Mary Higgins Clark was an American mystery novelist. Each of her twenty-seven mystery novels became bestsellers in the United States and several European countries, and they remain in print today, with her first work, Where Are the Children?, in its seventy-fifth printing.
Biographical Summary
Birth
Theresa Eleanor Higgins was born on December 24 , 1927 , the daughter of Irish immigrant Luke Higgins and his wife Nora, who was of Irish descent.
Childhood
Childhood
Clark was born just under nineteen months after her older brother Joseph, and her younger brother Johnny was born three years later. From the time she was a child, Mary was interested in writing, composing her first poem at the age of six and creating short plays for her friends to perform. When Clark turned ten, however, the family began to experience financial problems, as many of her clients were unable to pay their debts. Clark’s father was forced to take several jobs and work long hours, spending very few hours each day at home. The family’s darkest day came in 1939 , when Mary returned home from a religion class to discover that her father had died in his sleep.
Youth
When Clark graduated from Saint Francis Xavier Grammar School, she received a scholarship to continue her studies at Villa Maria Academy, a school run by the nuns of the Congregation of Notre Dame de Montreal . There, the headmistress and other teachers encouraged Clark to perfect her writing, although they were less than pleased when she began spending her class time writing stories instead of paying attention to lessons. At sixteen, Clark made her first attempt at publishing her work, submitting a short story to True Confessions magazine, which was rejected. To help pay the bills, she worked as a switchboard operator at the Shelton Hotel, where she often listened to the conversations of the patrons. One famous guest Clark spied on was Tennessee Williams, but she complained that he never said anything interesting. Despite Clark’s contributions to the family finances, the money her mother earned as a nanny was not enough, so the family lost their home and had to move into a small three-room apartment. When Joseph graduated from high school in 1944 , he immediately enlisted in the Navy both to serve his country during the war and to help his mother pay the bills. Six months after his enlistment, he contracted spinal meningitis and died. Shortly after Joseph’s death, Clark graduated from high school and began attending Wood Secretarial School on a half-scholarship. After completing the course the following year, she accepted a job as a secretary heading the creative department in the in-house advertising division at Remington-Rand. She soon began taking night classes to learn more about advertising and promotion. Her boss noticed her growing talent, as well as Clark’s natural beauty, and he expanded her scope of work to include writing for the company’s catalogs (alongside future novelist Joseph Heller ) and modeling for the company’s brochures alongside the then-unknown Grace Kelly .
Path
She began taking writing courses at New York University and, with some of her classmates, formed a writing workshop in which members would critique each other’s works in progress. The workshop, which continued for nearly forty years, met once a week, and at each meeting two members would each have twenty minutes to present their latest work. The other members would each have three minutes to provide constructive criticism. One of her college professors told the class that they should brainstorm a plot by reading newspapers and asking themselves “Supposing…?” and “What if…” Clark said she still gets a lot of ideas from asking herself that, along with “Why?” For her first college writing assignment, she used this method, summarizing her own experiences in a short story called Stowaway, which is about a flight attendant who finds a stowaway from Czechoslovakia on her plane. Although her professor highly praised her story, Clark was continually frustrated in her attempts to find a publisher. Finally, in 1956 , after six years and forty rejections, Extension Magazine agreed to buy the story for one hundred dollars. While those six years were devoted to her professional career, personally Clark and her husband were very busy. After selling her first short story, Clark began to regularly find publishers for her work. Through the writing workshop she met an agent, Patricia Schartle Myrer, who agreed to work with her. Myrer, who represented Clark for twenty years until her retirement, became such a close friend that Clark named her fifth daughter after her.
His Tales
Clark’s initial contract as a radio scriptwriter required her to write four-minute programs for the series Portrait of a Patriot. Her work was so good that she soon received two more offers of work on other radio series. This experience taught Clark to write cleanly and without adding extraneous details, which is very important for a thriller, since it must hint at the plot in every paragraph. Despite the security offered by her new job, money was tight at first, since she had to support five children ages five to thirteen on her own. For her first Christmas without Warren, Clark’s gifts to her children were personalized poems describing the things she would have liked to buy them. By the late 1960s , the short story market had collapsed. The Saturday Evening Post, which in 1960 had selected Clark’s short story “Beauty Pageant at Buckingham” as one of the ten best of the year, had decided to stop publishing fiction, and many of the popular women’s magazines had decided to focus on self-help articles. Since the stories were failing to find a publisher, Clark’s agent suggested she write a novel. Influenced by her research and her experience on the Portrait of a Patriot series, Clark spent the next three years writing a fictional account of the relationship between George and Martha Washington. The book sold, and although progress was small, it gave Clark confidence that she could complete a longer book and find a publisher. The novel was “sell-out” according to the press, and to make matters worse, four months after the novel was published, Clark’s mother, Nora Higgins, died.
Radio series
During this period, Clark became increasingly frustrated with her boss, and, although two of her children were partially dependent on her for their college education, she quit her job and joined two college friends in starting her own company to write and sell dialogue for radio series. To raise the five thousand dollars she would need to start the business, Clark was forced to pawn her engagement ring; during the eight months it took for the company to become profitable, she received no salary, thus weakening the family finances. Clark continued to write even during these difficult times. Encouraged by her manager to write another book, she returned to the suspense stories she loved as a child and which had helped her achieve success as a short story writer. While she was writing the novel, her younger brother Johnny died, leaving her the only surviving member of the family. To temporarily forget her grief, Clark devoted herself to writing, and soon finished the novel.
Other publications
The novel Where Are the Children? was completed, and Simon & Schuster agreed to buy it for the relatively small sum of three thousand dollars. Three months later, in July 1974 , Clark learned that the copyright to his novel had been sold for one hundred thousand dollars. For the first time in many years, he had no more financial worries. Where Are the Children? became a best-seller and was favorably reviewed. Two years after its publication, Clark sold the publishing rights to his second novel for 1.5 million dollars. As of 2008 , Clark had written twenty-seven suspense novels, which have sold over eighty-five million copies in the United States . All of her suspense novels have been bestsellers, and as of 2008 are still in print, including Where Are the Children?, which is in its 75th printing. In 2001 , the hardcover edition of Way Back was number one on The New York Times hardcover best-seller list , while the paperback version of her novel The Last Goodbye reached number one on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. Her books also rank among the top bestsellers in France , and she has achieved the distinction of being named a Chevalier de la Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 2000. She has also been honored in France with the Grand Prix de l’Écrit ( 1980 ) and the Deauville Literary Film Festival Prize ( 1999 ).
The Queen of Suspense
Known as “The Queen of Suspense,” Clark has been called a “master of intrigue” who has the ability to slowly build tension while making the reader think everyone is to blame. In her novels, the protagonists are strong, independent young women who find themselves in the middle of a problem that they must solve with their own courage and intelligence. The heroines are depicted as real people, who make sensible decisions, and who make readers think “this could have happened to me, or my daughter.” Clark’s books are written for adults, but because of her decision not to include explicit sex or violence in her stories, they have become popular with children ages twelve and up.
Predictions
Many of the books involve crimes involving children or telepathy. While Clark knew that there are people who claim to be psychics who are just fakes, she believed she had met others with true supernatural powers. Clark’s mother, looking at a picture of her eighteen-year-old son dressed in his new Navy uniform, told her daughter, “He’s got death in his eyes,” and the young man died shortly afterward. A psychic Clark visited while writing her second novel, Where Are the Children?, told her she would be very famous and make a lot of money. Although she laughed at the prediction at the time, the following week her novel hit the best-seller list and sold the movie rights soon after, truly boosting her career.
Personal Life
At the end of her year as a flight attendant, on December 26 , 1949 , Mary happily gave up her career and married Warren Clark. Their first daughter, Marilyn, was born nine months after their wedding, and Warren Jr. was born thirteen months later. Their third child, David, was born two years after his brother. Two months after Clark sold her story, her fourth child was born, a girl named Carol after the heroine of her mother’s story. In 1959 , Warren Clark was diagnosed with severe angina, and, although he curtailed his activities following doctor’s orders, he suffered three heart attacks over the next five years, each time returning from the hospital in a worse state. After the final heart attack in 1964 it was realized that Warren would not be able to work again, so Mary called a friend who wrote radio dialogue to see if there was any chance of her working there. The day she accepted the job of writing for the radio segment Portrait of a Patriot, Warren suffered a fatal heart attack. His visiting mother collapsed beside him in bed after discovering her son had died. In one night, Clark lost both her husband and her mother-in-law.
Novels
- Where are the children? ( 1975).
- A stranger is watching ( 1978).
- The cradle will fall ( 1980).
- A cry in the night ( 1982).
- Stillwatch ( 1984).
- Don’t cry anymore, my lady (Weep no more my lady, 1987).
- While my pretty one sleeps (1989).
- The Anastasia syndrome and other stories ( 1989).
- He likes music, he likes to dance (Loves music, loves to dance, 1991).
- Chased all around the town (All around the town, 1992).
- Mystery at the clinic (I’ll Be Seeing You, 1993).
- Remember me (1994).
- Alvirah and Willy’s Investigations (The Lottery Winner: Alvirah & Willy Stories, 1994)
- I can’t forget your face (Let me call you sweetheart, 1995).
- Death on the Cape ( 1992).
- Silent Night ( 1995).
- Pale as the moon (Moonlight Becomes You, 1996)
- My dear Sunday (My gal Sunday, 1996)
- Witness in the shadows (Pretend You Don’t See Her, ( 1997).
- The Stolen Star (All through the night, 1998).
- Forever mine (You Belong to me, 1998).
- Lost in her memory (We’ll Meet Again, 1999).
- The last goodbye (Before I Say Good-bye, 2000)
- Kidnapping in New York (Deck the Halls, 2000)
- The secret of the night (Daddy’s Little Girl, 2002).
- With the right to kitchen (Private Kitchen, 2000).
- On the Street Where You Live ( 2001)
- Last Chance (He Sees You When You’re Sleeping, 2001).
- The Power of Deception (The Second Time Around, 2004)
- Hidden in the shadows (Nightime Is My Time, 2005).
- In Self Defense (No Place Like Home, 2005)
- Two Little Girls in Blue ( 2006).
- The same song (I Heard That Song Before, 2007).
- Where Are You Now? ( 2008)
- Dashing Through the Snow (with daughter Carol Higgins Clark, 2008).
- Just Take My Heart (with daughter Carol Higgins Clark, 2009 ).
- The Shadow of Your Smile ( 2010)
- Blood Lies ( 2011).