Mary Higgins Clark was the first suspense writer whose work I fell in love with. I don’t remember quite how I found her books, but it was somewhere around age 10 or 11. Certainly, I’d known her name for a while; the “Queen of Suspense” was an icon of every bookstore, supermarket mass-market paperback section, and library front table.
Her mysteries were fantastically paced, every chapter designed to keep you reading for hours on end. There are twists and plot elements from her books that I still think of decades later. She had a masterful way of interpreting families, both healthy and very broken. Her sense of place added an extra element to every one of her books. Her first mystery, WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN?, took place on Cape Cod. It has been a long time since I last read it, but I can still sense the environment she wrote in that book just thinking of the title.
Higgins Clark had a wonderfully relatively wholesome style. Sure, she could whack someone with the best of them; that’s kind of a prerequisite for success in the genre. But her novels were low on both profanity and sex. I’m not the only one who devoured her books as a teenager. They certainly weren’t cozy mysteries, but they were a fantastic introduction to a genre I very much fell in love with.
So many of her cultural references were spot-on in every book, and even more rewarding if you knew her locale of choice. Her last volumes continued this trend; 2017’s EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE centered on a murder at the iconic spring Met Gala, one of New York City’s top social events. Her choices of setting and plot were very au courant without being dated when you read them years later. Her titles were even thought-out references, based on an iconic song lyric, often from the Great American Songbook or Broadway.
Higgins Clark did, in fact, consider place to be very important in her novels, and one place she often incorporated was her adopted home state of New Jersey. She was born in The Bronx (per her 2002 memoir, KITCHEN PRIVILEGES, one of three places in the world worthy of the prefix “The” alongside The Vatican and The Hague), but made Jersey her home. She felt strongly about the diverse beauty of the Garden State and set 14 of her novels there. In a 2013 interview with The Star-Ledger, she discussed how she made sure to insert this into her books: “Jersey is a beautiful state and I have written at least five books trying to prove that to all of the smart alecks. I set one in Spring Lake to show what a beautiful Victorian town it is. I set one in Ridgewood, one in Mahwah, with the mountains in the background. I set one in Mendham; all to try to show the smart alecks that New Jersey is a beautiful state. I want a medal, as one who continuously writes about how beautiful New Jersey is.” She got about as close as you can to that in 2011 with her induction into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
As a born-and-bred New Jerseyite myself, there was nothing more fun than picking up one of her books and seeing myself dropped into a roman à clef of Spring Lake, Saddle River or Ridgewood. Her house in Spring Lake was near my grandparents’ house, and I’d often bike past it. Once, when I met her at a signing, she extended an invite to come knock on the door if I ever saw the lights on inside. My mother was mortified that I might actually do this; I’m not sure Mary would have minded. 2001’s ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE was set in Spring Lake and sent a buzz through the town that summer. Street names were slightly changed, but she was detail-oriented to make sure that any house numbers in her book didn’t exist in parallel in real life. (I actually asked her about this at the aforementioned signing after spending an afternoon biking around trying to find the settings.) I guess tanking property values with a fictional murder isn’t very neighborly.
We met one other time, when she came to speak at my Genre Fiction class at Fordham University in 2012. She had a huge affinity for Fordham, having earned a degree on nights and weekends to set an example for her children. She remained a strong friend of the University, both personally and financially, funding a chair in the English department. After the event, we all went up to get books signed, and she noticed I was wearing a jacket from the Queen Elizabeth 2; our family had sailed on one of her final voyages a few years prior. She instantly smiled, and we spent several minutes sharing details of her voyages around the world on the QE2. Never mind that neither of us had been on the long-retired ship in many years at that point; she could wax vividly about her favorite spaces onboard. I was amazed, as was everyone else in the room. But would I expect anything less from someone who could write with such a sense of place?
The book world will not be the same without her new volumes gracing shelves in years to come, but she leaves an incredible back catalog that’s ripe to dive into.
