If you want to write with power keep things vital, says Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell literally created a genre when she published her first book Postmortem in 1990. It was the first thriller series to really place forensic science front and centre as the way of solving cases. If it was not for her creating and developing the character of the cool-headed forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, there would be no Bones, no Rizolli & Isles and certainly no CSI. Asking Cornwell if she knew that she was the originator of such a burgeoning genre, she says: “I can’t say that I did know I was starting something new with Postmortem; it was my fourth attempt. I wrote three earlier books, each one taking a year and then being rejected.”

Cornwell went to work at a morgue to research the book she wanted to write. She thought that she would only visit a few times to understand what a medical examiner does. However, she worked there longer than she expected. 

She says: “Well, if you told me that six years later, I would be a full-time employee there and still not published I probably would have had a nervous breakdown. That was not how I saw my life going. But what happened was, first of all there was so much to learn, and I didn’t get published, so I had to have a job, so I just kept going there. It was almost as if Scarpetta knew that I needed that graduate school training. 

“The very first time I wrote about Scarpetta was probably in about 1984, when I made my first attempt at writing a crime novel. She was a minor character, and [in] each book I wrote after that she got stronger. It was like she was basically saying, ‘How long is it going to take you to realise that I need to be in charge?' And I went, ‘Oh, let’s try that.’ That became Postmortem.”

Twenty-eight books later and Dr Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist living and working in Northern Virginia, is still solving crimes. In the latest book Identity Unknown she has been called to make sense of the bizarre death of an old lover — acclaimed astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Sal Giordano. It appears he was dropped out of the sky by a UFO (or as they call it in the book a UAP — an unidentified aerial phenomenon). 

She has her trusted sidekicks helping her out. First there’s Pete Marino, a former homicide detective that Scarpetta works closely with and who is in love with her but eventually married her sister Dorothy (messy!), her niece Lucy — an FBI agent and a helicopter pilot — and her husband Benton, a consultant for the FBI who knows lots of things. 

In Identity Unknown, it is taken as a fact that there are extraterritorial beings and that it's a possibility that Sal was murdered by a bunch of green men. Cornwell says that she doesn’t know exactly where these ideas for her books come from, but that she is always researching and finding out new things: “I start with something that makes me curious and oftentimes it has to do with the paranormal or supernatural; for example in the last book it was the whole notion of Bigfoot. There were a lot of stories I was seeing in the news about alleged sightings. So it made me want to start looking into that and ask if this is real? In this new book there’s been so much in the news about UAPs that got me into thinking what is this all about and what does this mean. I’ve some of my own experiences of things that could not be explained easily. 

“When I was doing research at Nasa in 2016, for two space thrillers I ended up writing, the more I learned the more my hair started standing up on the back of my head. It left me wondering what this was really about. And the experience I describe in the book of Scarpetta being in a storage room and coming across sealed classified files about Roswell is actually based on my own. I was in the storage area in the same museum she is working in and I was being given a tour, and they had gone into the back in this private area to get out a piece of skull from Abraham Lincoln's assassination and the bullet that killed him to show me. While I was looking around I saw this file drawer that had all this do-not-open tape around it and when I looked at it said Roswell and I just pointed at it. The look on my face that said ‘whaaaaat!’ and the curator looked like she'd been struck by lightning and she dismissed it as just a joke. I was with my partner Staci at that time and we both said to each other later ‘she didn’t act like that was a joke.’ I don’t know, but I have heard stories from investigators who have seen strange things in the desert, and there are probably loads of people who can tell you more. But this opened up my mind to ‘what if?’ What could look like if someone was killed by an extraterrestrial, and is that what really happened here or is it something else?” 

Cornwell explains she believes that the supernatural is merely unexplained science. “I’m not the only one who has said that by far, but I think magic is unexplained science. The more we learn about science the more we learn about what we are capable of. There is a lot that can be done that looks supernatural but there is a scientific explanation. I believe that there is [one] for everything. It's just that we don’t necessarily know that science — for us it’s miraculous. We are bound by the laws of nature, [it's] just we don’t know what all those laws are.”

Scarpetta — the TV series

Cornwell’s books will be an upcoming American television series created by Liz Sarnoff for Amazon Prime Video. Called Scarpetta, it’s produced by Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis, who will also star in it. Filming is taking place now, so it should hit our screens in a year or two.

Cornwell says: “Honestly I can’t say how I am going to feel about it until I see the series. I have been involved in it from the beginning. Jamie Lee Curtis first started discussing it with me four years ago. She has been the driving force and her involvement has also attracted other wonderful talent, not the least of which is Nicole Kidman.

I have accepted that this is just a translation of what I do and readers cannot expect it to be like the books. It an art form all on its own and I realised it is based on what I have done, but it is also other people’s now. It's not just mine. Don’t expect it to be identical, because that’s not possible, and it shouldn’t be. 

“The weird thing is that the book I’m writing now, I can’t help but think of Jamie Lee Curtis when I am writing about Dorothy, and I think it’s making it even better. You know when I think about Jamie playing Dorothy it just makes Dorothy all the more fun and funny and awful at the same time. It’s going to be awesome. And I can’t wait to see what Nicole brings to Scarpetta. I know these characters, but I’ll know them better when they’re known by other people.”

10 facts about Patricia Cornwell

1. She has sold over 120 million books in 36 languages in more than 120 countries.
2. It took several years and attempts to sell her first novel. Postmortem was penned while Cornwell worked as a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. It was published in 1990. 
3. Before that, in 1979, she was a journalist at the Charlotte Observer and received praise for her series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte.
4. Besides the Scarpetta series, she has authored two books on Jack the Ripper, two cookbooks (Food to Die For and Scarpetta’s Winter Table), a children’s book (Life’s Little Fable), and a biography of Ruth Graham (wife of evangelist Billy Graham).
5. Cornwell felt that she was called upon to investigate Jack the Ripper murders. She spent $7m forensically investigating it. Her book Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert is a follow-up to 2002’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper — Case Closed, and discusses additional evidence and new insights on how she believes Sickert was the Ripper. 
6. Cornwell lives in Boston with her wife Staci Gruber. She was born in Miami and grew up in North Carolina. 
7. The 68-year-old still rides motorbikes, flies helicopters and scuba dives. She says: “I keep up with that, especially since I have my character Lucy flying helicopters. I also enjoy doing it. It’s part of staying vital. You got to keep doing some of the stuff you have always done and you don’t want to slowly stop doing any of those things, even though they take a lot of effort. Like flying a helicopter. It takes a lot of energy and if you don't get to do it often it is daunting. I get a little nervous getting ready to take off in this thing and I wonder ‘Do I remember how to do this?’ It’s important to do that, so you gotta feel alive and vital or you are not going to write in a way that has power.”
8. She cofounded the Conservation Scientist Chair at the Harvard University Art Museums. She appears as a forensic consultant on CNN and serves as a member of Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital’s National Council, where she advocates for psychiatric research.
9. In 2013, she won a lawsuit against a firm in New York (Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP) for mismanaging her money. Cornwell said the company was negligent in handling her finances and cost her millions in losses or unaccounted-for revenue. She was awarded more than $50m in damages.
10. Cornwell made a cameo appearance on the episode of TV show Criminal Minds titled “True Genius”.