Laura Lippman wishes she could tell you that Murder Takes a Vacation (Morrow/HarperCollins, June 17), her latest novel and her first cozy mystery, was a highly intentional tribute to an often-disrespected genre that she loves.

But inspiration arrived in a different way.

“I want to pretend this was a conscious act of rebellion in which I write a genre that has been derided by men in my field,” she admits. “I do remember I was watching Charade [the 1963 movie with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn], and I thought, What about Charade as a story? Let’s flip the genders—have a woman be the older person and the man young and beautiful. Also, I had written two back-to-back books about pretty despicable people, three if you count my essays about myself. I needed to write a book about someone in whose company I would be happy.”

Author of 27 novels, six short story collections, and two essay collections—and a longtime resident of Baltimore—Lippman, 66, has always mined the dark side of crime fiction. She has examined criminal behavior through the eyes of her Baltimore private investigator, Tess Monaghan, and in stand-alone psychological thrillers that examine the insidious power of the past and how none of us are ever quite free from its grasp. Earlier this year, she was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, an honor that puts her in the company of Agatha Christie, Mary Higgins Clark, P.D. James, and others.

After a lot of time spent enmeshed in the troubled psyches of her characters, she realized her personal life called for a little uplift. In 2024, her divorce from screenwriter and producer David Simon was final (they split in 2020, and she wrote about it in the collection My Life as a Villainess). She also lost her beloved mother, who died at 93.

So Lippman focused her new novel on a character she created years ago but always felt she had neglected: Mrs. Blossom, Tess Monaghan’s assistant. Lippman hasn’t published a Tess novel in 10 years, but the time was ripe, she felt, for Mrs. Blossom to do a little sleuthing of her own.

In Murder Takes a Vacation, the widowed Mrs. Blossom has come into some money via a lottery ticket and has decided to indulge herself and embark on a European cruise. The novel’s cheeky first line—“Mrs. Blossom had never been upgraded in her life”—is an indication of the delightful, breezy style of the murder mystery, in which a friendly, attractive man on Mrs. Blossom’s flight from Baltimore to London befriends her. When he winds up dead, and a second mysterious man, Danny, pops up on arrival in Paris and doesn’t let her out of his sight, Mrs. Blossom knows this trip will not be the relaxing vacation she envisioned.

Lippman, long a fan of cozy authors like Margaret Maron and Donna Andrews, thought the writing would be relatively easy. She was wrong.

“The joke was on me. It was the hardest book I’ve ever written in my life,” Lippman says 

And yet, even after a maddening slew of revisions, Lippman is unwilling to let go of Mrs. Blossom. She’s already working on a second novel about the widow.

“Even on days when I’m banging my head against the wall, I realize I kind of like banging my head against the wall,” she says. “I’m so puzzled by people who want to skip the process of writing. It’s actually what I love most.” We recently spoke by phone with Lippman about the new book; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was so hard about writing a cozy?

You have to create a huge cast. In psychological thrillers or PI novels, you don’t need that many people. In a cozy, everyone has to come from this closed community. The person who’s killed has to have a personal connection to the killer and to the amateur sleuth. And you want there to be a lot of suspects. On my first try, my editor said, “This isn’t working. We need more people on this boat.” The things people are so quick to dismiss are often quite hard to do.

What is it about Mrs. Blossom that drew you back to her?

Mrs. Blossom is very much an amalgam of the three Lippman women. My sister is shy, someone who got married in her 20s and is still married to the same man. My mom loved to travel and would’ve liked to have gone on that trip Mrs. Blossom went on. And I am a woman in my 60s not expecting to be single, but I am. Mrs. Blossom is much kinder than I am and much sexier, though. I did have a lot of fun with her evolving fashion sense, because I love clothes, and my daughter and I could watch the big montage from The Devil Wears Prada all the time. There’s also a big overlap between [Mrs. Blossom and me] in her feelings about the artist Joan Mitchell. Mrs. Blossom’s discovery of Joan Mitchell is straight-up my discovery of Joan Mitchell.

You also took on writing from the point of view of a plus-size woman. How did you approach that?

I was paying attention to conversations about antifatness, the work of people like Aubrey Gordon [What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat] and Virginia Sole-Smith [Fat Talk]. I would describe myself as a midsize person—the term is midsize queens, which is awful; it’s supposed to be women sized 10-14. I know appropriation is always a hot-button topic. You have to be prepared to be told you’ve failed, and I feel like I’m prepared to be told I’m wrong. What I wanted to do was write a fat character who’s a self-conscious person, but she’s fine with her size. What’s bruising to her is to come upon people who are not. She’s happy in her body. I did have a sensitivity reader, but I do think curious, empathetic people who are not fat can write about a fat person if they’ve been paying attention to the culture we’re in.

I have a teenage daughter, and when I found out 15 years ago my child was going to be a girl, the only thing I wished for was to bring up a kid free of the body image issues I had. And now, it’s worse than ever, with TikTok and social media. It’s important to me to always say Mrs. Blossom is fine with herself. What she’s not fine with are the people who are cruel to her.

You say cozy mysteries are often derided by male crime writers. Why do you think that is?

The general problem in our culture, and I have said this a lot, is that men think something that makes them cry is profound and what makes women cry is simply sentimental. Books about men are seen as universal, while books about women are highly particular. Yet women are the backbone of fiction, commercial and literary. It’s so bizarre to me that this is the way the world works.

Do you think you’ll ever write about Tess Monaghan again?

I always want to bring Tess back. But I haven’t found the right story. She probably won’t even appear in the second Mrs. Blossom book, which is set in Tuscany at a posh resort cooking school. I’m always looking for the right idea for Tess. She’s dear to me and very much alive to me. Writing about Mrs. Blossom is the next best thing I can do.

Connie Ogle is a writer in South Florida.