from PRX.

I'm Kurt Anderson, and this is the Studio 360 podcast.

Laura Lipman is an Edgar Award-winning and Agatha Award-winning author of Detective Fiction,

most famously for the Tess Monaghan series.

Most famously until now, maybe, because her terrific brand-new novel, Lady in the Lake,

which doesn't star Tess, is a New York Times bestseller.

Laura Lippman also happens to be a lifelong resident of Baltimore, a city where Edgar

L. and Poe spent time and died.

So for a story we're working on, an American Icon's hour about Poe's work, I spent a recent

afternoon walking around Baltimore and talking with Laura.

Of course, Poe is best known for his Gothic horror tales and his dark Gothic poems, but he also

wrote what are considered the first detective stories ever in the 1840s.

His August DuPin stories, like the murders in the Room War and the purloined letter.

Almost half a century before Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock, Poe invented Laura Lipman's

literary genre.

What's interesting to me about it is he comes at it not because he's someone who's worked

as a police officer or worked in law, not because he's drawing on his own experience,

but because he does have this interest in the darkest side of human nature.

And he follows his own taste to a logical conclusion.

I took the train down to Baltimore, where I hadn't been for years, and I've got to say,

in light of the disgraceful slagging it's gotten recently from a celebrity currently living

an hour away, I found the place entirely charming.

...