At first blush, Laura Lippman’s Kirkus-starred 2019 novel, Lady in the Lake, appears to be a straightforward mystery. There’s the familiar title, calling to mind Raymond Chandler’s classic 1942 private-eye novel, The Lady in the Lake (which also received a Kirkus star), and the story, set primarily in 1960s Baltimore, featuring the discovery of not one but two dead bodies and a main character—amateur detective–turned–journalist Maddie Schwartz—who’s determined to uncover their stories.
However, Lippman’s novel is far from a typical whodunit; by the end, its mystery element feels like a red herring. Instead, the author provides an ambitious, kaleidoscopic portrait of a city and the diverse residents that give it life. A new, seven-episode Apple TV+ limited series adaptation, starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, isn’t a simple detective story, either—but its interpretation of Lippman’s work is unsatisfying at best, and baffling at worst. It premieres on July 19.
At the start of the novel, Maddie, recently divorced, takes an interest in the disappearance of a young Jewish girl; acting on a hunch, Maddie finds the girl’s corpse near a Baltimore arboretum. Her entanglement with the case leads her to pursue a journalism career despite her lack of experience; she starts at the Baltimore Star as an assistant for its “Helpline” column, which fields readers’ petty complaints about life in the city. As she tries to work her way up at the paper, she finds out that the badly decomposed body of a Black woman has been discovered in a fountain at local Druid Hill Park; the corpse is identified as Cleo Sherwood, who’d worked as a server at a club owned by small-time criminal Shell Gordon. Driven by journalistic ambition, Maddie delves deep into the case, trying to find what exactly happened to Cleo; meanwhile, she pursues a passionate relationship with a Black police officer, Ferdie Platt, who warns her to leave Cleo’s story alone.
The book intersperses third-person sections from Maddie’s point of view with a vast array of first-person vignettes of various people she meets, including a driven local news anchor who knew her in her youth, a restless clerk at a jewelry store, a casually sexist and racist police patrolman, a grieving newspaper columnist, a 68-year-old Black female cop known as “Lady Law,” a highly observant restaurant server, and many others—rich and poor, Black and white, Jewish and gentile. Each offers their own short story, a piece of their lives to add to the mosaic that Lippman slowly pieces together.
The narrators also include Tessie Fine, the young girl who’s abducted and killed, and Cleo, whose recurring narration is particularly intriguing; she tells her story as if she’s addressing Maddie directly, from beyond the grave, in a manner that recalls the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard: “Alive, I was Cleo Sherwood. Dead, I became the Lady in the Lake, a nasty broken thing, dragged from the fountain after steeping there for months, through the cold winter, then that fitful, bratty spring, almost into summer proper.”
As Lippman has noted in interviews, the characters of Tessie and Cleo were inspired by two real-life people in 1960s Baltimore: Esther Lebowitz, an 11-year-old Jewish girl who was kidnapped and murdered; and Shirley Parker, a Black woman who disappeared and whose body was later found in a lake in a city park. However, the characters’ lives bear little relationship to those of their real-life counterparts. Lippman isn’t interested in delivering a nonfiction account; instead, she offers an impressionistic work that presents 1960s Baltimore as a living, breathing entity, its people grappling with violence, sexism, racism, antisemitism, poverty, and a range of other issues. The investigations that drive Maddie through the narrative are certainly engaging, but they lead to solutions that aren’t especially complicated; they simply aren’t the point. Lippman is more concerned with the milieu of the mysteries than with the mysteries themselves, which makes for an unpredictable and frequently riveting read.
The streaming series, which was created, directed, and co-written by Honey Boy’s Alma Har’el, presents no such grand narrative. It focuses almost solely on Maddie and Cleo; everyone around them simply serves their stories, which are necessarily expanded to fill seven episodes of television. The broad strokes of the women’s narratives are the same, but there are numerous new flashbacks, new secondary characters, and an array of new scenes—including more than one that melodramatically puts Maddie’s life in violent danger.
It becomes clear that Har’el isn’t telling a story based in reality. The story makes vague nods to the era’s sexism and racism, but it seems unconcerned with exploring them in any detail; instead, it’s focused on establishing a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory visual style—one that reaches its apex during fantastical sequences that include a couple of truly ill-advised dance numbers. A very late scene even presents a vision of a character leading a parade. It’s all aggressively unreal, and it doesn’t fit the material in any way. Lippman’s Baltimore feels very real indeed; the miniseries’ version feels like a collection of constructed sets, though it was filmed on location. The show doesn’t feel lived in, because it doesn’t portray life as it’s truly lived.
Despite this, the performers do to give the production a sense of humanity. Portman convincingly portrays Maddie’s fierce ambition and her willingness to push ethical and journalistic boundaries—although her ill-advised choice to put on a Brooklyn-esque accent is jarring, as none of the other actors follow suit. In scene after scene, Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit), as Cleo, effectively gets across her character’s deep desire to escape her circumstances. A few secondary players stand out, as well: Better Things’ Mikey Madison is charming as Judith Weinstein, the jewelry store clerk who occasionally serves as Maddie’s investigative sidekick, and The Wire’s Wood Harris, as crime boss Shell Gordon, exudes quiet menace. One only wishes that they were working in an adaptation that didn’t miss the point. Fortunately, Lippman’s story is one that bears rereading.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.