Carol Higgins Clark: R.I.P.

Such sad news. So young. She wrote more than a dozen novels and also collaborated with her mother, Mary Higgins Clark died of appendix cancer on Monday in Los Angeles at the age of 66.

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From the NYT:

Carol Higgins Clark, who as a young woman retyped manuscripts by her mother, the famed mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, before going on to become a best-selling suspense novelist herself, 
Ms. Higgins Clark wrote more than a dozen novels on her own, beginning with Decked in 1992, and several others with Christmas themes in collaboration with her mother, who died in 2020. She started out aspiring to be an actress, and she eventually accumulated a handful of credits in movies, several of them based on her mother’s books. But in 1975, while she was home for the summer from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, another career possibility began to take shape when she bailed her mother, who was just beginning her suspense-writing career, out of a jam.

“She had her first suspense novel coming out, and had to get her second one in to her agent,” Carol Higgins Clark told NPR in 2008. “It was before computers, and she didn’t know how she was going to get it retyped in time, so I did it. And that’s really what got me into it, because I had talked to her about the characters and the plot. And I did that for a number of her books, which was great for me to learn about how to write.”

As her mother’s books caught on, Ms. Higgins Clark continued to act as an informal sounding board — doing research, helping her make dialogue for younger characters more authentic and more. In 1986, when her mother’s first suspense novel, “Where Are the Children?,” was made into a film, Carol Higgins Clark had a small role as a television reporter. Over the next 28 years she continued to appear in movies, many of them made for TV, based on her mother’s books, including “A Cry in the Night” (1992), in which she played a leading role.

That same year marked her own debut as a novelist. “Decked” introduced Regan Reilly, a private investigator who would anchor almost all of Carol Higgins Clark’s books.

In a nod to her mother, she made Reilly the daughter of a mystery writer. In that first book, set on an ocean liner, Reilly is haunted by the murder of her roommate 10 years earlier.

Read more Here.