Killer Instinct

By Mallory Gnaegy
| 5:00 a.m. January 8, 2014

"My main characters are resilient and strong. It doesn't mean they aren't worried, threatened or scared to death, but they figure it out and no one comes in and saves them," Mary Jane Clark says. (courtesy photo)

Arts + Culture

When actor and wedding-cake designer Piper Donovan came to Sarasota for a wedding one year ago, she witnessed multiple murders.

She’s headed to New Orleans this January, and she’ll take that mental baggage with her — Donovan always seems to be around when dead bodies appear. Luckily, Donovan is the fictional character in New York Times’ bestselling author Mary Jane Clark’s Piper Donovan Mystery Series. Clark is a part-time resident of Siesta Key who splits her time with Hillsdale, N.J.

The fourth book and newest installment to her series, “That Old Black Magic,” will be released Jan. 21. It follows Donovan to New Orleans, where she guest bakes at a bakery in the French Quarter when a series of voodoo-related murders take place.

Clark says the location of her books is always important.

“New Orleans has everything you’d want to have in a mystery,” she says.

She was inspired after an American Library Association convention took place there following Hurricane Katrina.

“I remember being so touched because you could tell when you walked down the street and went into the little shops, that people were so glad that you had come,” Clark says from her Siesta Key apartment. “I got this feeling, and really keyed into what they had been through and the hope and resilience of the people.”

In March 2012, right before she started writing, Clark went back for a visit. She saw the above-ground crypts, went on a voodoo tour, took a steamboat ride on the Mississippi and, of course, ate lots of food — to conjure just the right descriptions of the Big Easy.

Her actress daughter, Elizabeth Higgins Clark, inspired the main character of the series. A $75 Martha Stewart coffee-table book on cake decorating inspired the character’s career. She says her daughter and Piper Donovan are very similar.

“They know what they want. They have a good heart and a real sense of what’s right and wrong,” Clark says.

Clark sits comfortably atop a cozy denim couch surrounded by rattan furniture in her Siesta Key condo with a killer view. Based on her beachy, relaxed appearance and upon a first introduction, she doesn’t seem like the type who spends her days thinking up gruesome black magic killers. But, her bio fits the bill, or rather, kill.

First off, the name “Clark” might also trigger the names Mary Higgins Clark (her former mother-in-law) or Carol Higgins Clark (her former sister-in-law) — two other famous writers. Although, Mary Jane Clark kept her name long before she started writing books, for her children’s sake.

Her former mother-in-law had some influence on Mary Jane Clark’s career.

“I always thought writing books was something mystical, like, ‘How could anyone write a book?’” she says.

While the rest of the family was out waterskiing or having hot dogs on the deck, her former mother-in-law would be in her room working on her next book.

“I would see how hard she worked and I realized it wasn’t so much about the magic, but it was about the hard work,” Clark says.

More so than her former in-laws’ familial connection to writing, Clark herself grew up in an environment prone to suspense.

She grew up in New Jersey where her father, Fred Behrends, worked for the FBI on Russian espionage, kidnapping and extortion cases.

“He never would talk about his cases, but sometimes I’d read about them in a newspaper,” she says. “There was a feeling of suspense for what he did for a living, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that influenced me in going into suspense writing.”

But, it was media coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination that made her want to work in television news. She got her first job in New York at CBS as a desk assistant making $117 a week, working the overnight shift. She’d work her way up over the next 27 years, covering everything from hurricanes and shootings to politics and visits from the pope.

“Sometimes you’d think, ‘God, you couldn’t make this stuff up!’” she says about the content she was producing. “That was so wonderfully fertile and showed me that if I could think of it, it could happen.”

She started writing her first book, “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” on the side of her CBS job. In 1991, she was newly divorced from her husband, David Clark. She had a 5-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and a 1-year-old son, David, with Fragile X syndrome, a developmental disability. Clark began working part time at CBS to be around for her son, and needed an additional means of financial support. She says she probably wouldn’t have started writing if it weren’t for her son’s birth — she wanted to secure a financial future for him. It grew into something much bigger than she thought.

“It was totally therapeutic for me,” she says. “Because my life was kind of spinning out of control, and in writing the story I could control everything that happened.”

She wrote 10 books while at CBS, and retired from the news career in 2007 as a producer. She now devotes her time to writing her successful thrillers.

Clark fits the recurring theme of her books: characters, mostly women, who find themselves in hard situations, but figure it out and save themselves.

“It may not be some killer with a knife hiding in your closet or anything that obviously dramatic, but I think everyone has ups and downs and hard things they have to get through in life,” she says.