Before I Say Goodbye

  Wait ’til the sun shines, Nellie,

  When the clouds go drifting by . . .

  They have drifted by, Nell thought.

  We will be happy, Nellie . . .

  Sweethearts you and I . . .

  “You bet we will,” Dan whispered.

  So wait ’til the sun shines, Nellie, bye and bye.

  The song ended, and the crowd roared its approval. In the ballroom, Nell’s campaign manager grabbed the microphone. “The sun is shining!” he yelled. “We elected the president we wanted, the senator we wanted, and now, the congresswoman we wanted!” He began to chant: “We want Nell! We want Nell!”

  Hundreds of voices joined him in the chant.

  “Come on, Congresswoman MacDermott. They’re waiting for you,” Mac said, urging her toward the door.

  He took her arm and steered her, while Dan and Liz and Gert all fell in step behind them.

  “Now, Nell, the first thing I’d do if I were you . . .” Mac began.

  Mary Higgins Clark Talks About

  Her Life and Work

  • Communication with the dead is a theme in your new novel, Before I Say Good-Bye. Do you believe in this possibility?

  “I have an open mind on the subject.”

  • How does the title reflect the plot?

  “Nell McDermott, a young woman planning to run for Congress, is remorseful over a bitter quarrel with her husband, an architect, before his sudden death. Though skeptical, she responds to a message from a medium claiming to be his channel.”

  • Corruption in the building industry—bid rigging and bribery—is an integral part of the story. How could you describe these practices with such realism?

  “All my novels are based on real-life themes, on which I do extensive research.”

  • The main protagonist in Before I Say Good-Bye, Nell McDermott, has the gift of extrasensory perception. How is this manifested?

  “As a child, she had felt her parents’ and grandmother’s presence at the very moment they died.”

  • You vividly describe Nell being caught in a riptide in Hawaii and her parents’ voices guiding her back to shore. Were you ever in a riptide?

  “Yes, with my husband on a family holiday in Hawaii. In our case, though, it wasn’t hearing voices, but my sons who rescued us.”

  • It has been said that everyone has the innate capacity for extrasensory perception, that we could all cultivate it by listening to our intuition. Do you have any personal experience in this area?

  “My mother was very intuitive. My brother was in the military service. One day, she looked at a photograph he had recently sent and said, ‘I see death in his eyes.’ Six weeks later, he died at the age of eighteen.”

  • Your books are worldwide bestsellers. What is the key to your popularity?

  “Readers identify with my characters. I write about ordinary people whose lives are suddenly altered by an unforeseen event or encounter.”

  • How would you characterize your heroines?

  “As strong, attractive women who respond to a crisis with intelligence and courage.”

  • When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?

  “I knew it as a child. The first thing I wrote was a poem, when I was seven. I still have it. It’s pretty bad, but my mother thought it was beautiful and made me recite it for everyone who came in. I am sure the captive audience was ready to shoot me, but that kind of encouragement nurtures a budding talent. From the time I was seven, I also kept diaries. I can read them now and look back at what I was like at different ages. I still keep diaries; they are a great help to my novels. No one has seen them—they are locked in a trunk.”

  • What early experiences influenced you?

  “I grew up in the Bronx, where my father was the owner of Higgins Bar and Grille. When I was ten years old, I had a terrible shock. Coming home from early Mass one morning, I found a crowd of neighbors outside the house. My father had died in his sleep. When I had said good-night to my father, I didn’t know it was for the last time. His sudden death jolted me into awareness of the fragility of life. My mother went on to raise me and my two brothers alone.

  “My mother’s example taught me to be resilient, resourceful and through the ups and downs of life to keep a sense of humor.”

  • How did your father’s death influence the course of your life?

  “Our whole existence changed. My mother tried to get a job, but at that time it was practically impossible for women in late middle-age to return to the job market. She took baby-sitting jobs and, while I was in high school, I worked as a baby-sitter and switchboard operator. After graduating from high school, I went to secretarial school, so I could get a job and help with the family finances.”

  • So you had to sacrifice your college education?

  “Only postpone it. I went to college after my children were grown and I was already an established writer. In 1979, I graduated from Fordham University at Lincoln Center summa cum laude with a B.A. in philosophy. To celebrate, I gave myself a graduation party. The card read: ‘This invitation is 25 years overdue—help prove it’s not too late.’ ”

  • What happened in the years before you became a professional writer?

  “After completing secretarial school, I worked for a couple of years in an advertising agency. Then, one day, a friend—a Pan Am stewardess—spoke seven words that changed my life: ‘God, it was beastly hot in Calcutta.’ I decided that I, too, wanted to see the world and signed up as a Pan Am stewardess. My run was Europe, Africa and Asia. I was in a revolution in Syria and on the last flight into Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain went down. I flew for a year and then got married to Warren Clark, a neighbor, on whom I had a crush since I was sixteen.”

  • When did you start your writing career?

  “After I was married, I signed up for a writing course at New York University. There, I got advice from a professor which has always served me well. He said: ‘Write about what you know. Take a dramatic incident with which you are familiar and go with it.’ I thought of my experience on the last flight to Czechoslovakia and gave my imagination free rein. ‘Suppose,’ I reflected, ‘the stewardess finds an eighteen-year-old member of the Czech underground hiding on the plane as it is about to leave.’ The story was called ‘Stowaway.’ It took six years and forty rejection slips before I sold it to Extension magazine in 1956 for a hundred dollars. I framed that first letter of acceptance.”

  • You were widowed at an early age, with five young children. Did that discourage you from pursuing your goal?

  “No, on the contrary. To help fill the gap, I decided to concentrate on writing. My children ranged in age from thirteen down to five. Because of his heart condition, Warren wasn’t insurable, so I had to work. Just a few hours before he died of a heart attack, I had called a friend who did radio script writing. She had often asked me to join her company in writing for radio and I began writing radio shows. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to write books.”

  • How did you find time to write books while raising five children and holding a job?

  “When my children were young, I used to get up at five and write at the kitchen table until seven, when I had to get them ready for school. For me, writing is a need. It’s the degree of yearning that separates the real writer from the ‘would-bes.’ Those who say ‘I’ll write when I have time, when the kids are grown up or when I have a quiet place to work,’ will probably never do it.”

  • What are your children doing at present?

  “My daughter, actress-writer Carol Higgins Clark, is the author of four suspense novels, Decked, Snagged, Iced and Twanged, published by Warner Books and co-author of Deck the Halls, our first joint writing venture, published by Simon & Schuster and Scribner in November 2000. Her next suspense novel, Fleeced, will be published by Scribner in the summer of 2001. My daughter Marilyn is a superior court judge and my daughter Patty an executive assistant at the Mercantile Exchange. My son Warren, a
lawyer, is a municipal court judge; my son David is president of Celebrity Radio, producing syndicated programs.”

  • What was your first book?

  “A biographical novel about George Washington, Aspire to the Heavens, inspired by a radio series I was then writing called Portrait of a Patriot, vignettes about presidents. Published by Meredith Press in 1969, it is currently available in audio online and as an ebook. It will be reissued in 2001 in a special hardcover edition by Historic Mount Vernon with a new title, Mount Vernon Love Story.”

  • What made you turn to the field of mystery and suspense?

  “Write what you like to read—this is what I tell aspiring writers and the course I myself took in deciding to try my hand at suspense with the novel Where Are the Children? It became my first bestseller and a turning point in my life and career. Originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1975, it is in its 75th printing in paperback and was recently reissued in hardcover as a Simon & Schuster Classic.”

  • What is the premise of Where Are the Children?

  “In New York, there was a sensational case in which a beautiful young mother was on trial for murdering her two small children. I didn’t write about that case, but imagined: Suppose your children disappear and you are accused of killing them—and then it happens again. Where Are the Children? is about a woman whose past holds a terrible secret. Nancy Harmon had been found guilty of murdering her two children and only released from prison on a legal technicality. She abandons her old life, changes her appearance and leaves San Francisco, to seek tranquillity on Cape Cod. Now she has married again, has two more lovely children and a life filled with happiness . . . until the morning when she looks for her children, finds only a tattered mitten and knows that the nightmare is beginning again.

  “The theme of a missing child struck a personal chord in me. Once, when we moved to a new home, my youngest daughter Patty was briefly missing. That’s when I experienced the panic any mother feels under these circumstances.”

  • What stimulated you to write A Stranger Is Watching?

  “The book brings out the issue of capital punishment, from the viewpoints of a victim and an objective observer.

  “Steve Peterson’s wife, Nina, has been murdered by a man who had changed her flat tire. Two years later, an innocent nineteen-year-old boy is about to be executed for the crime. Steve, an advocate of capital punishment, is involved with Sharon Martin, an opponent of the death sentence. Their different views on this issue, however, are an obstacle to their relationship. Then one day, Sharon and Neil, Steve’s six-year-old son, are abducted by the psychopath who had murdered Nina. They are held in a room in the bowels of Grand Central Station, with a bomb rigged to the door.”

  • The Cradle Will Fall deals with women victimized by a ruthless doctor. Is medicine a subject of particular interest to you?

  “Yes. Particularly the subject covered in this book: medical research in fertility. The so-called test-tube baby had just been born in England and there were many arguments about the legal and ethical aspects of in-vitro fertilization. One article predicted that there would soon be surrogate mothers and host mothers. I thought, Suppose a brilliant doctor is experimenting with his patients’ lives in his desire to make a break-through—and I was on my way with the book.

  “In The Cradle Will Fall, Dr. Edgar Highley, a respected gynecologist and fertility specialist, runs an expensive clinic in a New Jersey hospital, where he is considered to achieve ‘miracle cures’ for infertile women. Katie DeMaio, a young prosecutor and widow of a judge, comes to the hospital after a minor car accident. That night, from her window, she sees a man load a woman’s body into the trunk of a car. Katie, who is heavily sedated, thinks she is having a nightmare. Released the next day, she starts work on a suicide case that looks more like murder. While initial evidence points elsewhere, the medical examiner establishes a trail leading to Dr. Highley. He suspects that the famous doctor’s work was more than controversial—that it was deadly. Before he can tell Katie, she has left the office for the weekend and an appointment for surgery with Dr. Highley, who had seen her at the window on that fateful night. At the time I wrote this novel, one of my daughters was an assistant prosecutor. She was the source of in-house advice about the legal aspects of this novel.”

  • A Cinderella story gone wrong is the theme of A Cry in the Night. What inspired this novel?

  “I was thinking about the fact that in our society so many single mothers are struggling to raise children alone and most of them would love to meet ‘Prince Charming.’

  “Jenny MacPartland is a beautiful young divorcée, working in a New York art gallery and struggling to support her two little girls. There, she meets Erich Krueger, a newly discovered Midwest artist who has come into fame and fortune. Married within a month, Jenny is sure she will grow to love living on Erich Krueger’s Minnesota farm, until lonely days and eerie nights strain her nerves to the breaking point and a chain of terrifying events threatens her marriage, her children and her life.

  “The book was made into a television film, starring my daughter Carol Higgins Clark, released in the United States in 1992.”

  • Stillwatch is set in Washington. What drew you to this milieu?

  “The 1984 election was coming up. I anticipated the Democrats ‘talking’ a woman vice president and decided to beat them to it. You can imagine my glee when, just as the book was coming out, Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

  “In this novel, there are two women protagonists. Pat Traymore comes to Washington to produce a television program on Senator Abigail Jennings, about to be appointed vice president. Pat’s task is to ‘humanize’ the senator—to shed light on aspects of her life unknown to the public. As Pat delves into Abigail’s past, she learns of facts that could destroy Abigail just as she is on the verge of attaining her goal. Pat has also come to Washington for unfinished business of her own—to uncover secrets of her past. She moves back into her childhood home, the scene of a terrible crime never explained. Pat does not realize that her quest may cost her life.

  “In Stillwatch I deal with two women’s relationship to their past: one determined to learn the truth at all costs, the other for whom emergence of the truth will mean the end of her dreams. In creating the setting, I was aided in part by my friend Francis Humphrey Howard, sister of the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, who introduced me to Washington life.”

  • Weep No More, My Lady takes place in a luxurious spa. Why did you choose this setting for a suspense novel?

  “It used to be only the rich could afford to go to spas. Today, with the widespread interest in health and beauty, there are affordable spas all over the country. An intriguing thought crossed my mind: Suppose a killer in a wet suit is stalking the grounds of one of these spas.

  “The plot in Weep No More, My Lady revolves around the mysterious death of stage and screen star Leila LaSalle. Was her fall from her penthouse terrace suicide or murder? This is the question plaguing her sister, beautiful Elizabeth Lange. Min, an old friend of Leila’s, is the owner of luxurious Cypress Point Spa. She invites Elizabeth to the spa, where she encounters a cast of characters each of whom had a motive for killing her sister—and one who is now trying to murder her.

  “Alvirah, the cleaning woman who has won the 40-million-dollar lottery, and her husband Willy, a plumber, made their debut in this novel. Alvirah came to Cypress Point Spa not only to relax and enjoy herself, but to write a gossip column for the New York Globe. The killer stalking Elizabeth, the main protagonist, decides to get Alvirah out of the way. His scheme fails, though, and she provides important clues to his identity.”

  • When you first introduced Alvirah Meehan as a character in Weep No More, My Lady, did you plan to make her and her husband Willy ongoing characters in your work?

  “No—on the contrary: I intended to kill off Alvirah in Weep No More, My Lady. My daughter Carol Higgins Clark prevailed on me to keep her alive. Alvirah and Willy became
the protagonists of The Lottery Winner: Alvirah & Willy Stories and my novel All Through the Night.

  “Alvirah and sleuth Regan Reilly, protagonist of Carol’s Regan Reilly series, join forces in our co-authored suspense novel, Deck the Halls.”

  • Your novel, While My Pretty One Sleeps, is set in the world of high fashion. How did you get such intimate knowledge of the fashion world?

  “I grew up hearing about the world of fashion from my mother, who had been the bridal buyer at B. Altman. I also wrote a syndicated radio show, Women Today, for which I regularly interviewed designers and fashion editors and attended fashion events. It gave me the chance to see both the glamour and the agony of the fashion industry.

  “Ethel Lambston, prominent gossip writer, is about to rock the fashion industry with an exposé revealing the secrets of top fashion designers. The story opens with Ethel’s killer driving, in a blinding snowstorm, to a state park in Rockland County, N.Y., to bury Ethel’s body. The first to notice Ethel’s disappearance is Neeve Kearney, beautiful young owner of an exclusive Madison Avenue boutique where Ethel bought all her clothes. She lives with her father, Myles Kearney. A retired police commissioner, he has never forgiven himself because his wife was murdered after he ignored a threat to her life. Neeve becomes deeply involved in the investigation of Ethel’s murder. She also becomes a target for the killer.

  “In While My Pretty One Sleeps, I have included themes based on my view of family relations. I created a strong father-daughter relationship because I am tired of books about parents and children at each other’s throats. I got along well with my parents and I get along fine with my children. The book also has a strong love story reflecting my belief that some people are meant for each other.”

  • The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories, a novella and short stories, covers such themes as parapsychology and supernatural phenomena. Have you delved into these subjects?