In
his introduction to Laura Lippman's new short-story anthology, fellow thriller
writer George Pelecanos contrasts Hardly Knew Her with other authors' "tossed-off
collections of odds and ends and never-should-have-been short stories." Clearly
Pelecanos is just jealous that Lippman is married to Baltimore local god David
Simon of The Wire,
while Pelecanos only worked for him, but in his praise is the acknowledgment
that the stories within (nearly all reprints) face the challenge of surprising
fans of Lippman's regular subject, private investigator Tess Monaghan, and
enticing readers new to her work. Still, Lippman proves herself competent in
brief by playing to the form's strengths instead of trying to duplicate the
narrative pull of a full-length mystery.
The postcard-sized stories
that comprise the majority of Hardly Knew Her avoid the Two-Minute
Mystery trap by driving the action with motives instead of violent acts. The
opening story, "The Crack Cocaine Diet," in which two girls go into west
Baltimore to buy drugs, establishes the pattern most of them fall into: Women,
either young or well-dressed, wind up in perilous situations, sometimes of
their own design, and retaliate in gruesome ways. "Femme Fatale"'s heroine is
well-dressed but not young, which is why a flattering offer made at a Starbucks
draws her into a new line of work. In "One True Love," a madam turned
well-dressed suburbanite is recognized by one of her johns at her son's soccer
game, and is driven to protect her livelihood when he demands free favors for
his silence; the same woman is the subject of the novella "Scratch A Woman,"
which rounds out the collection.
The common element among these
tales is clearest when the crime is witnessed by a third-party observer, as in
"Pony Girl," in which a man decides to follow a girl in a sexy Halloween
costume: He's able to acknowledge the biases which lead him to assume she'll
end the night a victim instead of a perp. "Arm And The Woman" seesaws into
B-grade male fantasy, but the elaborate feint of "Dear Penthouse Forum (A First
Draft)" begs for re-reading once it's revealed. In the end, Lippman's stories
featuring PI Monaghan, with their conventional focus on the facts of the case
and the process of investigation, seem the most out of place. The best moments
in Hardly Knew Her function as snapshots in which the reader's own lapses in
logic are revealed and the question of "whydunit" lingers.