communal protection for its "weaker" members. There is a real contradiction in our modern world between the rhetoric that accords ample praise for motherhood and children but then seems to turn its back on the real needs of both in times of crisis. Clark writes passionately about this contemporary phenomenon.

The level of guilt experienced by Dr. Miles provides a case in point. As a member of the medical establishment — and how more establishment can he be than to be a distinguished member of the Harvard Medical School faculty — he fails to help Nancy with her adolescent confusion. Had he acted in time perhaps he could have prevented her disastrous marriage to Carl Harmon, who she turns to in her desperation. Of course, Dr. Miles as well as the officials of the Adams Port police force rally around Nancy when she loses her children the second time, but even then their aid is tinged with suspicion.

A quick survey of the background history of the characters in this and her subsequent novels will show that a higher number than would be statistically probable have either lost a spouse or a child. The loss of a spouse becomes particularly important for the women characters because they frequently are without sufficient financial resources to remain independent and are forced to fend for themselves, often without a adequate employment opportunities. This lack of money also makes women, and their children, at risk and usually forces them back into a dependency on males for their support. As in Where Are the Children? such circumstances can work out well. Ray proves to be not only a good husband, caring, nurturing, and positively protective, but literally he also saves Nancy and Missy from the murderous clutches of the resurrected Carl in the novel's frantic denouement. As Carl plunges to his death while still desperately trying to cling to Missy, Nancy grabs her and Ray grabs Nancy preventing them both from falling as well.

Marriage, as an institution, in Clark's fiction is problematic. Married to the right man, a woman feels safe and experiences fulfillment in her life. Married to the wrong man, however, she may find life to be harrowing, even fatal. Marriage as the traditional haven for women and children ultimately works out, but usually not before it has been tested. In this respect marriage has proved to be a central social concern in Mary Higgins Clark's books, and although it is a traditional topic dealt with by female writers, Clark's thrillers give it especially close scrutiny.

Also in her fiction Clark explores the broadly defined subject of evil, with its hypnotic attractions and devastating social consequences. By opening Where Are the Children? within the conscience of the deranged Carl, she sets a tone of dislocation that is only resolved by the ending. Moreover, Carl's thoughts are so twisted that from the beginning they give the reader a real feel for his later behavior that observing him only from the outside would not provide. It is a wonderful device and serves many purposes, not the least of which is to give evil a palpable feel instead of reducing it to a social abstraction, and this particularizing feature drives home the disorienting nature of Nancy's past experience.

Although she might not agree, Mary Higgins Clark's stories do provide a substantial critique of social attitudes toward females and their traditional concerns. The conclusions of her novels right the wrongs vested on her heroines, but the fact that she raises so many negative issues casts some doubt on contemporary community values. Popular fiction often both criticizes and redeems such values, or rather first criticizes and then redeems them. The general effect is to espouse traditions which are also found wanting. This contradiction provides such popular writing with its tensions and suspense while leaving it open to possible negative interpretations masked by the conventional happy endings. Although Nancy at the end of Where Are the Children? appears to have exorcised the demons that have plagued her for so many years, it seems unrealistic to believe that she will not continue to experience many of the same fears and doubts in the future. And no matter how loving Ray may be or how secure her present children, she surely will be unable to completely purge her psyche of the nightmares caused by Carl's betrayal or the death of Peter and Lisa at his hands.

The woman-in-peril novel dates back to the rise of the Gothic romance at the end of the eighteenth century. In the typical Gothic tale, a young woman is trapped in an isolated country house or abandoned monastery and menaced by a fiend bent on her sexual destruction. The romances rely on exotic, often historical, locations dripping with period trappings and surrounded by a general atmosphere of decay. The suspense in the early romance novels was protracted, as was the prose, and they generally appealed to a middle- to upper-middle-class reading public, largely female, who had plenty of free time for reading long works of fiction. While the genre had wide appeal, it was not without its critics, who found the Gothic atmosphere often comically excessive. Jane Austin's Northanger Abbey is perhaps one of the better known of the parodies of the form written during the time. In spite of its excesses, however, the Gothic novel has proven a durable literary genre down to modern times.

Technology and literacy rates were to modify both the length and literary content of these early genre novels. As the nineteenth century progressed and readership widened to include the poor, the publishing industry found that popular fiction could be sold in shorter, serialized forms in periodicals. Publication of novels in parts allowed readers to consume the product slowly and did not require large amounts of free time since the parts were published over many months. Many variations of the woman-in-peril novel appeared during the Victorian period, and they often altered the conventions to allow for the creation of more forceful contemporary heroines. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) provides a good example of a mid-Victorian novel that domesticated the excess of the Gothic formula. Wilkie Collins's late mystery The Law and the Lady (1875) uses a deformed recluse who lived in a crumbling country house as part of its plot. Moreover the main portions of the Gothic tradition remained strong during the nineteenth century and were carried forward by a number of writers, many of whom used them in their tales of horror. Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker both used the Gothic tale for their stories about vampires.

With the turn of the century, almost universal literacy, and an increase in leisure activities of all kinds, popular fiction, especially genre fiction like mysteries and thrillers, grew shorter and more compact. So did the novels that now had to compete with the periodical fiction for the reader's attention and money. Horror and adventure tales, especially those appearing in pulp magazines and later in comic books, shamelessly exploited the Gothic tradition, doing much damage to its literary reputation. The woman-in-peril story fared nicely, though, in the pages of mystery writers, often female, like Mary Roberts Rinehart, who continued to update the form in their popular novels. Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca is really a Gothic tale revitalized.

The evolution of the modern mystery thriller was completed during the explosion of paperback fiction after World War II. Both in reprint and in originals, paperbacks made literature affordable to almost everyone, and while a good many paperbacks reprinted mainstream or classic fiction, they also opened up a vast market for genre fiction which remains vital to this day.

The popularity of Clark's woman-inperil thrillers attest to the strength and vitality of Gothic fiction. Although her novels avoid the excesses of her predecessors, they nevertheless are a part of a very long and quite distinguished literary tradition.

Those readers looking for other novels in the field will be best served by turning to Clark's subsequent efforts in fiction, especially, A Stranger is Watching (1977), A Cardie Will Fall (1980), and While My Pretty One Sleeps (1989). There are however, other writers, especially women writers, who have promoted strong female characters in the mystery field. Certainly Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, Linda Barnes, and others have opened up the crime and detective genres to resourceful and dynamic women protagonists. These characters may have harder edges and survive without the help of a male protector, but they are also the end products of a two-centuries old pattern of literary female emancipation.

Where Are the Children? was made into a feature motion picture by Columbia, directed by Bruce Malmuth, with Max Gail, Frederick Forrest, and Bernard Hughes and starring Jill Clayburgh as Nancy. The film was shot on location on Cape Cod and was released in 1986. Both Mary and her daughter, Carol, a professional actress, had bit parts as reporters in the film. In an interview Mary recounted a humorous incident during the filming when amid a pushing crowd of news hounds she fluffed her one line by calling out: "Come on, Jill. Tell the truth — admit it — you did kill your kids, Jill." The director stopped the scene and wanted to know who was calling out the name "Jill." She got the line right on the second take.