Payday

We reached Mary Higgins Clark the day after she signed her four-book, $10.1-million deal with Simon & Shuster. And she was licking stamps for the fourth annual Crime Writers Congress (next weekend in NYC), which she chairs. She told us all the loot hasn’t yet changed her life style--she’d just microwaved a cup of soup for lunch!

“She’s the world’s wealthiest secretary,” joked a spokesman for the writers congress, author Walter Wager.

Of her mega-contract, Higgins said, “Mystery suspense is the most popular genre in the world--we’re finally coming into our own. I think it’s wonderful if (the deal) points that up.”

Higgins got a $3,000 advance for her first suspense novel, “Where Are the Children?,” 10 years ago and followed it with five other best sellers.

Her next will be “While My Pretty One Sleeps,” due next spring, about a young NYC woman enmeshed in her mother’s death 17 years earlier--the only murder case that her police commissioner father never solved.

Film rights aren’t set: “I don’t like to sell them before I write the book.”