Mary Higgins Clark was born on December 24, 1927. Clark is an author of mystery and suspense novels whose books have been bestsellers almost from the beginning of her career. She came to writing relatively late, publishing her first novel at the age of 40. Her life before then was filled with enough drama and colorful happenings that they might make a fine novel in their own right.

Clark began writing poems and short plays for her friends to perform when she was 7 and started keeping a journal at about the same time. (The first entry: “Nothing much happened today.”)

Her father ran an Irish pub, which provided enough income to support the family comfortably. When the Great Depression hit, the family managed well for a few years. But eventually, more and more customers were unable to pay their bar bills. Clark’s father had to lay off workers and work increasingly long hours to keep the pub open. The stress and long hours may have contributed to his death in 1939.

Clark’s mother had a difficult time finding a job; she was a single mother with no recent work experience, looking for work during the Depression. The family had to take in boarders, and Clark had to move out of her bedroom so that it could be rented out.

She received a scholarship to a Catholic high school, where her teachers encouraged her writing. Clark made her first submission at 16, sending a story to True Confessions magazine; it was rejected. She helped the family pay the bills by working part-time as a hotel switchboard operator.

In 1944, Clark’s older brother, Joseph, graduated from high school and enlisted in the Navy. Six months later, he died of spinal meningitis. The family was devastated by the loss, but the pension his mother received as his survivor was enough that Clark no longer needed to work.

After a year of secretarial school, Clark began working as a secretary in the advertising department of typewriter manufacturer Remington Rand. She took night classes in advertising and was eventually promoted to writing ad copy. The company also occasionally used her as a model in its print advertising. In late 1949, Clark married and left the workforce. She began taking writing classes and joined some of her classmates in a weekly workshop where the members would critique each other’s work. That group continued to meet for almost 40 years. Clark had her first story published in 1956.

Over the next several years, Clark’s husband had several heart attacks. By 1964, he was unable to work, so Clark contacted a friend who worked in radio, thinking that she might be able to write radio scripts. On the day that she learned she’d gotten a job, her husband died of another heart attack, and his mother died at his bedside.

Clark was now a single mother of five children. Magazines were publishing fewer and fewer short stories, and her agent suggested that she should write a novel. She wrote Aspire to the Heavens, a fictionalized telling of the romance between George and Martha Washington. When it was published in 1968, it didn’t sell well—it was “remaindered as it came off the press,” Clark later said—but it gave her the confidence that she could write a novel that was good enough to publish. Aspire to the Heavens was re-released in 2000 as Mount Vernon Love Story (e-book | e-audio | print | audio); it sold much better the second time around.

Clark had always enjoyed writing suspense novels, and set out to write one. Where Are the Children? (e-book | e-audio | print) sold to Simon & Schuster for $3,000. It was released in 1975, and became so big a bestseller that Clark’s next novel, A Stranger Is Watching (e-book | e-audio | print), sold for $1.5 million.

And for 45 years, Clark has been a regular presence on the best-seller list. She’s published more than 50 novels and several collections of short stories. She’s written a memoir, Kitchen Privileges (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), and two picture books for children, Ghost Ship (print) and The Magical Christmas Horse (e-book | print), both illustrated by Wendell Minor.

In 1987, Clark introduced her first series characters. Alvirah and Willy are a couple who become amateur detectives after winning the lottery. They are relatively minor characters when they first appear in Weep No More, My Lady (e-book | e-audio | print), but they take center stage in Plumbing for Willy (e-audio) and the books that follow. Several of the Alvirah and Willy books are set at Christmas, and written in collaboration with Clark’s daughter, Carol Higgins Clark, whose own series character, private eye Regan Reilly, appears in them. The first of these Christmas collaborations in Deck the Halls (e-book | print | audio).

Clark created another recurring character in 2014’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin (e-book | e-audio | print | audio). Laurie Moran is the producer of a TV true crime show called Under Suspicion. She’s now appeared in six novels, all but the first written in collaboratin with Alafair Burke.

Clark’s novels have been translated into several languages, and she is among the most popular mystery writers in France. Several of her novels have been adapted for French television; three of those TV-movies are gathered in The Mary Higgins Clark Collection.

Also This Week

December 24, 1809

Kit Carson was born. Carson was a frontiersman of the mid-19th century who played important roles in the westward expansion of the United States. He served as a guide on John C. Fremont’s expeditions along the Pacific coast. His dealings with the Indian tribes of the American west were complicated; he led Civil War campaigns against the Apache and Navajo peoples, but later in life, was a strong advocate for fairer treatment of the Ute and Jicarilla Apache tribes by the US government. Hampton Sides’s biography of Carson is called Blood and Thunder (e-book | e-audio | print | audio).

December 24, 1886

Michael Curtiz was born. Curtiz was one of the great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. He was born in Hungary and didn’t come to Hollywood until he was 38, having already directed more than 60 movies in Europe. He made another 102 in America, working in every genre – swashbucklers, musicals, drama, comedy, romance, crime stories. He was nominated for the Best Director Oscar five times, winning it for Casablanca. The biography Michael Curtiz (e-book | print) is written by Alan K. Rode; Noah Isenberg discovers the history of a movie in We’ll Always Have Casablanca (e-book | e-audio | print).

December 26, 1933

Carroll Spinney was born. From 1969 until his retirement in 2018, Spinney performed as Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street. The role of Big Bird was physically demanding, requiring Spinney to hold his right arm over his head in order to manipulate the neck and mouth of the 8-foot-tall character. Spinney received four Daytime Emmy Awards for his work, and at the 2006 Daytime Emmy Awards was given the Lifetime Achievement Award. His life and career are the subject of the 2014 documentary I Am Big Bird.

December 27, 1969

Sarah Vowell was born. Vowell is a historian, writer, and occasional actress whose books explore American history with a sense of humor. In Unfamiliar Fishes (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), she looks at 1898, the year when the United States annexed Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico; The Wordy Shipmates (e-book | e-audio | print | audio) looks at the conflicts between different groups of Puritan colonists in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.