Concerning Mary Jane Clark’s fascination with crime and punishment, don’t make too much of the fact that her father was with the FBI. No, she’s just a Jersey girl — Dad was stationed at the New York City office — past and present, who happens to be the ex-daughter-in-law of mega-selling mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark. (They remain friends.)

Clark is a URI alum, graduating in 1976 with a double major in journalism and political science. She says she fell in love with the charm of the state in general and with Newport in specific, usually spending summers in the city. She has finally gotten around to placing a novel there, the recent Hide Yourself Away, her seventh popular mystery. With a daughter going to Providence College, she will be visiting Rhode Island even more often.

Clark recently spoke about matters mysterious and geographical over a lobster salad at Capital Grille.

Q: It must have been entertaining for you to research Rhode Island and Newport for this book.

A: It definitely was. They say to write what you know. And I think location is so important in writing fiction, for me at least. I have to picture where the characters are going. And knowing the locale, when I needed a place to kill somebody, I knew about the Forty Steps. I could push somebody down the Forty Steps. I always knew I wanted to set a book in Newport or Rhode Island.

Q: Were there things there were new to you that you came across?

A: I didn’t know about Rhode Island’s role with the Underground Railroad. So I thought that was very interesting and tried to incorporate a little of that in the book. I had taken a tour last summer of the homes. They have a backstairs tour at the Elms, where they show you how the servants lived and how they worked downstairs in the kitchen and laundry and all of that. And they have an old coal tunnel. Mr. Brewind — it was his mansion — didn’t want any unsightly coal delivery at the building, so he built a tunnel from the street, under the lawn and into the basement of the mansion. On the tour I thought that tunnel idea was very interesting, and as I did more research I found that there were some other tunnels in Newport. There is a tunnel at Fort Adams that was used for defensive purposes, and then at the Truro Synagogue — they think that was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Under the altar -— do you call it an altar at a synagogue? — there’s a trap door that goes down to where they think the slaves may have been hidden.

Q: What about the trade-off between developing character and providing action and momentum? Is it painful to have to choose?

A: Well, I’ve written news copy for years, so I’m used to telling sa complicated story in a minute-and-a-half for television. So when I write fiction, I pretty much get right to the action. I tell what I need to tell about the characters, as much as is needed to further the story. This is not pages and pages about people’s psyches and motivations. I think you learn their motivations from their actions, observing their actions. The whole suspense format, you want to keep it moving. I tried to leave little mini-cliffhangers at the end of each chapter, so you’ll be engrossed and want to keep turning the pages.

Q: Is developing character succinctly something you’ve worked on and improved over your seven novels?

A: I hope so. I hope it’s improving. You know, there’s always a character or two in each, they start out being a minor character and then you turn out to love them. I think it is really true that once you set the characters and you know who they are and what motivates them, then they really do tell you what to do. I’ve heard that so many times. It sounds ridiculously corny, but I think they do.

You don’t want them to do something that’s totally out in left field, that a character like them would not do. What’s good about doing this KEY News world is that, since I’ve worked at CBS for so many years, I know what the producer or the reporter would do in any given situation. So that’s a good place to start, because I don’t have to worry about what my main character is going to do — when something comes up, I know how they’re going to cover it or how they’re going to react. So it’s the ancillary characters that I can spend more time on.

Q: What did you not know about novel writing when you began that you know now?

A: The first one, it took me years. The kids were little; I was working at CBS. It took me two years to write it, and then it sat on the shelf for two years until I got an agent, who signed me up and sold it in two weeks. So it was like overnight success in six years. Since then I’ve had contracts to write one book a year. And when you’re on that kind of schedule, you really can’t say, "Oh, I have writer’s block." You’ve got to sit there and figure it out. And sometimes in the beginning it’s very slow going, defining your characters, outlining them and trying to figure out what they’re going to do. But I think I’ve learned that if you just keep at it long enough, you can figure it out. Not to get discouraged, not to throw in the towel. You need some talent and creativity, but I think the most important thing is the stick-to-it-iveness and the discipline of sitting there and making it happen.

— B.R.