At ten in the morning her bun, her suit and her make-up are immaculate and she has already "done" TV3. She could be any well-to-do American visitor of a certain age, revisiting Irish roots from the impeccable interior of the Merrion Hotel. Instead, she is an Irish-American cultural phenomenon of a magnitude which relegates Angela's Ashes and Riverdance and all the rest to the halfpenny place. You've probably seen her books in every bookshop and airport and corner shop you've ever passed through. Novels of suspense with a soupcon of romance and a string of titles such as Moonlight Becomes You and A Stranger Is Watching and, the latest, Before I Say Goodbye.
You've probably, if the sales figures are correct, read at least one of them. But if you've never stopped to ask yourself how much, exactly, all that might add up to in hard cash, prepare yourself for a shock. "I now have a five-book contract. Well, it's four novels and a memoir and they're paying me 15 million (dollars) a novel, so that's 60 million - isn't that lovely? And then four million for the memoir because that'll be a smaller book." Pause while The Irish Times picks itself up from the immaculately carpeted floor. "Of course, I have to earn it. It's really an IOU, is what it amounts to . . ." Some IOU. But Mary Higgins Clark has been turning out a book a year for a quarter of a century, and telephone number-style advances are, it seems, nothing new in her scheme of things.
"After the second book sold, and that was kind of a lot of money," she says, "I made a list of all the things I wished I'd done in this life and hadn't. One was to go to college, so I went to college at night for five years. Another was learn to ski, and I did that. And another thing was to buy an apartment in Manhattan. I love Manhattan."
Sixty million dollars is an awful lot of skiing lessons; but then Manhattan is - psychologically, if not geographically - a long way from where Mary Higgins Clark was reared, in the Bronx. A decidedly downmarket environment though not, she stresses, violent or unpleasant. "It was, and still is, very suburban and very country-looking. It was a very nice place to grow up." Which didn't make it easy. Her father, a Roscommon man, died of a heart attack at the age of 54. "From worrying about his business," she says. "He had a pub and a restaurant and in those days, people put everything on the slate. Everybody charged. But he had to pay the waiters and the liquor dealers. When he died, everything was mortgaged. The house, the insurance policy, everything."
Her mother, left with three kids to raise at a time when it was unthinkable for a woman to run a pub, was forced to rent rooms to make ends meet. "That's why I'm going to write a memoir, for Christmas a year and a half from now, called Kitchen Privileges because she put a discreet little sign up: "Furnished Room, Kitchen Privileges". And the people who came were very nice people who were also down on their luck - a car dealer and his wife whose business had gone bust, a schoolteacher who couldn't afford an apartment. They were interesting people. We only had one deadbeat who tried to get out in the middle of the night without paying his rent.
"My mother loved to move furniture. She had moved a lamp, and it was on the landing and the poor guy tripped over it at two in the morning. And mother being mother, she said, `look, if you couldn't afford to pay the rent, you didn't have to sneak out in the night'. He said, `Oh, I have a job in New Jersey, I just have to get there' and she gave him two dollars for his fare. Of course we never heard from him again. He was a deadbeat."
She answers questions with the practised ease of a born storyteller and an experienced interviewee. Yes, her lead characters are always female and always aged between 27 and 37 and always Irish-American and always, if not beautiful, attractive. Are there things she can write about now that she couldn't write about, 25 years and 18 novels back? "Oddly enough, in my first book, Where Are The Children, you - the adult reader - knew the children who died had been molested even though it was never mentioned in the text.
But two publishers turned that book down, 25 years ago, because they said that children in that kind of jeopardy might upset their women readers. And of course those two publishers have sidled up to me over the years and said, `any way we can disenchant you with Simon & Schuster?'." She chuckles delightedly. Sixty million dollars, presumably, says otherwise. But doesn't that sort of mammoth advance exert its own kind of pressure? "There's always pressure to tell a good story - self-propelled pressure," she says.
"There'll always be people who'll look at the books and say, `what can be worth that much?' Well, that's OK - I can live with that when the cheque comes in. But I do feel there's a moral obligation to tell the best possible story - to the reader, never mind the publisher. If you're gonna buy that book and curl up with it, I don't want you to say, `Oh, for God's sake, she threw this one away'."
Magically, she produces a tissue from somewhere in her immaculate ensemble. "Allergies, darling, allergies - I'm always sniffling. But as far as books are concerned, here's the comparison I use. It's as though you're pregnant and you don't drink and you don't smoke and you go to the doctor and you do all the exercises and take all the vitamins. And then you have the baby, and if someone says, `that is one homely kid', too bad - I say, I think it's the most beautiful baby God ever put on this earth."
Before I Say Goodbye is published by Simon & Schuster at £16.99 in UK. We'll Meet Again is published in paperback, price £5.99 in the UK, also by Simon and Schuster
