Suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark, 92
Mary Higgins Clark, who as a widowed mother of five in her 40s began a long reign as 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, died Jan. 31 in Naples, Fla. She was 92.
Her death was announced on her website and by her publisher, Simon and Schuster. The cause was not immediately available.
Known to her legions of fans as the “queen of suspense,” Clark was an almost instant sensation with the publication in 1975 of her first thriller, “Where Are the Children?” The story centered 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 $1.5 million, 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 $64 million contract for five books. The deal made her, per volume, the highest paid female writer in the world, the New York Times reported.
Her books were practically guaranteed to be page-turners from their covers, which often were emblazoned with the words MARY HIGGINS CLARK in type larger than the font used for their shuddersome titles.
They included “The Cradle Will Fall” (1980), about a sinister obstetrician-gynecologist; “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 plucky self-reliance.
A typical Mary Higgins Clark protagonist was a self-possessed, professional woman whose life, through no fault of her own, was struck by evil.
“My people are never looking for trouble,” the author once told the Times. “The example I use is this: a young woman is in a see-through blouse and a black leather miniskirt and walks along Ninth Avenue at three in the morning. Something happens to her, you say, ‘My goodness, that is terrible.’
“On the other hand, if you take the same young woman, and she’s in her home, and she looks at her watch and says, ‘Oh gosh, it’s time to pick up the baby from Mother’s,’ and she gets in the car and at the end of the driveway, from the floor of the back seat someone says, ‘Don’t turn right, dear. Turn left,’ then she is your sister or your daughter and you become emotionally involved in it. I write about nice people whose lives are in danger.”
Her narratives, while not often lauded for their subtlety, were highly readable.
“Elizabeth began to shiver uncontrollably at the image she could not banish from her mind,” Clark wrote in “Weep No More, My Lady” (1987). “Leila’s beautiful body, wrapped in the white satin pajamas, her long red hair cascading behind her, plummeting forty stories to the concrete courtyard . ... If I had stayed with her, Elizabeth thought, it never would have happened . . . . ”
Clark extensively researched the topics addressed in her fiction. She attended murder trials and confirmed medical terminology with doctors. Attempting to describe a New England murder, she contacted the Coast Guard to determine precisely where a body might wash ashore if it were dumped in the waters off Cape Cod.