‘Queen of suspense’ overcame 40 early rejections to sign multimillion-dollar deals

Mary Higgins Clark had an original way of dealing with anybody who upset her: she simply killed them off. ‘‘Someone once wrote an absolutely nasty review of one of my books and I asked for a description of him,’’ she explained in an interview in 2000. ‘‘You don’t know it, I thought, but you are going to end up dead on the floor.’’

Even the bestselling mystery author’s disappointing second husband wound up in a pool of blood – in one of her popular novels.

Not only was this a slightly macabre, although characteristically humorous, way of processing unpleasant encounters or episodes, it also reflected Higgins Clark’s ability to draw on negative experiences from her life and rework them for her novels.

She had more than her share of loss and sadness before she began to enjoy success, and coped thanks to her naturally positive, just-get-on-with-it attitude and her Catholic faith.

Having witnessed her widowed mother’s indomitable spirit, Higgins Clark adopted the same approach when, aged 36 and with five young children, she found herself in the same predicament. She said in 2006: ‘‘It was through my mother that I learnt to cope with tragedy. She grieved, but she didn’t collapse.’’

The heroines of the more than 50 novels Higgins Clark wrote after her husband’s death were cut from a similar cloth. In many of her page-turners – of which she sold more than 100 million copies in the US alone – a woman finds herself unexpectedly in a terrifying situation through no fault of her own, but gets out of it through sheer gumption and quick wit. Death is ever present, and life, as Higgins Clark learnt early on, is precarious. As she once told an interviewer: ‘‘We all hang by a thread, and there are many things we cannot choose about our lives. It’s how we react to the inevitable that counts.’’

It was not until the late 1990s that America’s ‘‘queen of suspense’’ began to be known in the UK, with titles such as Remember Me (1994), the tale of a mother whose young son has died in a tragic accident, Daddy’s Little Girl (2002), about a former child witness’ campaign against her teenage sister’s convicted killer after he is released from jail, and The Second Time Around (2003), the story of the charismatic head of a medical research company involved in the development of a cancer cure, whose private plane crashes, but whose body is not found.

The reason British recognition did not happen sooner, she believed, was because ‘‘you don’t know how to classify me . . . I’m a suspense writer, not a blood-and-guts spiller. It’s what’s left to the imagination. I get grandmothers saying: ‘You write a lovely book, dear. No sex and no violence.’ Yet the first one was about a child molester.’’

novelist b December 24, 1927 d January 31, 2020 Mary Higgins Clark

She was born Mary Theresa Eleanor Higgins in the Bronx in New York City in 1927 to Luke Higgins, who came to the city from County Roscommon and owned a popular Irish bar and grill, and Nora. Her father died of a heart attack when Mary was 10, leaving Nora with three children and a ledger of uncollectable debts from his pub.

She aspired to being a writer from an early age and seemed to have a strong presentiment she would make it, habitually going windowshopping on Fifth Avenue for the expensive clothes she would buy once she was a published author. She was 16 when she began pitching short stories to magazines.

After leaving school she was desperate to earn money, so took a secretarial course rather than going to college. After three years working at an advertising agency she switched jobs and, at 21, became a Pan American Airways stewardess.

Following her wedding to childhood sweetheart Warren Clark in 1949, she took her first writing course at New York University. When the professor told students to pick a situation they had experienced or read about and begin by asking the questions: ‘‘Suppose

. . . ?’’ and ‘‘What if . . . ?’’, Higgins Clark thought back to being on Pan Am’s final flight to Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain fell around the country. She wrote the short story Stowaway, which was based on the fictional premise that a member of the Czech underground movement was on the last flight out of Prague. Stowaway was published in 1956 and became the inspiration for an episode of Armchair Theatre on ITV.

Warren, who had been ill for years, died in 1964. Widowed with five children, Higgins Clark took a job as a radio scriptwriter. She continued to write fiction every morning before her family rose.

In 1975 Higgins Clark sold Where Are the Children?, inspired by a real case of a woman accused of murdering her children. She received US$3000 – a standard fee for a first novel – but it was such a hit that the paperback rights were sold for $100,000. With the proceeds from her second book she bought a Cadillac, by her third she was a millionaire. Nevertheless, she never forgot her 40 rejection notes, including the one that read: ‘‘Mrs Clark, your stories are light, slight and trite.’’

Higgins Clark set a record with what was believed to be ‘‘the first eight-figure agreement involving a single author’’. The multibook contract with Simon & Schuster guaranteed her at least $10.1m. In 2000 it was surpassed with a $64m contract for four novels and a memoir.

‘‘After a long widowhood’’ and a failed second marriage, she found happiness with third husband John Conheeney, a retired Merrill Lynch executive. He died in 2018.

‘‘I like to tell a story where the theme, really, is it happens to very nice people whose lives are invaded,’’ she once said. ‘‘They are not looking for trouble. Something happens.’’

‘‘There are many things we cannot choose about our lives. It’s how we react to the inevitable that counts.’’