Scarpetta author Patricia Cornwell: ‘I know instantly if something is dangerous’

There was a time, not so long ago, when bestselling thriller-writer Patricia Cornwell thought her fictional forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta would never come to the screen.

So many pitches, talks, scripts and A-list actors interested in the role – Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie included – have come and gone since the award-winning American writer’s first Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, was published in 1990, the first to win all major crime awards in a single year.

The author, who has sold over 120 million books worldwide, had originally wanted Jodie Foster to play Scarpetta – she got a flat refusal many years ago – and had lost all hope until five years ago when her good friend, actor Jamie Lee Curtis, who has a production company, got things moving.

“Nobody was chasing after her (Scarpetta) in Hollywood any more and I’d given up. I thought, this is never going to happen. So I thought, great, Jamie, you go ahead, give it a shot. You could make it a cartoon at this point and I’d be grateful, but I really didn’t think it would happen,” Cornwell recalls in her Southern twang.

Yet it did. The Scarpetta TV series adaptation starring Nicole Kidman as the forensic sleuth and Curtis as her feisty older sister, Dorothy, can now be seen on Amazon Prime Video – Cornwell has a cameo appearance – and a second series is in the making.

“I don’t feel that everybody deserves to play Scarpetta. She’s a role model. She is a crusader. There are so many people that wish they knew her in real life.

“I remember one time I rolled up to a scene of a serial murder, and one of the victim’s relatives came out to me and said, ‘Thank God, Scarpetta has arrived to help us!’ And I said, ‘If only that were true, but it’s just little old me’.

“That’s how people feel about her. They want her there when they’ve lost a loved one. So not everyone deserves to play that, but Nicole Kidman does.”

Cornwell, 69, recalls her introductions to Hollywood’s finest in her memoir, True Crime, a life story which is just as colourful as her fiction.

The Miami-born author has witnessed autopsies, is more than familiar with the morgue, learned how to fly helicopters because Lucy, Scarpetta’s tech-savvy niece, is a qualified helicopter pilot, has learned to scuba dive and been on firing ranges to try out the latest weaponry used by her imaginary killers.

This attention to detail is also evident in her memoir, as she recalls her unhappy childhood with neglectful parents. Her father, a lawyer, walked out on Christmas Day 1961, ignoring five-year-old Patricia’s desperate attempts to cling to his leg.

Lonely and often considered a nuisance, she would make up imaginary friends like Mr Owl. Her mother, she recalls, was largely absent, either physically or mentally.

“I only have maybe one or two images of her from the first almost seven years that I was in Florida. I have tons of images of my father, but almost none of her, because she was mostly in her room depressed, or she would go somewhere or go see my grandmother, or she was just absent.”

After her father left, her mother moved with Patricia and her brothers Jim and John to an evangelical community in Montreat, North Carolina, down the road from famous preacher Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth – who became a parental figure in Patricia’s life.

The children pretty much looked after themselves as their mother suffered from depression, spending time in a psychiatric hospital, at which point they were fostered by an abusive woman who bullied and terrified her.

Overcoming harsh obstacles gave her the ambition to become a journalist and an award-winning police reporter, but she quit her job after being raped by a city official – which she never reported for fear of it ruining her career – when she was working for the Charlotte Observer.

“I was so afraid of running into this person who would follow me sometimes in his car.”

She went on to work at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, which would give her plenty of material for her books.

The public perception may be that she likes to go to the morgue, to watch autopsies, but she notes that there has been a price to pay.

“You cross a line, a boundary you can never go back to. It’s a double edge because on the one hand if the things that I write about were made up and didn’t really happen in life there would be no point in wallowing in such morbid mire.

“But these are real things. I want to know the terrain, what’s under me and that includes the serial killer around the block, or if you get a bad feeling on an elevator don’t get on it, or that the worst thing you can ever do if someone tries to abduct you in a parking lot is go with them. Have them kill you right there, because what they’re going to do with you somewhere else is so much worse.

“I am an AI intelligence whack job full of morbid tales of what might happen to you if you’re not careful.”

She’s not scared, she says, but she is vigilant.

“I know instantly if something is dangerous. I’ve got a database that has created its own algorithm that makes connections of ‘The scaffolding is going to do that’ or ‘I didn’t like the way that person looked’ or ‘What was that noise?’ I know all the nuances of what will kill people.”

She avoids big crowds which, if an emergency happens, you couldn’t get out, “especially these days where people open fire everywhere”, and you wouldn’t catch her in a deserted area where there are no eyes or ears.

She still has bodyguards for protection at public events, but notes: “I try to be safe and smart within reason, but not crazy. I don’t have gun turrets and bullet-proof windows.”

Over the years her private life has been picked at and probed. She married her English professor Charlie Cornwell in 1980, but divorced him nine years later and went on to meet and marry Dr Staci Gruber, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who she lives with in Boston. They have been together for almost 22 years. What’s the secret?

“You have to have someone that is like your soulmate and best friend and somebody devoted to helping you be your very best, as you are to helping them do the same. Plus, Staci’s never boring. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

Cornwell has a new Scarpetta novel coming out next year and agrees that with all the technology available, there are more hurdles for the writer.

“The hardest thing is creating crimes where someone doesn’t get caught in five minutes. I have become the artful tech dodger, where I have to figure out a way to dodge around why cameras didn’t pick it up and why a cell signal is not being emitted.”

Satellites, hologram technology, AI, avatars and fakery are all challenges.

True Crime by Patricia Cornwell is published by Sphere, priced £25. Available now