Mary Higgins Clark — often called "the Queen of Suspense" — began her writing career, oddly enough, with a biographical novel about George Washington, published in 1969 by Meredith Press. The title was "Aspire to the Heavens," the family motto of Washington's mother.
Clark pronounced the title "a dumb one and my fault," during a telephone interview from her home in New Jersey. "It appeared next to the Bible and Norman Vincent Peale in the spiritual section of bookstores, and it went nowhere. Everyone thought it was a prayer book."
Now, Clark's first book has been republished by Simon & Schuster, but under a new title, "Mount Vernon Love Story," and she calls it her "little 'Cinderella' book." She says she did primary research on the book, got the historical events accurate, "then I took it upon myself to decide what George and Martha said to each other."
Born and raised in New York, Clark comes from Irish descendants, one of the reasons she thinks she is "a natural storyteller — every writer has to be." She is the type who easily holds forth at a party and keeps other guests entertained.
She says she's "comfortable speaking in lectures," as she will do on Saturday, Sept. 21, when she delivers the keynote address of the League of Utah Writers' Fall Roundup at the Salt Lake Airport Hilton. Go online to www.luwrite.com for details.
The odds were stacked heavily against Clark becoming a famous writer. After high school, she went to secretarial school, then worked in an advertising agency and later as a flight attendant. In 1950, she married Warren Clark, who was nine years her senior. Soon after her marriage, she started writing short stories, but it took six years and 40 rejection slips before her first published work appeared in Extension Magazine; she was paid $100.
"The joke was that my husband was supporting an indigent writer," Clark said.
In 1964, she was left a widow when her husband had a heart attack, so she went to work writing radio scripts. But she "missed the printed word so desperately" that soon she was rising early each morning to work on her first book from 5-7 a.m.
"Where Are the Children?" her first suspense novel, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1975. Since it was a best-seller, it transformed her life. She had learned in a writing class that a writer should ask two questions — "Suppose?" and "What if?" — so she applied that to a real murder case and produced her novel. She earned $3,000 for that one — but her second, "A Stranger is Watching" (1978), brought her a million dollars.
In 1974, she enrolled at Fordham University, where she got a degree in philosophy. "I always missed having a college diploma. So I started when my youngest child was 16. I absolutely loved study. I took a course my first semester on Augustine and I realized that philosophy was a good field for me — it provided a wonderful world view for writing."
Today, she has 27 best-sellers — two of which were written with her author daughter, Carol Higgins Clark. Mary Higgins Clark's memoir "Kitchen Privileges" will appear in November, and her next novel, "The Second Time Around," will be published in April 2003.
When she writes, Clark does so in a highly organized fashion. "I block out scenes, and I do biographies of everyone who is in the book. I know where they went to school and what kind of little kids they were. I know the ending when I start, who did it and why. I keep an up-to-date list of names so that I don't use the same characters I've used in earlier novels."
A steady support group for Clark is her writers group of 15 years, which includes other suspense writers, including Stan Cohen, Susan Isaacs and Peter Straub. "It's good to talk with other people who know exactly what you're talking about. "Although hesitant to name her favorite suspense writers, she can't resist noting that "P.D. James is a marvelous contemporary English writer."
Clark maintains she writes for anyone from the ages of 12 to 95 and gets letters from readers of all ages. "I'm on the approved school-reading lists across the country because I don't include sex and violence. I believe in letting the reader's mind be part of the story. When you had footsteps on the stairs in Hitchcock, you never saw the violence, but it was pretty scary."
That could be one of the reasons she is the most popular fiction writer in France, which Clark calls "a very family-oriented country." But she is disappointed that the "true-blue mystery writers do not consider me one of them. I don't know why, but they've never nominated me for an Edgar."
The Mystery Writers of America did, however, select her to be Grand Master of the Edgar Awards in 2000.
" I love to write," she said. "Writing is an itch I always have to scratch."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com