How I made a KILLING
Guns, gay marriage and a lurid real-life murder case... how Patricia Cornwell escaped an abusive childhood to become the 100 million-selling queen of crime fiction is every bit as gripping as one of her thrillers
Patricia Cornwell has sold over 100 million books, uses a private helicopter to flit between her Massachusetts mansion and upscale New York apartment, and has a personal fortune somewhere north of $75m. So, naturally, she is telling me about her money worries.
‘There will always be a financial incentive to write because, honestly, the way I grew up, a part of me is always afraid I’m going to wake up poor,’ says the author, who won $50m in damages last year after suing her former finance company for mismanagement. ‘When I sit at my desk I think, I hope you know what you’re doing. What if you can’t figure out an ending? What if the characters don’t talk to you? Writer’s block is all about fear, and I know where that comes from.’
Cornwell, 58, often ends up arguing with Dr Kay Scarpetta, the fictional forensic pathologist who has cut a swathe through 22 bestselling novels – the latest, Flesh
And Blood, has just been released. ‘I chastise her,’ she says. ‘I say to her, “Dammit, do something! Why is it always me who has to sit in this chair and figure out how to solve this case?”’ She laughs. ‘Then I think, “Patsy, you’re losing your mind…”’
Cornwell’s insecurities are rooted in a life story that reads like an over-ripe work of fiction. Her father, an eminent US lawyer, abandoned the family on Christmas Day, 1961, when his daughter was five. After her mother was hospitalised with depression, Cornwell spent much of her childhood with an abusive foster family and was later diagnosed as bipolar, prone to wild spending sprees and alcoholic binges.
By the Nineties, her life was threatening to spiral out of control. Shortly after the end of her 10-year marriage to Charles Cornwell – 17 years her senior, he had been her English professor at college – in 1991 she embarked on a lesbian affair with FBI agent Margo Bennett. When Bennett’s husband later attempted to murder his estranged wife, Cornwell was dragged into the lurid fallout. In 1993, she was sentenced to 28 days in a treatment centre after her excessive drinking led to a car crash and a drunk-driving conviction.
‘So much drama and melodrama, soap opera and horrible tales,’ she sighs. ‘Real life is so much crazier than anything you can make up. I’ve had a rather strange life. I’ve made mistakes and I don’t always feel all that secure. I still face a lot of the same phobias as I did as a very young person. Some days aren’t so good, and it’s important to be honest about that.’
Married to Harvard neuroscientist Staci Gruber for almost 10 years, Cornwell is more grounded these days but remains ‘anxiety-driven’. Writing the Scarpetta novels offers not just financial security but a kind of therapy.
‘On the one hand I want to get up in the morning and have someone tell me I don’t have to write today, and on the other I don’t know what to do with myself if I don’t. I learned to escape into my creativity at a really young age because there was so much unhappiness around me and a lot of things that were really scary. I think that’s where it all started. I found that creating stories made the world safer, I felt more in control. Writing makes me feel better.’
Cornwell was born in Miami in 1956, and after graduating from college in North Carolina worked as a reporter at a local paper. She later joined the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, where she formed an interest in forensic pathology. The first Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, appeared in 1990 and was an immediate hit. During the initial period of success Cornwell describes herself as ‘a cocky little person’, steeped in the more extreme forms of religion and Republicanism.
George W Bush was a family friend – she called him ‘Big George’ – and she grew up next door to the evangelist Billy Graham.
‘I was surrounded by very right-wing people in very right-wing places like Virginia,’ she says. ‘As a result, I was very sure of myself. Life was pretty simple: things were either wrong or right. I really p***** people off, actually. Eventually I said to myself, “Be careful what you say. People aren’t picking up the latest Scarpetta novel to find out who you’re voting for. They don’t give a c***. Shut up!”’
Flesh And Blood unfolds in the shadow of the Boston marathon bombings, but Cornwell is aware that it can be dangerous for an author to engage too closely with reality. Her fellow American novelist John Grisham recently got into hot water by claiming that some people who watch child pornography online should be treated more leniently.
‘I saw that,’ says Cornwell, ‘and you have to be extremely mindful of how things will be perceived. Even if you know what you mean, and you might even be right, you’d better be careful how you put that out there.
‘Everyone has to a right to their opinion, but it’s important to know that there will be consequences.’
These days she’s an Obama sympathiser who holds liberal views on capital punishment – ‘it’s not a deterrent, it simply moves us all closer to barbarism’ – and wants ‘to be part of a group of people who are humane and inclusive’.
Love played its part in this transition. Cornwell married Gruber in 2005, though accepting her own sexuality was a painful process. ‘Being gay was shameful, verboten,’ she explains. ‘ Going back to my childhood, you’d go to hell for something like that, so it was difficult.’ Why did she finally decide to embrace it? ‘I want to stand up for what I am. Whatever happens, you must live an honest life. That covert way of living sends a silent message of judgment and shame. It’s a risk. I may have lost a lot of readers when it came out, but if people don’t like that I’m gay, that’s too bad.’
One stout pillar of conservative America that Cornwell hasn’t renounced is the gun. ‘There’s not much I haven’t shot,’ she drawls, deadpan. ‘ I’m not one of these
people who are rabid about being anti-guns, but there’s no way on earth you’re going to tell me not to have a firearm to protect my home and myself.’
Her stance is partly attributable to that dramatic upbringing – ‘I grew up with guns’ – and partly to her ingrained fearfulness. Having survived an abusive childhood, a quarter of a century spent wading in the murky waters of criminality has left her with a stark appraisal of human nature. ‘A lot of components go into creating a monster: cruelty, savagery, callousness. Do we all have that in us? I suspect we do. We can all do pretty bad things if we don’t pay attention.’
As an adult Cornwell has endured stalkers and deploys heavy security at personal appearances. ‘When I got famous people started cruising my house, parking across the street,’ she says.
‘I had to move behind gates. So there’s no way I’m going to sit in front of a line of people at a shop- ping mall and have nobody there to protect me.’
Queen of the airport novel she may be, but Cornwell has not always been a critics’ favourite. While the New York Times praised her last novel, Dust, for its ‘more meditative mood’, the Washington Post has complained that ‘she can write no book so bad that it won’t instantly appear on the bestseller list’.
‘Oh, I don’t care!’ says Cornwell breezily. ‘And who knows? Maybe it’s fair.’
The reviews may be mixed, but Cornwell almost single-handedly popularised forensic crime
Scarpetta, however, has only ever existed on the page, though perhaps not for much longer. ‘ I’m keeping my fingers crossed,’ she says, confirming that Angelina Jolie is in the frame to play the role on film.
‘The hardest thing has been getting the right story. People have to remember that when this all began there was no such thing as a forensic thriller; now forensics are absolutely everywhere. We have to figure out the best approach to introduce this character to the world on screen with a terrific story.’
Cornwell clearly identifies strongly with Scarpetta. When she talks about the character’s emotional evolution over the past 25 years – ‘she’s loosened up a bit, sometimes she’s even funny!’ – she could easily be talking about herself.
‘I do love and admire her,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I could ever kill her off, though I might stop one day. We’ll find her office empty, and she’ll be off down the hall doing something else.’
At which point, Cornwell must surely settle down to write her memoirs. She suggests calling them All Of A Sudden, her favourite phrase when writing stories as a child. A Life Less Ordinary might be more apt.