Silent Night

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. My mother went on to raise me and my two brothers alone. 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’s example taught me resilience. The characters in my books are resilient and resourceful. When calamity strikes, they carry on.”

• 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 was married to Warren Clark.”

• When did you start your writing career?

“After I got 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 Clark 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. For fourteen years, I supported my family writing these programs. The series consisted of five four-minute programs a week, syndicated on five hundred stations and hosted by celebrities such as Betsy Palmer, Hugh Downs, Bill Cullen, Lee Meriwether and Betty White. But I knew that writing radio scripts wasn’t enough. I wanted to write books.”

• What was your first book?

“A biographical novel about George Washington, Aspire to the Heavens, based on a radio series I was then writing called ‘Portrait of a Patriot,’ vignettes about presidents. It was a commercial disaster and remaindered as it came off the press. But it showed that I could write a book and get it published.”

• 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-be’s.’ 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.”

• When do you write now?

“I still love to work early in the morning, but get up a little later, at 6 A.M. I don’t seek seclusion. Having an active, lively family around keeps my ears sharpened.”

• What are your children doing at present?

“My daughter Carol is the author of three suspense novels, Decked, Snagged and Iced, published by Warner Books. My daughter Marilyn is a superior court judge and my daughter Patty is 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. I have six grandchildren.”

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

“I decided to write a book that would, hopefully, outsell Aspire to the Heavens. One of the best clues about what to write is what one likes to read. I decided to see if I could write a suspense novel. It was like a prospector stumbling on a vein of gold. I wrote Where Are the Children?-my first bestseller and a turning point in my life and career.”

• Your background is Irish. How did that influence your writing?

“The Irish are, by nature, storytellers. All my grandparents were born in Ireland, as was my father. At family gatherings, my mother, aunts and great-aunts and cousins would sit around the table and stories flowed. Nothing was ever said simply. When one cousin was dating a fellow the family didn’t approve of, one of the old girls sighed, ‘Many a man was lost at sea the night that one was born.’ There were sad stories and glad stories, and I sat at the table, drinking them all in. Many of that clan have been prototypes for characters in my books.”

• Which of your novels have been made into films?

“Two of my novels were feature films: A Stranger Is Watching, produced by MGM, and Where Are the Children? , released by Rastar Films through Columbia Pictures. I was a local extra in Where Are the Children? Blink, and you’ll miss me. Three others were CBS television films: The Cradle Will Fall, Stillwatch and Remember Me, in which I make a brief appearance playing myself. The television film based on my novel, A Cry in the Night, released by Rysher Distribution, starred my daughter Carol Higgins Clark and Perry King. It was produced by Telescene in Canada and I went to the set in Montreal and ended up with a one-line part. I’m the lady coming out of church and greeting the priest; my friends tell me that’s type-casting!”

• How do you feel about film adaptations of your work?

“When you sell a book for television or for a feature film, you are in essence giving up your child for adoption. You wish it well, but lose control. It’s a different medium, and there is no way anyone can take your book and reproduce it exactly as you wrote it. It’s always fun to watch something you have written turned into a film. I can’t spend much time on the sets, but I love to go at least for a few days and be part of it. Now that I am establishing myself as a walk-on like Alfred Hitchcock, it’s even more fun.”

• How do you feel about having your stories on audio cassette?

“The first time I heard one of my own books on audio, I was listening to it on the tape player in my car and I was so absorbed that I went through a stop sign. I enjoy hearing books-not only my own but other authors’-on audio. On my almost-daily drive to and from New Jersey and the five-hour drive to my summer house in Cape Cod,