Chapter Fifty-Nine
Patricia Cornwell
A Life of Crime
To say that Patricia Cornwell is a force to be reckoned with—whether at a crime scene, in a forensics lab, at her keyboard, or on your bookshelf—is a grotesque understatement. Not only is the novelist touted as the world’s number one best-selling crime writer, she’s become a forensics consultant in her own right through the course of researching what she calls her “nonfiction fiction” series featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. A founding member of the National Forensic Academy and founder of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, in addition to influential roles at other respected institutions, Cornwell is arguably as well known today for her books—a staple of bestseller lists (and airport kiosks) everywhere since her series began with 1990’s Postmortem—as she is for her advocacy of psychiatric research, criminal justice, literacy, and animal rights. She’s also been credited with whetting the American public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the forensic genre, the popularity of her series spurring shows like CSI and Cold Case Files.
Some attribute her success to a determination that took root during her childhood years in foster care. Others say her steadfast persona is a reflection of her start as a journalist, her hands-on approach to research, and her adult life lived in the public eye—she’s drawn notice from the start, with her debut book, a biography of longtime family friend (and wife of the prominent preacher) Ruth Bell Graham; her self-financed investigation into the identity of Jack the Ripper, culminating in the controversial book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed; her relationship with FBI agent Margo Bennett, whose husband was convicted of his wife’s attempted murder after allegedly discovering her affair with Cornwell; her marriage first to Charles Cornwell, a professor seventeen years her senior, and presently to Harvard psychiatry instructor Staci Ann Gruber; and her successful defamation suit against a writer who accused her of plagiarism and waged an Internet war against her character.
One thing is certain: Cornwell isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. And neither is Scarpetta. A film is in development at Fox, with Angelina Jolie attached to the project, and Cornwell’s twenty-fourth book in the series, Chaos, was released in November 2016.
It’s not easy to picture the crimes you write about, or to imagine people capable of committing them. How much can you afford to immerse yourself in your stories? Is there a way to maintain a distance as you work?
Yes, and I think that is a judgment call that’s different for every individual. You know the saying: If you’re going to dine with the devil, use a long spoon. We all have to know what our boundaries are, and certainly my boundaries are much broader than a lot of people’s, because this world I write about is something I’ve found extremely interesting, going back to the earliest days of my development as a writer, when I was a journalist [on] the police beat. I always wanted to know: What happens to the body when it disappears from the crime scene? Where’s it going? What are they doing with it? This was in the late seventies, and nobody talked about that sort of thing back then. But I was fascinated by the body and what you could tell from it.
And I think the reason I’m comfortable with what people would call “gruesome” is I look at it as an excavation. When I was a kid, one of my dreams was to be an archaeologist, and if you think about it, working a crime scene is a reconstruction of a past life, and a death, and trying to figure out everything you possibly can from the artifacts that are left behind, whether they’re injuries, or the way they’re dressed, or a fleck of paint, or a fiber—all of these have a story to tell. That is what I find so intriguing, and that tends to overwhelm the gross factor. Because, yes, crime scenes and the morgue are offensive to all of your sensibilities. But for me, the idea of figuring out what happened is far more compelling than my repulsion by the unfortunate aspects of it.
So I know my boundaries. For example, if a pathologist said, “Have you ever done a Y incision on a dead body? Would you like to try?” I’d say, “Absolutely not.” There are things I won’t do, because to me it’s over the line. Maybe the farthest I would go is to, if I were studying a bite mark done postmortem, for example, bite on a piece of raw chicken and then brush my teeth really well. I [once] went to a tattoo parlor, had a turkey roaster tattooed, and then did forensic tests on it for Black Notice. So I do things, but I have limits.
One thing I’ve always been careful of is I don’t want to spend a lot of time with the people who commit these types of crimes. I’ve interviewed people on death row and been to prisons, but a little of that goes a long way. Direct exposure to what I call “monsters” disturbs me. It doesn’t feel safe when I write about them. I wrote in the third-person point of view for a while, and when you do that, you have to take on the perspective of the killer—and I found it was really uncomfortable, so I don’t do that anymore.
You’ve said you don’t know what’s going on with your characters’ personal lives until you start to write. How much do you know about your central, crime-based plot before you begin? Do you have an outline?
No, I’m a very organic writer. I started out doing poetry when I was young, and I think I have a little bit of a poetic approach to writing a book, where I start with an image. For example, in Red Mist, I knew Scarpetta was going to have to go to Savannah, but I had no idea what was going to happen. And then I just continued to have this image of her driving this old white van through the swamps on this hot summer day. I thought, You don’t drive something like that. I must have mixed images in my head. But she wouldn’t get out of it. I kept seeing it, and I thought, You know what, just go with it. But I sure as hell don’t know what she’s doing in this piece of crap—it’s not even a rental car! And that becomes a very important part of the story: what she was doing in that, and who it belongs to, and what’s in store for her—she’s been lured into sort of a trap. So I basically started spinning this whole story based on this image.
Sometimes it goes really smoothly, and sometimes I get stuck. But I can’t imagine outlining a book and then just sitting down and writing it. I think it would lose its emotional being—the effervescence, the sparkle. It would get flat, I’m afraid, if I tried to do it that way. But I know that works for some people. Everybody has to do what works for them.
How much do your writing and researching processes overlap, then? Your plots hinge on those factual details.
They’re inextricably connected: [Research] is where I get my ideas, and I continue to do research as I’m writing a book, and it all evolves together. I get an idea, and then when I look into it, that gives me other ideas. Sometimes one single thing somebody shows me on a research trip becomes the genesis of the entire story. …
One of the things that inspired The Bone Bed is that I was invited to go on a dinosaur dig, and I went. So what I would say to writers is: Go out and do something. Don’t just read other people’s books. Go have adventures! When you read Hemingway, you know he’s had that beer, he’s eaten that food, he shot that elephant. Now, I’m not recommending people go around shooting elephants, but go out and do something. Get real-life experiences you can describe.
What’s your daily writing routine?
I try to start first thing in the morning, when my mind is clear, and work as long as I can. In the early stages of a book, that might only be four or five hours. Then there might be times I’m working eight to ten hours a day. I get the most done by secluding myself. My partner is very understanding about my running away from home, because I sometimes just have to go. I set up an office in a hotel—on the water, that’s my favorite—and I isolate. Then I’m just living with what I’m doing, and even when I’m not writing it, I’m thinking about it, and I can get an incredible amount of work done in two or three weeks. So I tend to write in spurts.
One thing I’d advise is: Treat your writing like a relationship and not a job. Because if it’s a relationship, even if you only have one hour in a day, you might just sit down and open up your last chapter because it’s like visiting your friend. What do you do when you miss somebody? You pick up the phone. You keep that connection established. If you do that with your writing, then you tend to stay in that moment, and you don’t forget what you’re doing. Usually the last thing I do before I go to bed is sit at my computer and just take a look at the last thing I was writing. It’s almost like I tuck my characters in at night. I may not do much, but I’m reminding myself: This is the world I’m living in right now, and I’ll go to sleep and I’ll see you in the morning.
A lot of writers feel locked into a style after they’ve established a series, but you’ve changed things like tense and POV. How have you found that freedom?
You have to be willing to take risks, especially if you’re going to be out here for a long time. If you get bored or frustrated, then your readers are going to be bored and frustrated. I’m not saying change is always good, but it may be necessary. When I finished The Last Precinct, in 1999, I said, “I’m banging on the walls of [Scarpetta’s] skull. This is so confining, writing from her point of view. I don’t think I can do this anymore.” So I made a decision to try writing the next [book] from the third person. And I needed to do that, to become a better writer and to sort of broaden my stage. But after a while, I realized I like it better writing from her point of view, so I’ve gone back to it. And technology has changed so much in the last decade that now you can write from somebody’s point of view and still take them lots of other places and have them see different things because of surveillance cameras, the Internet, and all that. …
You’re going to have one side love that you did something different, and then another side that doesn’t like what you do. [But] you have to adapt to the world that you’re in. If you want to stay viable, you have to.
You have experts review your manuscripts before they’re published. Why is it so important to you that the facts in your stories be meticulously accurate? Are you ever tempted to take creative license?
I do take creative license sometimes—I invent things that aren’t out there yet but I know will be—but there’s no reason to make gratuitous mistakes. If you get a forensic instrument wrong because you’re too lazy to check it out—that I won’t do, and I think that goes back to my starting out as a journalist. I have rubbed shoulders so much with people in those professions, that out of respect for them I try to get it right.
I write a sort of nonfiction fiction. I weave stories out of factual material, and that is grounding to me—it’s the tether that holds my balloon in place so I don’t go drifting off into chaos. That doesn’t mean everybody has to do that. But I do think that if you’re trying to capture a certain world, such as law or medicine or forensics or a historical novel, there’s no reason not to try to get the facts correct, to do that research. And I think if people go to the trouble to do it, it’ll become more vivid to them, and they’ll write better stories as a result.
You’ve been credited for starting the rash of forensic-based books, TV shows, movies, you name it. Do you see yourself as having spurred your own genre?
Yeah, Scarpetta really opened the door to what I call the forensic genre—and it’s not that I was smart enough to think of that, it’s just that I inadvertently threw myself into the research, because this world fascinates me. And obviously people in the entertainment business realized there was enormous potential there.
That became the tail chasing the dog in my case. I had to adapt what I do, because of what people see every day. I’m not going to spend ten pages describing what a scanning electron microscope is, because people see them on television now. I don’t need to tell you twenty pages of what the morgue looks like when you’re watching reality shows that take place in a morgue. So I’ve had to adapt how I tell my stories, but also I have to always keep one lap ahead of the competition. Whatever they come out with on some show, I’m going to make sure I do research and know something they don’t know, and [put] it in my next book. And then that gets recycled in some TV show, and then I do the next book and show you something else new, and it all ends up on television anyway—which is the way it works. I mean, I don’t own forensics. But it created a situation I never would’ve imagined. I’m like someone who’s running faster all the time and trying not to look back. Run, run, run, they’re gaining on you!
This is one of the reasons, too, that I switched back to Scarpetta’s point of view: The one thing I do better than anybody, and nobody has ever repeated, is this one character. I don’t care who else is out there; there’s not another Scarpetta. She is my gold—all of my characters are. So I have become much more character driven, and much more about what’s going on in their lives. Of course they’re going to be extremely technically sophisticated, and I’ll never cheat anybody on that, but the main characters aren’t forensics and science and medicine anymore.
Some novelists are constantly reminding people their work is fiction, but you’re often consulted as a forensics expert. When did you become okay with that distinction being blurred? And do you think it’s an advantage for fiction writers to become experts on their subjects?
I do think it is. I’m a strange mix. I started out as a poet and an artist, but I also have this other side where I absorb this information. If I’m at a crime scene or an autopsy, I completely understand what these professionals are talking about, and I feel like I’m one of them, while at the same time I know who they really are as opposed to me. I always give them the respect they deserve—I don’t ever mess with the real thing, and I never am presumptuous—but over the years, these are sort of my colleagues. When I go riding with the detectives, we’re sort of working the case together. I never cross boundaries in a way that’s inappropriate, but it’s just become natural for me to live what I do—again, knowing the limits.
And the truth is, that’s what’s fun. It makes it fun for me. The biggest enemy when you have a series is that you get bored with it. …
One thing I’d remind writers is: Writing is hard work. It isn’t just sitting around fantasizing, or having a drink with somebody and talking about how cool it would be if you wrote a story. It’s work. And if you don’t make it work, and you don’t devote yourself to it, you’re not going to write anything very good. I think writers who consistently produce, they’re going to tell you they don’t always feel like doing it. It’s the hardest thing, to sit down at that blank screen.
And research isn’t easy. But if you’re going to have a character who’s a musician, you should learn everything about that you possibly can. When I decided Lucy was going to be a pilot, I started taking lessons—how could I describe what that feels like unless I’ve sat in that seat? That’s important: I want you to see it, smell it, taste it. I want you to go through the looking glass of the words on the page and be in the world I’m describing. And the audience can do it painlessly. But those of us who create that have to work very hard for it.
You once said, “I am just as insecure for my new book as I was for my first one.” Is that still true today?
Absolutely. I always think, I’m not sure I can do this—what if it’s not any good? Oh my God, what a terrible paragraph—erase it before somebody sees it! [Laughs.] I don’t think I’ll ever get over that. A part of me knows I can pull it out somehow, but it’s daunting. It gets easier and harder at the same time. I know the characters better, but that’s also a drawback, because you want to do something new with them.
I think a little insecurity is a good thing. I’ll be honest: When somebody has written their first novel and they tell me how fantastic it is, I know it’s probably not very good. It’s usually the person who says, “I don’t know, I’m not sure what I think, but I’m afraid to do much else to it because I don’t want to ruin it,” and then you look at the thing and go, “Now that is really special.” So it’s not bad to be a little insecure. It makes you work harder and pay attention.
It’s like when people tell me, “It must be so relaxing to fly a helicopter,” and I say, “If your pilot says that, do not get in!” That should not be relaxing—you should be hypervigilant and alert. Why? Because you’re a little bit insecure. Because you’re in this very powerful machine that’s off the ground.
When you sit in that chair, that should be your cockpit. You should be hyper-, hypervigilant, and alert, and a little bit nervous about what you’re doing, and you’ll do a good job.
You’ve been referred to as “a woman who writes like a man.” How can writers sidestep labels like those?
If you worry about labels, about what a publisher’s going to think, you’re worrying about the wrong things. You should be telling your truth and pulling it out of your soul. You should go see something and interpret it in a way nobody ever has. … You should be worried that you can’t describe a full moon in a way that somebody hasn’t one hundred times before you. The poetry of what you do, the imagination of it, and the startling enlightenment of what you might present to an audience, that should be what you’re worried about.
You had three books rejected before Postmortem, which was also rejected before finding a publisher. What can you say to struggling writers today?
Quitting can’t be an option. You don’t become a writer—you are one. And if you really are a writer, it’s like telling a songbird to shut up—you can’t.
You have to be willing to be bad at something to be good at it. You will never be good at writing the first time you try, any more than Nadal hit a tennis ball the way he does now the first time he picked up a racket. You’re going to trip over your own feet, you’re going to have awkward sentences and terrible dialogue, and the only way you get better is to just do it all the time. And if this is the inevitability of how you express yourself, you’re still going to get up after failures. Some people are lucky, and their first book gets published and is well received. For me it took a lot of warm-ups, and those books should have been rejected. They were a learning process; I would never try to publish them today. And Postmortem did not deserve to be rejected by practically every major publishing house before it was accepted, but it was because it was so different [that] people didn’t know what to do with it. I think something that’s unique is going to get passed over a lot of times—and then it gets published by some little offbeat press and takes the world by storm. …
I worked in the morgue for six years, because I had so many failures. And Scarpetta knew I needed to do that to be qualified to write about her. She says, “I hate to do this to you, but you don’t have a clue, girl. You need to be down here every day going to the labs, going to the morgue, going to crime scenes, riding with the detectives, going to court. And then, maybe, you can begin to have a concept of what it’s like to be me, and then I’ll let you tell my story.” And she still does that to me.