Washington (AFP)
The American writer Mary Higgins Clark, "queen of suspense" and one of the best-selling writers in the world, died at 92, chaining bestsellers after a difficult start to her career.
Mary Higgins Clark died "surrounded by family and friends," publisher Simon and Schuster announced on Friday.
She has written around fifty books, sold in some hundred million copies, including more than 80 million in the United States, since her first big success in 1975, "La maison du guet".
Born in New York, in the Bronx, on December 24, 1927, into a modest family of Irish descent, Mary Theresa Eleanor Higgins Clark says that she caught the writing virus at the age of 7, the Irish being often " born storytellers. "
Family dramas will convince her that the worst can always happen and it is this moment when everything changes which she likes to describe in her books.
Her father dies of a heart attack when she is 10 years old and her mother, being alone with three children, is forced to share her house with tenants. Mary will have to work very young, as a switchboard operator in a hotel then typist before getting married, at 20, and becoming a flight attendant for Pan Am.
She will stop traveling the world to raise her children while continuing to write, in her kitchen from 5 to 7 am, before school time.
- Five children to feed -
Mary was 35 when her husband died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 44, leaving her widowed with five dependent children. As a young girl, she already lost her older brother, who died suddenly from meningitis, and then her 15-month-old nephew, who fell from a window.
She becomes a typist again but still dreams of making a living from her writing. After news, radio soap operas, a biography of George Washington, published but unsuccessful, she embarked on the detective story.
"La maison du guet" is a best seller as soon as it was published in 1975, like "La nuit du renard" (1977) which made her a millionaire, prompting her French publisher, Albin Michel, to create a Special Suspense collection.
Mary is then finally a popular popular novelist but, to make up for lost time, she enrolled at Fordham University, in New York, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in philosophy, her first university degree, at 50 years of age.
In 1987, he was awarded the honor of presiding over the Mystery Writers of America and, the following year, the International Crime Congress, in New York.
In 2000, Mary surprised by publishing "Three Days Before Christmas", a thriller co-signed with her daughter Carol. Mother and daughter will publish four more.
Many of his detective novels have been adapted for television or film such as La nuit du renard (A Stranger is Watching, Sean S. Cunningham, 1982), La maison du guet (Where are The Childen, Bruce Malmuth, 1986), Nous no longer go to the wood (All around The Town, Paolo Barzman, 2002).
In her memoirs, "Between yesterday and tomorrow" (2003), the one who since 1996 has been the wife of the influential businessman John Conheeney, says that she will write until her death because if "to win the lottery , makes you happy for a year, doing what you love makes you happy a lifetime ".
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