Book review: Death Wears A Beauty Mask & Other Stories

THE facts speak for themselves, and they are very, very impressive: Over 50 novels published, million of copies sold, four-book contracts for over $60m. 

Mary Higgins Clark

Simon and Schuster, €11.99; ebook, €22.50

The list goes on, and 87-year-old Mary Higgins Clark — the only daughter of Irish immigrant Luke Higgins, and an inductee into the Irish America Hall of Fame in 2011 — continues to add to it.

From her debut suspense novel, Where Are the Children (1975), Clark hasn’t stopped writing. Her latest novel (The Melody Lingers On) arrived recently with the kind of tagline every thriller writer wants to see on the press release: “The brand new spine-tingling thriller from the global multi-million bestseller”.

But first we have Clark’s latest gathered collection of bits and pieces, Death Wears A Beauty Mask & Other Stories.

None of the stories collected here are new, although the titular tale is a completed novella first attempted, and then abandoned, in 1972.

Chronologically, the collection begins in 1958 (‘Stowaway’) and ends this year (with the revised ‘Death Wears A Beauty Mask’).

All are efficient enough, yet all lack what this reviewer likes best in crime/thriller writing: A toughness, terseness, and a kind of acerbic humour that skewers civilised thought.

In other words, despite Clark’s title of ‘Queen of Suspense’, there’s nothing to be found here that makes you want to keep the light on for fear of getting spooked by the dark.

It starts innocently enough with Clark’s first published story, ‘Stowaway’, which sees airline stewardess Carol assist the unofficial passage of a defector.

Carol, however, loves the plane’s pilot, Tom, and wonders “how much longer it would be before her heart stopped racing painfully at every glimpse of him, before she stopped being so aware of his splendid tallness in the dark uniform”.

The story has a happy ending, but you can’t help but ponder at how Tom’s “splendid tallness” has anything to do with, well, anything.

The most recent completed story, ‘The Tell-Tale Purr’ (2009), clearly references the original master of suspense, Edgar Allen Poe, but is so devoid of anything remotely close to an edge that you could turn the pages with a boxing glove.

Even the teaser of the completed novella is a non-starter. Nominally about a fashion model that goes missing following work in Europe for a luxury cosmetics brand, ‘Death Wears A Beauty Mask’ neither dazzles with its insights into the world of high fashion in 1970s New York, nor grips with lacklustre pacing and (yet another) light hearted ending.

The problem appears to be this: In the past 25 years the quality of thriller writing has taken on a far more literary, contemporary, and visceral bent.

In fairness, no one could accuse Mary Higgins Clark of jumping on any bandwagons. And you won’t find her deviating from her asexual and wholesome writing and storyline styles any time soon, either.

The real conundrum is that while some of the plot outlines tackle very serious themes (evil doings to children and young women, in particular), there isn’t a hint of Clark wanting to engage the reader in anything that comes close to even vaguely realistic territory.

It’s horses for courses, needless to say, but Clark’s assemblage of writing and plotting tropes are more for fans of Reader’s Digest and Agatha Christie than, for example, Jeffrey Deaver and Carl Hiassen.

You can’t help but wonder, though, how riveting the stories and novels could be if there was even a pinch of grit thrown into them. Queen of Suspense? Pass.