Mary Higgins Clark: Crime novelist who mastered the art of suspense

In her forties Mary Higgins Clark, a widowed mother of five, turned her hand to writing fiction and in the process became one of the most successful crime writers of all time, pouring out novel after novel about resilient women befallen by unnatural deaths, disappearances and wicked criminal deeds.

Known to her legions of fans as the “Queen of Suspense”, Clark, who has died aged 92, was an almost instant sensation with the publication in 1975 of her first thriller, Where Are the Children?. The story centred on a mother who, not for the first time, must prove her innocence when her children go missing. Clark, who until then had struggled alone to support her family, described herself in that moment as a “prospector stumbling on a vein of gold”.

Her output included dozens of novels that sold tens of millions of copies in hard copy, in paperback and in translation. Few if any critics placed her writing in the category of high literature. But Clark had discovered a crowd-pleasing – and profitable – formula for fictional crime.

After selling her first book for $3,000, she collected $1.5m, including paperback rights, for her second novel, A Stranger Is Watching (1977), about a kidnapping in New York City’s Grand Central Station.

In 2000, after increasingly generous advances over the years, Simon and Schuster awarded Clark a $64m contract for five books. The deal reportedly made her, per volume, the highest-paid female writer in the world.

Her canon included The Cradle Will Fall (1980), about a sinister obstetrician-gynaecologist; Loves Music, Loves to Dance (1991), about a killer who stalks the personal ads; Let Me Call You Sweetheart (1995), about a plastic surgeon who modifies his patients’ faces to resemble the visage of a murdered woman; and Daddy’s Gone A Hunting (2013), a dark tale of family secrets.

In addition to her novels, Clark wrote short stories, children’s books and a memoir, Kitchen Privileges, that recounted a life marked by hardship, including the loss at a young age of her father and the deaths of two brothers. Like many of her fictional heroines, she overcame adversity with self-reliance.

Clark, who was Catholic, abstained from the gory and the risque, a decision that was said to have resulted in TV and movie deals that were less lucrative than those obtained by thriller writers who did not similarly restrain themselves. On the printed page, however, her stories were blockbusters.

Mary Theresa Eleanor Higgins was born in 1927 in the New York City borough of the Bronx. Her father, an Irish immigrant, owned and operated a bar and grill that catered to the local Irish-American community. He struggled during the Depression and died in his sleep one day while Mary was at church.

His widow took in boarders, offering them “kitchen privileges”, a phrase Clark resurrected years later for her memoir. She had two brothers who both predeceased her.

As a teenager, Mary worked as a telephone operator at a hotel where she said she listened in on the conversations of a then-unknown playwright, Tennessee Williams. She went to secretarial school before becoming a stewardess with Pan American World Airways. After a year she came home and in 1949 married Warren Clark.

While raising their children, she nurtured an interest in writing and endured the disappointment of rejection slips before selling her first story, “Stowaway”, in 1956 to Extension magazine for $100. Its protagonist was a flight attendant who discovers a member of the Czech underground hidden on her plane.

Clark’s husband died in 1964 and to support her family she began writing radio copy. A programme called Portrait of a Patriot led her to write her first book, a historical novel about George Washington titled Aspire to the Heavens (1969). Seeking inspiration for her next effort, she realised that a large portion of her own library consisted of suspense novels. Stealing time to write in the early mornings before her children awoke, she produced another manuscript that became Where Are the Children?.

Clark’s financial success allowed her to return to school and receive, in 1979, a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Fordham University in New York.

Clark’s second marriage, to lawyer Raymond Ploetz, was annulled. In 1996, she married John Conheeney, a retired Merrill Lynch executive. He died in 2018. She is survived by her children, including Carol Higgins Clark, also a novelist with whom she collaborated on books including Deck the Halls (2000) and Dashing Through the Snow (2008).

Mary Higgins Clark, author, born 24 December 1927, died 31 January 2020

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