Writer Loves Getting Down To Details In Suspense Novels

Mary Higgins Clark loves sweating the details.

She’ll call the White House to find out what color gloves the waiters wear at state dinners (it’s up to the first lady), ask the Coast Guard where a body dumped off Monomoy Island near Cape Cod would most likely wash up (Martha’s Vineyard), or consult with a plastic surgeon about shards of glass ground into the skin (“don’t say it didn’t penetrate the dermis, say the glass didn’t penetrate deeply,” the doctor advised her. “If it didn’t penetrate the dermis, there’s no need to go to a plastic surgeon.”)

“I love working the details,” the doyenne of American suspense novels says over iced tea in her Washington hotel room. “You don’t want anyone else doing it for you. I really get so mad when writers don’t pay attention to the details.”

In the course of an hourlong conversation that runs the gamut from her Irish Catholic upbringing to the plot of her next book, Clark, 63, shrugs off attempts to analyze what makes her one of America’s most successful mystery writers. In fact, she seems not overly enthusiastic about her work until the subject turns to her knack for detail. Then her voice grows louder. Her eyes widen. Her hands strike the air for emphasis.

You can talk about what makes people buy my books all you want, her manner says, or what separates me from the thousands of other mystery/suspense writers struggling to find an audience. But I’d rather talk about the obstetrician who insisted an embryo is not “implanted in” the mother’s womb, but rather “transferred to.”

Clark could easily fill the role of Jessica Fletcher if Angela Lansbury ever got tired of TV’s “Murder, She Wrote.” With her ladylike suit and soft brown hair piled high atop her head, she looks better suited to an afternoon tea than a murder scene.

She speaks with a Bronx accent that sounds as if it spent a few years at finishing school. And she’s gracious to a fault, particularly when it comes to her readers. At book signings, which invariably attract hundreds of fans, she tries to personalize each autograph, even if it’s just adding a stick-figure caricature of herself.

Apparently, that devotion is paying off.

For almost 20 years, the New York native has been turning out best sellers with almost clocklike regularity. A million copies of her latest novel, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” have already been printed - and it wasn’t even released until Monday. Under a 1992 contract with Simon & Schuster, she earns $1 million per book.

Not bad for a secretarial school graduate and former stewardess who turned to full-time writing only after her husband, airline executive Warren F. Clark, died unexpectedly in 1964 and left her to raise five children. Her first book, a biographical novel based on the life of George and Martha Washington, was published in 1969 - and relegated immediately to the remainder bins.

Her next effort, a mystery/suspense novel titled “Where Are the Children?” for which Clark was paid $3,000, was a different matter altogether.

In it, a mother wrongly convicted of killing her two young children gets out of prison and remarries, only to have her children from that second marriage vanish mysteriously. After the paperback rights were sold for $100,000 (the book has since gone through more than 70 printings), she turned out novel No. 2, “A Stranger is Watching.” That one made her a millionaire, and neither she nor her fans have looked back.

“I’m really very grateful,” she says. “I know so many writers who get beautifully reviewed, and nothing happens. It’s very discouraging. One of my friends - she’s older - she said to me, ‘Mary, I’ve written 26 books, every one of them beautifully reviewed, and there isn’t one of them in print.’ That hurts. That really does hurt.”

Clark is largely unfamiliar with that sort of pain. Her novels have initial printings of a million, putting her a notch below the rarefied air breathed by the Grishams of the world but still in pretty exclusive company. Even her older books are printed 100,000 at a time.

And while she’s hardly a darling of critics - most seem to regard her as a lightweight who does what she does well enough but without a lot of substance or flair - Clark has avoided the savagery with which other high-profile authors such as Tom Clancy are sometimes attacked. She just keeps on writing her books and watching as a million or so readers gobble them up.

She can’t really say why. Sure, breakneck pacing helps. Certainly, it doesn’t hurt that her chapters are rarely more than two or three pages long. Of course, people appreciate her attention to detail.

Asked what makes her a good writer, Clark replies without hesitation.

“It’s a gift. I mean, I can’t sing a note. If I had Enrico Caruso to teach me to hit middle-C on key, it would never happen. But I have a gift for storytelling. That was what I was given at the cradle. Can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t sew, but can tell a story.”

She understands that people connect with her books for different reasons. For some, they provide entertainment - a rush of adrenalin as the heroine tries to save herself, or maybe a feeling of satisfaction as they try to figure out the mystery before the characters do. But for others, Mary Higgins Clark books are more than just momentary diversions.

“I have people write to me to say, ‘Your book got me through such a hard time.’ One woman said, ‘My husband had open heart surgery. We didn’t know if he would make it. I was sitting for hours, and I was just reading your book.”’

Clark makes no bones about writing for the masses. She eschews graphic sex and violence, a decision that not only jibes with her own sensibilities (“I like Hitchcock pictures better than blow-‘em-up-Charlie pictures. I think the subtlety is more interesting), but also has helped land her books on hundreds of high school reading lists. That, too, plays no small part in her popularity.

“I’m on the reading list from age 12,” she says with a sort of am-I-the only-writer-who-understands-this? emphasis. “I have three, and even four, generations of readers.”

“I was at a book signing the other day, and this one lady was so sweet,” Clark says, pausing to recall the woman’s exact words. “She came up to me and said, ‘I go to all the garage sales looking for your books.’ “

Clark tells the story, smiles a smile that reveals the crow’s feet around her eyes (one of the few outward signs of her 63 years) and laughs a hearty Bronx laugh. It’s the laugh of a woman who is successful enough to appreciate the readers who don’t add to her royalty checks just as much as those who do.