Mary Higgins Clark

I was a member of another group called the Adams Roundtable, which is a bunch of mystery writers that used to have lunch together once a month.

It was founded by Mary Higgins Clark, and over the years, our membership included Lawrence Block, uh, Peter Straub, um, Susan Isaacs, Judith Kellman, uh, Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, so we had a lot of writers.

And one time the subject came up of what's the scariest noise in the world? Is it a man screaming, a man torture? Is it a wife crying? Is it a woman d- you know, what...

We went on and on, and a guy named Warren Murphy, who is a wonderful writer, who's deceased now.

Um, face it and move on with your life.

Um, I-- These...

Other example I give is, I mentioned before Mary Higgins Clark, huge bestselling writer.

Where Are the Children? was her, her first legendary book.

You have other things in your life more important than writing, and so you don't do it.

The example I often use is my old friend, Mary Higgins Clark, who passed away a few years ago.

And when Mary was 38 years old, I think it was 38, maybe 37, she had five children, five young children, and her husband dies.

The next day, her mother-in-law dies.

I do too.

Because I honestly, I miss reading, you know, of course I was big on Mary Higgins Clark.

Yeah.

But honestly, every time I pick up a secular book to read, It's filthy.

And I remember how much fun that was.

And Mary Higgins Clark was still alive.

And I could remember sweeping by Mary, who was always, you know, dressed to the nines with fabulous jewels and the whole bit.

And I remember she was so surprised to see us.

So to do that, I wanted to think about how literature about crime looks kind of at a couple different, say, places in the cultural hierarchy.

So I definitely wanted to look at things like airport paperbacks, right? So super famous genre writers like Ed McBain and Donald Goines and Mary Higgins Clark and Patricia Cornwell, Stephen King, very much the kinds of crime fiction that was in airports.

I picked up some of those books when I was a kid.

So I wanted to kind of take that mainstream genre fiction, those really popular, really influential genre writers, and then put them in conversation with a couple other slices of the literary picture.

But abusive men and kind of killer husbands aren't really a big part of crime fiction until the publishing industry is willing to publish more crime fiction by women.

So...

Mary Higgins Clark is kind of credited with basically helping to create the genre of domestic suspense fiction, which is often a woman and maybe her children who are being pursued or trapped in a house with an abusive husband.

And so much feminist detective fiction is...

Mm-hmm.

Um, I remember reading Mary Higgins Clark.

Now, I don't think she was really bad, but that was another one that felt older to me-

Mm-hmm

So that's kind of what I've been going through.

So it's kind of been going on, like, the Danielle Steel kick and the Mary Higgins Clark kick.

So that's kind of the main authors that I'm gonna be discussing.

So the first one I'm gonna be talking about here, this one is a Danielle Steel book.

It's some- you know, it's very, again, very informative, but it's, you know, it's, it's okay.

And one that I am planning, well, I'll get to the ones that I'm planning to read.

Another one, actual book, physical book that I'm reading is, I think it's called Where Are You Now? by Mary Higgins Clark.

That book so far, I'm about halfway through, is so good.