“Lady in the Lake” author Laura Lippman talks about the series set in Baltimore

Laura Lippman and her daughter traveled to New York last week for the big premiere of the Apple TV+ version of her 2019 novel “Lady In The Lake.” They were made up by the “glamour squad,” she recalled, and then met stars Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram in a crowd of about 200 people at the Museum of Arts and Design.

But what Lippman is really looking forward to is watching the show again with friends on Friday, when it premieres on a much smaller screen. “Maybe a dozen people,” she said. “That’s Baltimore!”

This is the second Lippman book to come to the screen. “Every Secret Thing,” starring Diane Lane and Dakota Fanning, was released in 2014, although the recent film “Prom Mom” ​​has been optioned and ideas for the popular Tess Monaghan series are “doing the rounds,” she said.

But the scale of making “Lady In The Lake” is on another level. Is it hard to see one of your literary babies being reinterpreted by someone else? “Not really,” Lippman said matter-of-factly. “I know I’m not a screenwriter. I’ve been going to the movies alone a lot lately and I respect what they do more than ever. It’s a huge learning curve. I’ve fallen in love with movies of all kinds again.”

The former Baltimore Sun reporter never wanted or expected the show to “owe anything” to her novel, although she noticed the departures from her work when she saw the first two episodes in March. “It wasn’t judgmental,” she said. “When I watched it again, I realized I wasn’t cataloging the differences anymore. I thought, ‘Wait a minute! This is bigger.’ There had to be more at stake.”

Set in the 1960s, Lady In The Lake follows separated Pikesville housewife Maddie (Portman) who becomes entangled in the story of a missing black woman, Cleo (Ingram). The film examines the racial and class divides in Baltimore in depth and offers a well-crafted portrayal of the black community. I told Lippman that I was pleased, as the authoritative Baltimore TV shows and movies of my youth often lacked that perspective.

“Baltimore is like a jazz classic, like ‘My Funny Valentine.’ There are as many versions as there are people who play it. But in an ideal world, there would be more versions by now,” said Lippman, who admits that the media often “uses black suffering to tell a story. I did that. I can’t solve the representation problem in publishing, but there should be a dozen Baltimore stories.”

She liked some of the details director Alma Har’el added to the script to draw the connections between the stories across racial and cultural lines. “It was interesting to bring in the idea that innocent black men might be involved in the disappearance of the missing white girl,” as well as the addition of Slappy, Cleo’s estranged husband (Byron Bowers), as “a clever way of introducing the community without directly saying, ‘And this is what it’s like to be a black man in 1966.'”

Lippman was so pleased with the result that she wrote “effusive” thank-you letters to Har’el, Portman and Ingram, the latter of whom emotively portrays the reserved Cleo. “It sounds a little bizarre, but Cleo also kept me at arm’s length,” said the woman who created her. “Even with your own characters, you don’t know everything. I wrote to Moses: ‘She’s yours now.'”

Ingram is a Baltimore native, and Cleo, like many black residents, doesn’t speak with the stereotypical “hey, hon” accent. However, some characters do, and it was fun to watch the actors make a valiant effort, even though the pronunciations are unfamiliar to many people outside the area.

Lippman recalled that John Glover, a graduate of Towson University, “went all over the place” with his accent in his role on the 1980s-set NBC sitcom “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” which earned him letters and calls to NBC asking if he was mentally retarded.

This made for an entertaining demonstration of the Baltimore accent, and let me tell you, you’ve never had a Baltimore night until you’ve sat in a bar with Laura Lippman trying to find the perfect local pronunciation of “ambulance.” (And it’s “amblance”)

She’s quite pleased with the Baltimore the show created, including the sets. “What about Pennsylvania Avenue?” she asked of recreating a 1960s version of the then-busy street. “The sight of it at night literally made me gasp.”

Lippman will find out what the locals think at her neighborhood party tomorrow. As much fun as the premiere was, she said, “This is the highlight.”