Murder Takes a Vacation

Lippman, a former journalist for the Baltimore Sun, drew on her long experience as a crime beat reporter when she branched into novel-writing in 1997. Her first novel, Baltimore Blues, introduced her longtime character Tess Monaghan, a private investigator who, like Lippman, works as a Baltimore crime reporter. Lippman has acknowledged Monaghan’s autobiographical roots, noting also that her first mystery novel was inspired by her “fleeting desire to kill someone” (“The Books.” LauraLippman.com). Over the next few decades, Lippman followed Baltimore Blues with a dozen more Tess Monaghan novels and novellas, most of them set in Baltimore, as well as a few standalone mysteries based on real-life events. What the Dead Know (2007), for instance, drew on the widely publicized disappearance of two preteen sisters from a Maryland shopping center in 1975, and Lady in the Lake (2019) on the 1969 murder of an 11-year-old girl in Baltimore.

Muriel Blossom, the elderly protagonist and amateur sleuth of Murder Takes a Vacation, played a supporting role in some of Lippman’s Tess Monaghan mysteries, notably Another Thing to Fall (2008), which featured her as Monaghan’s student and sometime assistant. Mrs. Blossom’s central role in the new novel, Lippman says, owes partly to her own desire to take a respite from the dour themes and “deeply unpleasant people” that drove her three previous novels; Mrs. Blossom, she says, “filled the bill” of someone she “flat-out liked” and wanted to spend more time with (“From Side Character to Star: Muriel Blossom’s Big Moment.” The Big Thrill, 2025). As such, Murder Takes a Vacation serves as a partial vacation for Lippman herself, who opts for a lighter tone—one much closer to the cozy mystery genre than the graphic realism of much of her previous crime fiction.

Cozy mysteries, a style exemplified by Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series (including Murder at the Vicarage and A Pocket Full of Rye), typically center on an amateur sleuth who brings a shrewd eye and a lived-in knowledge of human nature and everyday life to the solving of mysteries, usually in a quaint or picturesque setting. In these mysteries, sex and violence are never graphically described, weighty social issues go largely unmentioned, and murderers, by and large, are intelligent, well-spoken, and relatively rational. For its vast readership, the cozy mystery genre serves partly as a haven from real-life violence and its turbulent social contexts. The mysterious deaths and art-theft intrigue of Murder Takes a Vacation unfold in the summery bliss of a cruise on the River Seine, which the newly rich Muriel Blossom has joined as a leisurely getaway from her Baltimore life. In true “cozy” fashion, Mrs. Blossom uses her everyday knowledge and life experience—about clothes, colors, art, human psychology—to foil the evildoers.

In Lippman’s novel, the “McGuffin” (the central object that canonically drives the plot of a mystery) is a jewel-encrusted statue of a bird, an allusion to Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 detective novel The Maltese Falcon, a classic of detective noir that departs from the cozy mystery. References to classic noir, including Danny Johnson’s Peter Lorre-like character, provide humor and contrast Mrs. Blossom’s sunny hero with her bright floral prints. Lippman subtly subverts the genre in other ways as well; for instance, cozy sleuths seldom change over the course of the story. Miss Marple, for example, is virtually the same in every novel, giving each a standalone reading experience. It doesn’t matter what order the books are read in because the problem to be solved always lies outside of the character. Lippman, however, regretted not giving Muriel Blossom “her due” in the Tess novels and resolved to “open up” her character in a story all her own. Societal prejudice against “older and overweight people” factored into Lippman’s evolving portrait of Muriel Blossom (The Big Thrill). She begins as shy and self-effacing, and by the novel’s end has become “the main character in her own life” (247), standing up to the more glamorous people who underestimated and condescended to her. Her intrigue-laden cruise down the River Seine becomes, unexpectedly, an inner voyage as well.