Halfway through my interview with Mary Higgins Clark in her Central Park South pied à terre, an earring slips out of her ear and clatters onto the coffee table. Clark, sitting directly underneath a portrait of herself, leans past the glass of wine she’s nursed throughout our conversation to fetch the errant piece of jewelry. “These stupid pierced ears keep closing! I have them re-pierced but it never stays put. Such a damn nuisance!”
That brief break, after which we return to talking about her first suspense novel, published 40 years ago this August, is apt for several reasons.
Clark, when faced with a problem, moves to fix it quickly. She keeps her exclamations strictly PG-13, just like the characters in the novels that have sold more than 3m copies around the world annually. Finally, she is efficient, a quality that will serve her well for the rest of the year.
When we first meet on a snowy winter’s day, Clark isn’t certain how many books she would publish in 2015. She’d spent part of the morning on the phone with Michael Korda, her editor on all but the first two books, trying to untangle knotty plot threads one chapter at a time (Korda typically edits Clark’s manuscripts in 15- to 20-page increments.)
The number turns out to be three: Death Wears a Beauty Mask, a collection of stories and a novella published at the end of April; her annual suspense novel The Melody Lingers On, coming 23 June; and All Dressed in White, the second in the Under Suspicion series she writes with Alafair Burke.
It’s a heavy load for the majority of commercial fiction writers, almost inconceivable for those in more rarefied literary climes. Yet Clark’s most productive year is also the year she will turn 88.
Throughout her career, Clark’s hallmarks have always been present: the amiable, early-30s woman – this time a widow with a young child, who lands in personal turmoil through little fault of her own but has enough gumption to see her way out of it. Clark loves to adopt multiple viewpoints from characters with clearly defined conflicts, and her pacing so precise as to be diamond-cut. She likes wicked late-game twists, and a satisfying resolution.
Like many of my peers, I read and loved Clark’s novels in high school. They presented plausible situations involving good-hearted people that managed to scare the hell out of me. Then I moved on to other, newer, writers.
When I started studying the most notable female suspense writers of the 20th century more seriously, I discovered out an important pattern. Every generation loves a story of a woman in distress, dating all the way back to the Brontë sisters. Mary Roberts Rinehart spun that sentiment with The Circular Staircase in 1908. Mignon Eberhart ruled that corner between the wars, while alongside her writers like Daphne du Maurier, Charlotte Armstrong, and Mary Stewart added more sophisticated storytelling layers.
What Clark did, starting with Where Are the Children? in 1975, was add an urban urgency taken straight from tabloid headlines. That novel was based on the story of Alice Crimmins, accused and convicted of murdering her children in Queens half a century ago, a case Clark followed as it unfolded.
As a young housewife in New Jersey’s Bergen County, Clark habitually attended murder trials (she now says “I can’t do that anymore, because I’d get recognized”.) She can still quote passages verbatim from “Will Justice Triumph?” crime columns, syndicated across the country in the 1940s and 1950s. Even now Clark never misses the morning New York Post, looking for just the right story that will spur her next book idea.
Her unerring, almost instinctive sense of pace attracted fans as lofty as David Foster Wallace, who taught Where Are the Children? in his college classes and repeated praised her suspense skills. But by leaving sex, violence and profanity strictly offstage – writing, as Clark describes several times to me, about “very nice people whose lives are invaded” – Clark attracts a readership ranging in age from 10 to 90.
“She’s writing the Great American Standards of suspense novels,” Clark’s publisher, Jonathan Karp, told me. “She’s singing in a major key and playing big meaty chords and people are applauding at the end of the song.”
Unlikable heroines are in vogue, and the success of books like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and Luckiest Girl Alive ensures it will stay that way for some time. Clark’s overtly likable heroines, a standard from which she hasn’t deviated from in four decades and never will, seem strangely subversive as a result.
So, too does another distinct Clark trait: loyalty. She has published all of her books with Simon & Schuster. In France, where Clark is a perennial bestseller, Albin Michel has also published her entire body of work.
I ask Korda what’s changed in their 40 years working together. “That’s awkward because in a way, nothing has. Mary bounces ideas off me and I tend to bounce ideas off of her until something clicks. Mary’s great genius is that she writes for but also thinks like her readers, and predicts what her readers will accept and what they won’t. Mary is very certain about what they want and what she wants.” The last word is always Clark’s, and, Korda emphasizes, “99.9% of the time she’s right.”
Clark’s generosity towards fans and the mystery community (where she lends her name to an award for the book most resembling her own sensibility) is well-established. The thriller writer Harlan Coben, a friend of Clark’s for more than 15 years, relates a story of what happened when he and Clark once did an event in Germany:
“Our flight got messed up, had to land at another airport, missed our connection, and our luggage got lost. When we finally got to the hotel, our rooms weren’t ready. I was exhausted and exasperated, but Mary smiled through it all, waited patiently on all the lines, kept us all laughing. If a superstar like Mary doesn’t act like a prima donna, how can you?”
All Dressed in White, the third and last book Clark will publish this year, is part of an experiment that seems to be working. When Simon & Schuster asked her, after publishing I’ve Got You Under My Skin last year, to turn it into a series, Clark teamed up with Alafair Burke, part of the newer cohort of female suspense writers.
The Cinderella Murder, published last November, surprised Simon & Schuster by selling at nearly the same clip as one of Clark’s solo novels. I can see why. It’s clearly a Clark novel but there are extra touches and tonal flourishes that resemble Burke’s Manhattan-set novels. “She’s a terrific writer,” Clark says of Burke. “One of her strengths is how good she is with technology.”
In an essay published this spring, Burke described Clark’s working habits: “While one half of her brain contemplates the antagonist’s next terrifying move, the other half imagines how the protagonist will react to her child’s fears. She can recite quotidian details in the lives of every character, whether those facts make it to the page or not.”
Aside from the third Under Suspicion book under contract, Clark will also publish a solo novel in 2016, but precise dates for both books aren’t engraved on the release calendar. “We’re happy to take things book by book,” Karp says.
After so many novels and so many years, is there anything Clark hasn’t done that she has a yen to write? Her answer, to my utter lack of surprise, is in keeping with her nature: “The next novel!”
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