Mary Higgins Clark

• Born: December 24, 1929
• Birthplace: Bronx, New York
• Died: January 31, 2020

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; psychological; cozy; thriller

Principal Series: Alvirah and Willy Mehan, 1987-

Contribution

Mary Higgins Clark, one of the most popular and prolific modern suspense writers, has been called the “Queen of Suspense.” Her fast-paced, tightly plotted award-winning best sellers capturing daily terrors have attracted readers worldwide for more than thirty years. In the tradition of Pat Flower, Margaret Millar, and Mignon Eberhardt, authors noted for portraying vulnerable women facing evil, Clark is at her best when she is writing about women who rise above personal weaknesses to protect and defend those less capable. Her success lies in part in her ability to understand the worries of wives, mothers, and working women: their fears for their children, their alienation from the men in their lives, their personal insecurities, their vaguely disturbing childhood memories, and their growing awareness of deception and lies beneath people’s smiles. She connects the intimate and personal with broader public concerns to heighten the sense of suspense. Clark, who publishes one or two novels or story collections per year, weaves disparate plot strands into unexpected wholes, often exploring the same theme on multiple levels (for example, providing different degrees and types of betrayals or jealousies). Her strength is in creating vivid scenes that make readers experience apprehension, fear, discovery, and catharsis.

Biography

The daughter of Irish restaurant owner Luke Joseph Higgins and Nora C. (Durkin) Higgins, Mary Higgins grew up in the Bronx and attended Villa Maria Academy and Ward Secretarial School. She wrote her first poem at seven and frightened friends with scary ghost stories. The sudden deaths of her father and her older brother Joe affected her deeply. At seventeen she became a Remington Rand advertising assistant. Creative writing classes at New York University inspired her to join a writing group that became the Adams Round Table and eventually led to five short-story collections. While working as a Pan Am flight attendant (1949-1950), she married long-time friend and airline executive Warren F. Clark. When her husband died in 1964, Clark was left with five children to support. She wrote and produced radio scripts for Robert G. Jennings (1965-1970) while writing in her free time. When her first published book, Aspire to the Heavens: A Biography of George Washington (1969), proved a commercial failure, she turned to the mystery genre. In 1970 she went to work for Aerial Communications, where she served ten years as vice president, partner, and radio programming creative director/producer.

Clark’s publication of Where Are the Children? (1975) earned more than $100,000 in paperback royalties and marked the beginning of her long, successful second career as a mystery writer attuned to childhood fears, mother-child relationships, the traumatic loss of family members, and the spine-tingling fears of women alone in the dark. In 1978 she married attorney Raymond Charles Ploetz and moved to his Minnesota farm but soon had the marriage annulled. She received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Fordham University, graduating summa cum laude in 1979. In 1980 she became chair of the board and creative director of David J. Clark Enterprises in New York. Not until her second thriller, A Stranger Is Watching (1977), earned a $500,000 advance, more than $1 million in paperback rights, and film rights from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did Clark feel she had the financial security she needed to leave Aerial and raise her family in comfort. In 1989 she signed a then-record-breaking $11.4 million contract with Simon & Schuster and in 1992 a $35 million contract.

Clark served as president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1987 and has since served on the board of directors. As chair of the International Crime Writers Congress, she attended a Federal Bureau of Investigation lecture on serial killers using personal ads to entice victims, which became the inspiration for Loves Music, Loves to Dance (1991). Her literary interests have led her to join various authors’ guilds and academies, including the American Irish Historical Society. In 1996 Clark established the Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, which publishes mystery and suspense stories.

In 1996, she married retired chief executive officer John J. Conheeney, whose name she uses in her private life. Their renovated home in Spring Lake, New Jersey, became the setting of On the Street Where You Live (2001). Clark continues to write novels, sometimes with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, with whom she revived the Alvirah and Willy Mehan series by creating several Christmas-themed novels. Clark contributes regularly to periodicals on a wide variety of topics. More than twelve of her works have been filmed.

With more than fifty million books in print, Clark enjoys best-seller status worldwide. Her many awards include the New Jersey Author Award in 1969 for Aspire to the Heavens, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1980 for A Stranger Is Waiting, thirteen honorary doctorates, and the titles of dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, dame of Malta, and dame of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem. In 2000 she was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Analysis

Mary Higgins Clark, whose book titles frequently come from those of songs, builds suspense quickly, with action moving forward rapidly as a sympathetic heroine rescues herself (and others) from a deranged killer. Amid the suspense, Clark often comments on relevant social topics: dishonest fertility specialists (The Cradle Will Fall, 1980), greedy health maintenance organizations (HMOs) profiting at the expense of patients (We’ll Meet Again, 1999), the failures of the federal witness protection program (Pretend You Don’t See Her, 1995), and financial/pharmaceutical conspiracies (The Second Time Around, 2003). In her novels, she typically establishes a chain of responsibility involving blackmail and silence—fear of losing one’s job, intimidation, and pride in knowing secrets—that makes more than one individual culpable.

Clark’s characters are everyday people trapped in frightening situations amid the commonplace: a newlywed who discovers her husband’s terrible secrets, a woman who finds the contractor building her new house is not what he seems, and a grieving stepdaughter who is buried alive. The psychological and philosophical are vital to her creative method. Her heroines may be a photographer and amateur sculptor (Moonlight Becomes You: A Novel, 1996), a Manhattan real estate agent (Pretend You Don’t See Her), the owner of an exclusive boutique (While My Pretty One Sleeps, 1989), a radio psychologist investigating disappearances (You Belong to Me, 1998), or just ordinary homemakers and mothers, but they all undergo a test of strength and prove extraordinary in their ability to endure and overcome adversity. Often they discover links between their private lives and a murderer, always an unquestionably deranged monster, whose evil lies hidden behind a respectable facade (such as the plastic surgeon who puts the beautiful face of a murder victim on patient after patient). A typical Clark heroine is Celia Foster Nolan (No Place Like Home, 2005), who as a child was falsely accused of murdering her parents. Her husband buys her family’s house and presents it to her for her birthday, unaware of its special terrors. She becomes haunted by the past, especially when her parents’ real killer stalks her and her son. A less common protagonist is the serial killer in Nighttime Is My Time (2004), a former geek once tormented by his high school classmates who seeks revenge by targeting members of the popular crowd at his twentieth reunion.

Clark is a master at conveying the back story and relevant facts through dialogue, multiple perspectives, stories within stories, and simultaneous episodes, while maintaining suspense and moving the action forward. Sometimes the suspense comes from uncertainty about the villain’s identity or what the known killer will get away with before the heroine realizes the truth; sometimes there is a countdown to disaster; frequently, Clark leads readers’ attention one way while she slowly builds a set of clues to implicate a far less obvious character. Daddy’s Little Girl (2002) and The Second Time Around experiment with a first-person narrator.

Clark writes about the psychological (personality disorders in Loves Music, Loves to Dance; multiple personalities and childhood sexual abuse in All Around the Town, 1992; a stalker’s mind-set in Nighttime Is My Time), medical science (genetic manipulation and in vitro fertilization in I’ll Be Seeing You; nursing homes plagued by sudden death in Moonlight Becomes You; plastic surgery in Let Me Call You Sweetheart, 1995, and We’ll Meet Again), and household crime (burglaries in Stillwatch, 1984). A political thriller set among the Washington, D.C., elite, Stillwatch depicts two strong women, one modeled on Geraldine Ferraro, while Weep No More, My Lady (1987), with multiple suspects, is a celebrity mystery set at an exclusive spa. Occasionally, Clark’s lifelong interest in the supernatural appears, for example, the ghost of the heroine’s murdered mother in While My Pretty One Sleeps, the haunted house in Remember Me (1994), or the psychic phenomena in Before I Say Goodbye (2000), in every other way a political suspense story. The serial killer who stalks young women in a present-day New Jersey resort town (On the Street Where You Live) believes himself to be the reincarnation of a killer from the past century and plans over a twelve-day period to commit his historical crimes all over again.

Clark’s sources are friends and family, news events, and personal experiences. Her tightly woven plots capture the suspicions that can plague family members facing murder close to home. Her themes include the insidious effects of the past on the present, human frailty (jealousy, greed, arrogance), vulnerability and innocence, the far-ranging effects of violence, abuses of the justice system, the dehumanization of systems supposedly existing for the public weal, the corrupting effect of money and politics, betrayals of trust both personal and professional, and questions of identity.

Where Are the Children?

Clark’s first suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, set in a misty, stormy Cape Cod and inspired by a New York trial of a woman accused of murdering her children, sets the pattern for her future novels in that it features a vulnerable young woman who, in a time of crisis, proves to be a resourceful survivor. Nancy Harmon, although innocent, is freed from certain conviction for gruesomely murdering her two children by a legal technicality. Relocated and remarried but still traumatized seven years later, she is forced to revisit the nightmare when the real killer tries to repeat his crime, abducting and abusing Nancy’s two children from her second marriage. Nancy, confused and terrified, must find the truth: A manipulative murderer with a multiple-personality disorder happily drugged his wife, killed his own children, and plans to murder Nancy’s children. Despite the complicated back story, the novel spans only one day.

A Stranger Is Watching

In A Stranger Is Watching, Clark questions a 1976 Supreme Court ruling permitting the death penalty. She sets her story over a three-day period leading to the eve of the execution of Ronald Thompson, who has been erroneously convicted of murdering Nina Peterson, and sends her heroine journalist Sharon Martin into harm’s way in his defense. Sharon has fallen in love with Nina’s husband, Steve, who is suffering because of his wife’s death and trying to comfort his six-year-old son Neil, who witnessed his mother’s murder. The real killer, a psychopath, takes Sharon and Neil hostage and hides them under Grand Central Station, which he intends to blow up. In a countdown to the execution and explosion, Clark intensifies the terror by shifting the point of view among Sharon, Neil, Steve, the killer, and the third-person narrator.

The Cradle Will Fall

The Cradle Will Fall, a medical thriller inspired by the first test-tube baby, occurs over a week and features the recently widowed Katie DeMaio, an ambitious young prosecutor pathologically fearful of hospitals. When Kate is admitted to Westlake Hospital after a minor driving accident, she sees out her hospital window, amid snow and sleet, a familiar figure hiding a woman’s body in his car. When she discovers the next day that the woman’s death has been declared a suicide, Kate does not believe it, knowing that the dead woman had desperately wanted a child and was six months pregnant. She begins an investigation into the illegal activities of fertility specialists, including insertion of embryos into the wombs of sterile women. The most terrifying event in the novel is when the heroine must undergo surgery in the very hospital where the doctors she is investigating practice.

A Cry in the Night

A Cry in the Night (1982) is a gothic tale set on a remote Minnesota farm and inspired by Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), and Clark’s second marriage. This story depends on the gullibility of Jenny MacParland, a divorced mother of two girls, making ends meet in a fashionable Manhattan art gallery. A Minnesota painter, whose portrait of a beautiful woman seems hauntingly familiar, sweeps Jenny off her feet. Her innocent assumption of this Prince Charming’s goodness and her desire to please prove dangerous to her personal safety. She finds herself trapped in a horrifying world: An exquisite mansion becomes a prison, her life and those of her children are threatened, and the secrets of her husband’s first wife reveal his own dark reality.

Principal Series Characters:

• Alvirah and Willy Mehan are a comic working-class pair of amateur detectives who became free to travel and stumble on mysteries after Alvirah won a lottery. Alvirah has a nose for trouble, which leads her to a kidnapping amid a winter’s storm, a stolen Christmas tree, an abandoned baby, and a mobster-laden cruise.

Bibliography

Clark, Mary Higgins. Kitchen Privileges: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. The title of this memoir refers to the boardinghouse that Clark’s mother ran. The work deals with her childhood influences, her early life, and her first marriage.

De Roche, Linda. Revisiting Mary Higgins Clark: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Updates Peltzer’s earlier work with novels published 1996-2002 and provides plots, characters, thematic analysis, and critical readings. Comprehensive bibliography. Film guide. Indexed.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Essays on over one hundred women writers, including Clark; a useful overview essay on women mystery writers places Clark in the genre. Indexed.

Macdonald, Gina. “We’ll Meet Again.” In Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Vol. 14. New York: Gale Press, 2001. Analyzes the social concerns, themes, characters, techniques, literary precedents, and related titles of this novel. The encyclopedia includes analyses of five other Clark novels.

Peltzer, Linda C. Mary Higgins Clark: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Analyzes Clark’s early work, suspense conventions, and literary/family influences. Indexed.