Carol Higgins Clark, suspense writer who added dash of humor, dies at 66
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Carol Higgins Clark, a writer of popular suspense novels who infused the corpses-and-clues genre with doses of dark humor, while also teaming up with her mother, famed mystery author Mary Higgins Clark, on Christmas-themed whodunits, died June 12 at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 66. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight A family statement said the cause was appendix cancer.
Ms. Clark built her literary brand around the character Regan Reilly, a fictional private eye whose backstory had some autobiographical touches. Reilly’s mother was a famous mystery novelist. Reilly was raised in New Jersey, like Ms. Clark, and drifted to the West Coast.
Ms. Clark’s more than a dozen books also took Reilly on cases that often traced Ms. Clark’s life. “Decked” (1992), Ms. Clark’s first novel, peers into a cold-case murder in England, where Ms. Clark spent a college semester. In “Wrecked” (2010), a mysterious death is investigated on Cape Cod, where Ms. Clark vacationed many summers. The plot of “Mobbed” (2011) involves trying to prevent bloodshed on the New Jersey shore.
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“As a writer you always use what you know and take things from life,” Ms. Clark told a Montreal radio station in 1995. “So, sure, I think there is some of me in Regan.”
Ms. Clark didn’t set out to follow her mother’s literary career. She aspired to become an actress. Ms. Clark found her spark as a writer while helping type the final versions of some of her mother’s manuscripts in the 1970s.
They discussed plots and characters. Ms. Clark made suggestions for dialogue and references to make them ring more authentic to younger readers. “That’s when it all started,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ms. Clark was landing acting roles. She had a part in an off-Broadway staging of Wendy Wasserman’s play “Uncommon Women and Others” as well as some television movies. When “Where Are the Children?” was adapted into a 1986 film from her mother’s novel, Ms. Clark was cast in a small part as a television reporter. She then played the lead role, a women frightened of her new husband, in the 1992 movie version of her mother’s book “A Cry in the Night.”
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That same year, Ms. Clark’s “Decked” was published, introducing the gumshoe character Reilly and Ms. Clark’s penchant for splicing in light banter and wry observations as a mystery is unraveled. In this case, Reilly is returning from Britain on an ocean liner after the body of her long-missing roommate was unearthed during a class reunion.
Ms. Clark described the shoes of an elderly woman on board the ship as “like gunboats hinged on her thick ankles.” In the stalker mystery “Twanged” (1998), Ms. Clark playfully skewered the Hamptons. Reilly is surrounded by an oddball coterie including an heir to a “thumbtack fortune,” a guru who calls himself Peace Man and a feng shui aficionado who can’t stop rearranging furniture.
The body-on-the-beach plot of “Burned” (2005) unfolds as Reilly visits Hawaii for a bachelorette fling before her wedding. A friend pleads for Reilly to “go easy on me with the bridesmaids’ dresses.” Reilly’s reply: “I was actually thinking of plaid pantsuits.”
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Washington Post reviewer Sarah Booth Conroy described Mary Higgins Clark’s style as “deadly serious novels about the sort of chilling fears that come to women in the middle of the night.” Her daughter, however, “spoons in a bit of bawdy, a soupçon of slapstick.”
“Everybody in our family is like that,” Ms. Clark said in the Montreal radio interview. “We always told stories and jokes. My mother says it helps being Irish. That was always the way I was brought up, with a lot of humor at the dinner table.”
She added: “I keep the murder count down.”
Reviewers generally looked favorably on Ms. Clark’s stabs at humor but were more mixed on the overall product. A Booklist review said Ms. Clark’s style “hovers on the edge of cliché, and there is no suspense to speak of” but ends up delivering “a kind of mindless good time.”
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For nearly a decade, Ms. Clark joined to write holiday-season thrillers with her mother, who died in 2020. In some of the novels, including “Deck the Halls” (2000) and “The Christmas Thief” (2004), Ms. Clark’s sleuth Reilly crosses paths with one of her mother’s recurring characters, Alvirah Meehan, a lottery winner who becomes an amateur detective.
Ms. Clark always had a soft spot for Alvirah Meehan. She saved her life, in a literary sense. While reading a version of her mother’s 1987 book, “Weep No More, My Lady,” Ms. Clark was stunned that Meehan was killed off. Ms. Clark thought she was too interesting of a character to lose.
“You can’t kill Alvirah, too,” Ms. Clark recalled telling her mother. “Well, I begged for Alvirah’s life and she kept her alive.”
‘Scary Stuff’
Carol Ann Higgins Clark was born on July 28, 1956, in Manhattan and raised in Washington Township in northern New Jersey. Her father, who had been a sales manager for Capital Airlines, died when she was 8.
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She graduated in 1978 from Mount Holyoke College and then studied acting at Beverly Hills Playhouse.
In October 2006, New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and a flight instructor were killed when their small plane crashed into an Upper East Side building. Ms. Clark’s apartment, just one story below the impact, was badly damaged. She was not at home at the time.
She lived most recently in West Hollywood and was active in Los Angeles-area charities aiding homeless people and others with disabilities. She recorded a public service video supporting a foundation researching appendix cancer.
Survivors include a sister, Marilyn, and brothers, Warren and David. A sister, Patricia, died in 2020.
Ms. Clark often took part in a monthly lunch with other mystery and suspense writers. Once, author Warren Murphy asked each to describe the scariest sound if alone at home at 3 a.m. His pick: “A toilet flushes.”
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Soon after, Ms. Clark was spending the night by herself at her mother’s house in New Jersey. She heard the sound of the elevator. “I ran out of that house so fast” and called the police, she recounted. She finally learned that the elevator automatically returns to the second floor.
“That’s the type of stuff you try to pick up as a writer,” she told an audience in 2014, “because that’s the scary stuff.”
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Source: The Washington Post
