Mary Higgins Clark
US ‘Queen of suspense’ was once the highest-paid female author in the world
MARY Higgins Clark, who has died aged 92, was America’s answer to Agatha Christie, a “queen of suspense” who wrote more than 50 bestselling mystery novels; her first two, Where Are the Children? (1975) and A Stranger Is Watching (1977), were adapted into films.
Mary Higgins Clark began writing in earnest when her first husband died suddenly, leaving her, aged 35, a widow with five young children and $25,000 (€23,000) in insurance money. She wrote short stories and $20-a-time radio scripts, and in 1968, after six years and some 40 rejection letters, sold her first book, Aspire to Heaven, a biographical novel about George Washington, for $100.
It sold just a few copies, and her next book Where are the Children?, about a woman accused of killing her offspring, was turned down by two publishers before it became a bestseller. It won her a $lm contract and set her on a path that would end in her becoming the highest-paid female author in the world.
Always supremely plotted, Mary Higgins Clark’s mysteries, often inspired by news stories, were based on thorough research. She would attend murder trials and consult experts about poisoning techniques, though she never used explicit violence.
She felt that the main reason her books were successful was that they concerned “normal people [whom] terrible things happen to”. Readers, she explained, instinctively liked her protagonists and wanted them to be all right: “They’re not down and outs or living on the edge… it could be anyone you know, it could be you.”
Mary Theresa Eleanor Higgins was born on Christmas Eve 1927 into an Irish family in the Bronx district of New
York. Her father, who ran an Irish bar, died of a heart attack when Mary was 10, leaving his widow with three children and a portfolio of mortgages: “My mother had $2,000 to her name, and that was it.”
To make ends meet they took in lodgers, and after school Mary worked shifts on a hotel switchboard.
More tragedy followed. Mary’s 18-year-old brother was killed in the war, while her other brother died in an accident aged 42. Not surprisingly her typical heroine was a woman in her late 20s or early 30s who had suffered loss.
After leaving school Mary went to secretarial college and worked in an advertising agency, then as a Pan Am air stewardess, giving up her job in 1949 when she married Warren Clark, a neighbour who worked in the travel business, with whom she had five children.
Mary, who died on January 31, had always enjoyed writing stories, but it was her husband’s death that persuaded her to turn her hobby into a career. Despite a slow start she managed to put all her children through private education.
In 2000 she became the highest-paid female author in the world when Simon and Schuster awarded her a €59m contract for five books.
In 2001 she published a memoir, Kitchen Privileges. Her last novel, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Cry, was published last year.
A second marriage, in 1978, to Raymond Ploetz, was annulled. In 1996 she married, thirdly, John Conheeney, who died in 2018. She is survived by her children.