Mary Higgins Clark active as ever at age 85

Simon & Schuster, 338 pages

$26.99

Mary Higgins Clark is 85 and could have retired long ago, but she worries more when she’s not writing. She’s completed more than 40 books, not just mysteries, but children’s stories, Christmas novels, an historical novel and a memoir.

Her current book, “Daddy’s Gone a Hunting,” is a vintage Clark thriller featuring women in distress, tragic pasts and secret identities. It’s about a deadly explosion that destroys a family furniture business in Long Island City and about one of the founder’s granddaughters — injured in the blast, suspected of being in on the crime — who lies in a coma.

She is fascinated by memory, what happens to it after a traumatic event and what we’re capable of understanding while supposedly unconscious. She discusses an incident from a few years ago, when she was recovering from surgery and was accidentally given too much medication.

“My blood pressure was dropping and so was my heart rate, and I actually had that out of body experience where I was floating above,” she says. “And John (her husband, former Merrill Lynch Futures CEO John J. Conheeney) and the kids were all standing around the bed and it was a cathedral-like room. And I thought, ‘I have a choice. If I turn right, I will not come back. If I go down, I will come back and I’m not ready yet.’ And I came down.”

Mary Higgins was born in New York City in 1927, an Irish-American whose immigrant father owned a popular pub. But when she was 11, her father died and the family lost their home. While still in high school, she worked as a switchboard operator to help support her family.

As an adult, Clark relived her mother’s tragedy. She married Warren Clark, a regional manager of Capital Airways, in 1949 and had five children. But in 1964, Warren Clark died of a heart attack; his wife became a widow and single mother.

Clark always was a story teller and in her 20s and 30s, she wrote fiction for Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines.

After her husband’s death, she managed enough spare time to work on a novel about George and Martha Washington, “Aspire to the Heavens.” She was proud of the story but hated the title and wasn’t crazy about the sales.

Her life changed with her second book, “Where Are the Children?”, published in 1975.

Higgins has since become one of the industry’s most dependable and loyal writers, regularly turning out best sellers for Simon & Schuster. Her U.S. sales alone top 100 million copies and, according to her publisher, she continues to sell some 3 million books a year worldwide.

“You want to turn the page,” she says, explaining the appeal of suspense novels. “The greatest compliment I can receive is, ‘I read your darned book ‘til 4 in the morning, and now I’m tired.’ I say, ‘Then you got your money’s worth.’”