Mary Higgins Clark

Mary Higgins Clark (born December 24, 1927, Bronx, New York, U.S.—died January 31, 2020, Naples, Florida) was an American mystery and suspense writer who for more than four decades was a fixture on best-seller lists.

Higgins began writing poetry at the age of six. She kept diaries throughout her life and credited her entries as the inspiration for some of her story ideas. Challenges in her early life—notably the death of her father, which left her middle-aged mother to provide for the family of four—had a significant influence on her portrayal of female characters as innovative and resilient. She postponed college in favor of attending secretarial school in order to get an office job, but after three years of working at an advertising agency, she became (1949) a flight attendant with Pan American World Airways. Her experience aboard the final flight into Czechoslovakia before it was cut off behind the Iron Curtain inspired her first published short story, “Stowaway” (1956).

After leaving her job to marry William Clark in 1949, she focused on writing short stories while raising a family. Following the death of her husband in 1964, she penned radio scripts to support her five children until a mentor encouraged her to try writing novels. Clark’s debut attempt, Aspire to the Heavens: A Biography of George Washington (1968), was unsuccessful. (It was rereleased in 2002 as Mount Vernon Love Story.) However, her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children? (1975), was an immediate success and led to a series of multimillion-dollar contracts with publisher Simon & Schuster. Clark became known as the “Queen of Suspense,” and her later novels included A Stranger Is Watching (1977), While My Pretty One Sleeps (1989), We’ll Meet Again (1999), Daddy’s Gone a Hunting (2013), and I’ve Got My Eyes on You (2018). Several of Clark’s novels and stories were adapted into films.

Clark also penned a memoir, Kitchen Privileges (2002), and coauthored a series of Christmas-themed mysteries with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark. With Alafair Burke, she cowrote the Under Suspicion mystery series, which centers on a fictional television program that re-creates real unsolved murder cases, using individuals who were originally affected by those crimes in the hope of solving them. In addition, Clark penned the Alivrah and Willy series, which focuses on the mystery-solving duo of a lottery winner and her plumber husband.

Among the many honors that Clark received were the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (1980), membership (1997) in the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, and induction (2000) as a Grand Master of the Edgar Allan Poe Awards by the Mystery Writers of America. A devout Roman Catholic, she was awarded the papal honor of being named Dame of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great. Beginning in 2001, Simon & Schuster sponsored an annual award for suspense-fiction writers in Clark’s name.