Top 10 books about Baltimore

Anne Tyler is indelibly tied to the city, but authors as contrasting as Frederick Douglass and John Waters have shown some of its different faces

When I began writing novels set in my home town of Baltimore, the living writer most identified with the city was Anne Tyler. More than two decades later, that’s still true. Yet Tyler’s books are not about Baltimore per se. The city is her backdrop, not her subject. Tyler would be one of the great American novelists wherever she lived.

She gets Baltimore right, of course, because she’s Anne Tyler. The question, as always with any Baltimore-based story, is which Baltimore? It’s a city of contradictions, as open to interpretation and variation as the best jazz standards.

Once one of the largest cities in the US, Baltimore has been losing population in recent years and its public image is dismal. There was the Freddie Gray uprising in 2015, numerous scandals involving the police department and now our mayor has been forced to step down in a scandal over a children’s book. It’s a poor city with a high homicide rate. Still, there are those of us who love it and choose to live here.

And writers have always been drawn to Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe lived and later died here, although didn’t produce any significant work here. Gertrude Stein went to medical school and took up boxing; Dashiell Hammett, forever associated with San Francisco, was once a Pinkerton detective agent in the city. But in truth, there’s not enough fiction about my home town. To come up with a list of 10 books, I had to go beyond novels.

Meanwhile, there’s a reason we call it Smalltimore. This list includes friends, a mentor, a minister and a husband. Tyler is the only living Baltimore writer on this list I’ve never met – and she was a good friend to my friend, Rob Hiaasen, shot to death last summer alongside four of his newspaper colleagues.

1. The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (1985)
If I have to pick just one Tyler as a classic Baltimore novel, I’d go with The Accidental Tourist because Macon Leary and his siblings typify a certain kind of north Baltimore eccentric. Alphabetised kitchen, a family card game that only the family understands? I know these people.

2. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845)
“[I]t was no small affair, in the eyes of the slaves, to be allowed to see Baltimore,” Frederick Douglass writes in his memoir. As a boy, Douglass was sent to Baltimore from a large plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and it changed his life: he learned to read and write here. But he had to leave in order to escape slavery.

3. The City of Anger by William Manchester (1953)
Manchester, perhaps best known in the US as Winston Churchill’s biographer, doesn’t identify the eponymous city in his novel as Baltimore, but it’s clearly based on the place where he worked as a reporter. (The Evening Sun, where I would work many decades later.) It centres on an election, corrupt politicians and similarly corrupt cops. It’s depressingly relevant.

4. Shock Value by John Waters (1981)
Although best known as a film director, Waters is a gifted prose stylist. His autobiography, reissued in 2005, is my favourite. It recalls his early life and early work and touches on his obsession with the local dance show that would later inspire the various iterations of Hairspray. And reader, he married me. My husband and me, that is.

5. Red Baker by Robert Ward (1985)
Shortlisted for the National Book Award, this novel’s eponymous protagonist is a steelworker made redundant in the early 1980s, when the city’s working-class jobs had begun to disappear. It is a quintessential Baltimore book.

6. Ten Indians by Madison Smartt Bell (1996)
Bell has found international acclaim for his Haiti trilogy, but has long made his home in Baltimore, where he runs the creative writing programme at Goucher College. (He hired me to teach there.) Ten Indians follows a well-intentioned psychiatrist who opens a Taekwando school in a troubled neighbourhood.

7. The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2008)
This was Coates’s first book, a very Baltimorean autobiography about the forces that shaped him as a young man, and a portrait of the artist as a young nerd. Much of it turns on his relationship with his activist intellectual father, Paul Coates, a complicated man to say the least.

8. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010)
Baltimore is home to a world-class hospital, Johns Hopkins, of which the city is justifiably proud. But the hospital’s relationship to Baltimore’s African American residents is complicated – entire blocks have been destroyed by its expansion, there are urban legends about secret experiments on black children. Skloot’s hugely popular investigation into how one woman’s cells were the basis of medical breakthroughs braids all these strands together into a stunning, novelistic read.

9. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (1965-2010)
This one is a cheat – Clifton’s poetry transcends autobiography and she belonged to many cities. But she was Maryland’s poet laureate from 1979 to 1985 and many of the poems collected here would have been written during her time in Baltimore, where she died in 2010. And these are among the best poems written in Baltimore, or anywhere else, for that matter.

10. The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns (1997)
I didn’t know David Simon that well at the Baltimore Sun; he took a buyout in 1995 and began working in television. But in 1997, he published his second non-fiction narrative (co-written by Burns, his collaborator on The Wire) – at about the same time as I published my second novel, so I spent some time hanging out with him in bookstores. The Corner feels – oh, dreaded word, but true here – Dickensian. It’s a sweeping epic about those touched by the drug trade in one west Baltimore neighbourhood. Yes, I married him in 2006, but I think even his enemies have to concede he’s one of the city’s great chroniclers. Um, not that he has any enemies. He is a man of famously mild and easygoing temperament. Pity about the puny backlist.

Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman is published by Faber & Faber. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15.

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