Facts about Mary Clark
Mary Higgins Clark Biography
A giantess of modern suspense fiction, Mary Higgins Clark was the author of the novels A Stranger is Watching (1978), A Cry in the Dark (1982) and Nighttime is My Time (2004).
Clark’s specialty was Hitchcockian suspense, light on sex and violence but heavy on regular folks swept up in dastardly crimes and lurking terror.
Clark was raised by her mother in The Bronx; her father died when she was 10. She went to secretarial school and spent a year as a Pan Am stewardess before marrying a family friend, Warren Clark.
She took writing classes at New York University, and when her husband died of a heart attack in 1964, Clark supported their five children by writing for radio.
Her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children? (1975), was a surprise bestseller.
By the 1990s she had written a dozen more bestsellers and was being paid $12 million per book. She wrote over 50 novels in all, many of them with titles taken from song lyrics, including I’ll Be Seeing You (1993), Silent Night (1995), and No Place Like Home (2005).
Clark’s last novel was Kiss the Girls and Make Them Cry, published in 2019.
Extra credit
Her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark, is the authoer of the Regan Reilly series of suspense novels… Mary Higgins Clark went to college late; she graduated from Fordham University in 1979 with a degree in philosophy… She married John J. Conheeney, retired CEO of Merrill Lynch Futures, in 1996. Her first published book was Aspire to the Heavens, a 1960 novel about George Washington.