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Article IndexExploring her latest suspense novel, religious convictions and living in New Jersey
BY JOHN ESPOSITO
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
The critically acclaimed writer and proud New Jersey resident, Mary Higgins Clark, is the author of twenty-nine suspense novels. Her books are worldwide bestsellers, with over 100 million sold in the United States alone.
The "Queen of Suspense" chatted recently on a wide range of subjects, including her riveting new blockbuster novel, The Shadow of Your Smile; a 50 year love affair with New Jersey; her devout religious faith; a belief in ESP; Bronx roots; some dark days; a happy and rewarding family life; self-publishing and much more.
JE: Congratulations are in order. Your latest novel, The Shadow of Your Smile, made its debut on the New York Times Best Sellers Fiction list on May 2nd in the number one position.
MHC: That's right. Thank you so much.
JE: This has not been an uncommon occurrence since your initial success in 1975 with Where Are the Children. It must be especially gratifying to know your work continues to be extremely popular.
MHC: Oh, of course it is. I mean, none of us, I think, takes anything for granted. You know, there are so many new writers, so many wonderful new writers. And to continue to hold an audience is very gratifying.
JE: Many of your books' titles, the latest being no exception, carry the names of popular songs from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, made famous by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Vic Damone and Tony Bennett. Do you have a particular affection for the songs from that period and do you personally select the book titles?
MHC: Well, you see what happened was many years ago, I think I only had four or five books out at the time and I was signing yet another contract with Simon and Schuster and my agent said, "Oh for Heaven's sake, they want titles for the next two books," so I just threw in While My Pretty One Sleeps and Weep No More My Lady. Well, Weep No More My Lady became the first one that was a song title and I liked it. Since then I've been using an excerpt from a song, if not a title. And it's worked very well.
JE: With respect to your book cover illustrations, I read somewhere that you utilized one individual to illustrate your very first bestseller and you have used him several times since. Is there collaboration with your various illustrators to depict a specific theme? How does that all work?
MHC: Wendell Minor, who is an illustrator and simply a fine painter, did the cover for Where Are the Children. I credit that cover, that Edward Hopper look of darkness and the small red mitten on the grass as really helping to put that book over. It was both in hard cover and soft cover. That haunting illustration has been something wonderful. And then he did three more of my books. You see, I don't select the illustrator, the Art Department does. That's not my job, if you will. But now, Wendell and I have done two children's books together. One of them came out last year; the next one will come out next year.
JE: Let's discuss your new book, The Shadow of Your Smile. Please explain how you arrived at the underlying premise. You touch upon it briefly in the Acknowledgments section of the book and perhaps you can elaborate further.
MHC: Well, very simply, a year ago in April, my friend, Bishop Paul Bootkoski, who is the Bishop of Metuchen, invited us to a beatification ceremony of a nun, a Carmelite nun, who had started many homes for the aged and infirmed. When the niece of one of the nuns, about ten years ago, was pregnant, she was told that in utero, the sonogram showed the baby was hopelessly deformed. The Carmelite nuns started a crusade of prayer to Mother Angeline McCrory. When the baby was born, she was absolutely normal. She is now eight or nine years old. And that, with a lifetime of service to the aged and infirmed, has had them put Mother Angeline up for beatification. And as a Catholic, I was so impressed by the ceremony that I thought I would absolutely love to see if, within the framework of telling a suspense novel, I could possibly include a situation where it's faith versus miracle. And that became The Shadow of Your Smile.
JE: I believe it's an accurate statement that in addition to your successful writing career, your family and religious faith, specifically Catholicism, are the most important things in your life.
MHC: They are.
JE: On the subject of faith, your heartfelt memoir from 2002, Kitchen Privileges, speaks to the power of prayer. You write how your mother and you prayed continually for your older brother Joseph's recovery from osteomyelitis at age 13, and your prayers were answered. In what other ways has your Catholic faith been such a beacon in your life?
MHC: Well, it has always been a beacon in my life. My mother was a very devout Catholic and, you know, I've always said the Lord loves cheerful saints and Mother was a cheerful saint. My father died, leaving her with three little kids. There is no question that my brother Joseph was her heart. She would have thrown herself literally across the railroad tracks for the three of us, but he was the firstborn son, and he couldn't do enough for her and then he died at 18. He was spared at 13 and died at 18. She at least had that other five years, but six months later she had a graduation party for me from high school. She took off the heavy black dress and had a black and white dress on. She said Joseph had a party last year and you will have one now. So, she lived faith, even when her heart was broken.
JE: I came across a wonderful article you had written about your mother, Nora, for Woman's Day magazine in 1989. She was a terrific lady by all accounts.
MHC: My Wild Irish Mother (laughter). You don't know how many people said, "Are you sure you weren't writing about my mother?"
JE: As a mystery and suspense writer, some of the topics that you've dealt with include ESP, psychic phenomena, parapsychology; schizophrenia, in vitro fertilization, human cloning and reincarnation. Have you ever felt at odds with the Catholic Church, given some of these subjects may cross the line as to Church teachings?
MHC: I didn't know when I wrote about in vitro that it was considered a "no, no" by the church. I frankly didn't know that. I mean when a husband and wife try to conceive a child, we are not talking about a mail order donor sort of thing. But when a husband and wife try to conceive a child, I would have thought it would be perfectly okay, to use whatever medicine they could. But as far as psychic, I think some people have a glimpse into the future. I do believe that. My own mother, for example, as I think I mention it in Kitchen Privileges, would get a feeling about someone and God help that someone if something were to happen. In fact, my uncle used to breeze in and out of town; he always traveled. He'd stay out of touch and then he'd be in touch and see everybody. He never married. The girl he was going to marry was buried in her wedding dress a week before the wedding in the 1917 flu. But mother just said, "I have a feeling about Jenny. Something's happened to her." I said, "Oh for God's sake, Mother." Well, she went to the different hospitals to see if there was any record. And my uncle had had a stroke. He must have been mugged because he had no identification. He was found sitting in front of the house where they had lived for many years in Manhattan and he was about to be buried in Potters Field. That was another one of the family stories.
And then there was the picture of my brother, Joseph, in his dress blues, after the six week boot camp. My mother got the picture and threw it down and said, "He has death in his eyes." He was dead six months later from spinal meningitis, which he contracted while in radio school in California. He was about to be shipped out to the Pacific. Well, it was a heartbreak. So I do think that some people have a glimpse into the future. But I don't believe in psychics, as such, you know, go to a psychic and they'll tell you what to do. I've taken courses for the sake of writing, many years ago, and it was fascinating.
JE: How then did you come upon writing mystery and suspense? Was it something that you were interested in from the time you were a young writer?
MHC: I didn't realize the first two short stories that I sold were suspense stories. It was only because I had an idea for them that I wrote suspense stories. One of them was called, Stowaway and the other, Deadline for Paradise. I didn't realize that I was gravitating toward suspense. I wrote the usual "boy meets girl" stories that Good Housekeeping and Redbook were printing in the fifties and early sixties and then the magazine market simply disappeared. There were no magazines that had fiction in them. They were all fact. Look at them. Try to find...all right, the New Yorker does two or three, totally different. I mean they do literary short stories. They don't do the ones we wrote in the fifties.
JE: It's disappointing that the short story no longer carries the weight it once did in the book publishing industry. If a successful novelist such as yourself or Stephen King, for example, chooses to write a book of short stories, it will undoubtedly sell well, but for the unknown writer, it would be very difficult to earn a living.
MHC: Absolutely. Very difficult. There just isn't the market. Maybe it will come back. I hope so.
JE: Hopefully, its popularity will return some day.
MHC: I had been widowed (in 1964) and started writing radio shows for a living. And that was when I wrote a series called, Portrait of a Patriot. Each day it was a different patriot. Four minute profiles of famous people. "He was the tailor from Tennessee who became President of the United States. Do you know who he is?" And when I finally did George Washington, I think it was something like, "At 16 his mother said, ‘Unpack your bags, you are not going to sea.' Do you know who he is?"
JE: I suspect that the Washington profile written for the radio show provided you with the incentive to write your first book in 1968, a quasi-biographical novel, titled Aspire to the Heavens: A Portrait of George Washington (reissued as Mount Vernon Love Story in 2002). The book discusses George's affection for Sally Cary and later, his love affair with Martha Custis, whom as most Americans know, he married. It's interesting that this introductory novel is grounded in historical romance, a quite different genre then mystery and suspense, which proved to be the venue that propelled you to the ranks of best selling author.
MHC: I became so intrigued by George Washington that I thought, "We don't know that man. We don't understand that man." I always thought he married an older woman for her money because you see the pictures of them with young children. Those were her grandchildren, not the children. She was older, eight months older. She was 27 to his 26.
JE: Were you able to dispel rumors that Washington had an intimate relationship with Sally Cary outside his marriage?
MHC: Oh, Sally Cary Fairfax was his best friend's wife. When he was 16, she taught him how to dance. Washington probably always had a crush on her, his first love. But there was never a relationship there. Sally was devoted to her husband, George Fairfax. And they were best of friends with George and Martha for 20 years before Sally Fairfax and her husband moved to England to try to dissuade the British from the Revolutionary War. And he was an heir to Lord Fairfax over there.
