Best-selling ‘Queen of Suspense,’ has died
Mary Higgins Clark, a fixture on bestseller lists for decades whose more than 50 novels earned her the sobriquet Queen of Suspense, died Friday in Naples, Florida. She was 92.
Her death was announced by her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, also a mystery novelist. In addition to Naples, her mother had homes in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts.
Mary Higgins Clark, whose books have sold more than 100 million copies in the United States alone, was still writing until recently, her daughter said, and had a book published in November.
Legions of readers were addicted to her page-turners, which popped up on the market one after another. She wanted to create stories that would make a reader say: “This could be me. That could be my daughter. This could happen to us,” she told Marilyn Stasio in a 1997 interview in The New York Times.
Her heroes were most often female, her villains male, and she said that she wrote about “nice people whose lives are invaded.”
Stasio wrote that “Mary Higgins Clark writes to a simple formula that entails putting a woman in peril and letting her figure her own way out.” Although that formula is “repetitive and predictable,” she added, it works because Higgins Clark “is a natural-born storyteller.”
It certainly worked for fans. Masses of followers flocked to her Facebook page and showered her with praise and questions, and she kept them informed about her projects.
In her memoir, “Kitchen Privileges” (2002), Higgins Clark described herself in her younger years as “aching,
yearning, burning” to write, certain that she would succeed but needing guidance. She eventually found it in a writing class at New York University. The professor suggested his students seize upon a situation they had experienced or read about and begin by asking the questions “Suppose ... ?” and “What if ... ?”
It was a recipe Higgins Clark said she stuck to, with the addition of the question “Why?”
There are, however, two things that won’t be found in her books — sex and profanity — and that choice was deliberate.
In her first successful novel, “Where Are the Children?” (1975), which Higgins Clark sold for $3,000, a young mother who is accused of killing her son and daughter changes her identity, finds a new husband and builds another family, only to have her second set of children disappear.
Years later, the secrets of the cutthroat high-end real estate market in New Jersey were among the scariest aspects of “No Place Like Home” (2005), a story about a young woman who tries to distance herself from a painful childhood in which she accidentally killed someone close to her. When her husband surprises her by buying her a dream house, the consequences are nothing short of a nightmare.
Higgins Clark and her daughter Carol also wrote as a team, producing five holiday-themed crime novels that bring together Mary Higgins Clark’s character Alvirah Meehan and Carol Higgins Clark’s Regan Reilly.
And in recent years she collaborated with Alafair Burke on the “Under Suspicion” series, in which the character Laurie Moran, a producer of true-crime television programs, grapples with mysterious cases.