lippman, a 1977 graduate of Wilde Lake High School.
"Place is very important to fiction … and this book begins on the banks of Wilde Lake and ends there, with the narrator listening to 'wavelets,' as she calls them, hit the shore," said the award-winning author, who has set many of her novels in Baltimore.
"Wilde Lake," which was released earlier this month, revolves around "the terrible things that can happen despite someone's good intentions," she said. The book is published by William Morrow and Co., part of HarperCollins.
Lippman said she realized the plot she was developing would be particularly well suited to Columbia in the 1970s, when certain ideas and themes were being explored.
But she won't say more, stating: "I don't want to spoil discoveries readers may make" while reading the book.
In the novel's afterword, Lippman writes that "New City Upon a Hill: A Brief History of Columbia," written by David Stebenne and Joseph Rocco Mitchell, and the "You Knew You Grew Up in Columbia, MD When…" Facebook page "filled the gaps in my knowledge about the place where I lived and attended high school, 1974-1977."
The author said her family rented their Baltimore home and moved to an apartment complex on Windstream Drive so she could attend Wilde Lake in 1974 as a sophomore. They returned to Baltimore after she graduated three years later.
She said she believes her parents felt the change would be good for her, in part because of the school's "so-called open-space concept" and because there was a lot going on in Baltimore schools.
"There was a bitter strike during my freshman year and that created stress for me" due to teacher absences, she recalled.
"My parents felt the move would address a lot of different things," she said. "I welcomed the change since I was not happy at Western, which was a single-sex school. I was keen to compete with boys and girls."
Lippman said she has "very fond and affectionate memories" of her high school years.
"There was an enormous amount of leeway shown students if they had particular talents," she said. "I asked my English teacher if I could adapt a novel into a musical [for a class assignment] and she said, 'Sure!' "
The book was "The Joyous Season" by Patrick Dennis, who also wrote "Auntie Mame." Lippman wrote a play and lyrics that were never intended to be performed.
"I had an immense amount of freedom to explore my own creativity," she said. "There was another student who was like 12, and who had come from the middle school to study math. His name was David desJardins, and he ended up being one of the first people at Google."
After graduating from college with a journalism degree and writing for a couple of daily newspapers in Texas, Lippman returned to Baltimore in 1989 to work at The Sun, where she said she occasionally covered stories related to what journalists call the "cops and courts beat." She said she would rise early to work on fiction writing for two hours before heading to her reporting job.
She worked at The Sun for 12 years, then left daily journalism in 2001 to become a full-time novelist.
"I love the crime genre," she said. "I like to read crime novels, and I understand the genre."
Her writing influences include crime novelists Megan Abbott and Kate Atkinson. She described the late James Crumley, a Texas native whose books centered on hard-boiled detectives, as "a big hero" of hers.
There are more than 50 customer reviews of "Wilde Lake" on Amazon.com, including one from Barbara Laricos, an Ellicott City resident who wrote: "This may be my favorite [Laura Lippman novel] yet, in part because I live in the area where this book is set. The local tidbits are right on target and the characters are rich, complex and wonderfully flawed. And as usual, the end surprised me."
A retired federal employee, Laricos said in a phone interview she appreciated the contrasts that Lippman drew between the past and present in Howard County, where Laricos witnessed an evolution after Columbia's founding.
"Those were times of dramatic change, not only in the county physically, but in the people living here," she said. "The population became more diverse and more tolerant of other races."
Michael Davis, a longtime Wilde Lake resident with a law practice in Town Center, attended Lippman's author talk May 7 at Slayton House, arranged for village residents by the Wilde Lake Community Association.
"Most everybody in the audience was sharing their memories of early Columbia with her, and all of her comments were very positive about what it was like living here then," Davis said. "She was funny, humble and self-effacing."
Lippman said her aim as a novelist was to write a book a year. With 20 novels to her name since 1997, she has surpassed that goal.
"It's expected in the crime genre," she said. "To be successful, [a crime writer] must write books at that pace."