Her crime novels are based on obsessive detail and gory research. But, as writer Patricia Cornwell tells Carole Cadwalladr, her own back story is one of the most frightening of all
Bad things happen to good people. That’s what I learn from Patricia Cornwell’s latest novel, Depraved Heart, the 23rd she’s written featuring Dr Kay Scarpetta, the cool-headed, genre-busting forensic pathologist Cornwell invented back in 1990 before forensic pathology – and CSI – had colonised all TV schedules. Sometimes really bad things. That’s what else I learn: that when psychopaths are involved, you start thinking in italics. A lot.
But then, it would be easy to treat Patricia Cornwell with a certain amount of italicised irony. The website Gawker, in describing her, suggested that “The world needs more out lesbian true-crime authors who pilot helicopters, are obsessed with Jack the Ripper and maintained a warm friendship with Billy Graham’s wife for many years.”
She is all those things. A 59-year-old blonde-coiffed action woman with a strong southern accent and a rapid-fire delivery who does our entire interview in a wetsuit – a clone of one Scarpetta wore in the books. She is that rare mythical beast: a writer who makes money from books. Lots of money. So much money from the equally gung-ho Scarpetta, that she failed to notice for a long time that her accountants had defrauded her of more than $50m.
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But then, it would be easy to treat Patricia Cornwell with a certain amount of italicised irony. The website Gawker, in describing her, suggested that “The world needs more out lesbian true-crime authors who pilot helicopters, are obsessed with Jack the Ripper and maintained a warm friendship with Billy Graham’s wife for many years.”
She is all those things. A 59-year-old blonde-coiffed action woman with a strong southern accent and a rapid-fire delivery who does our entire interview in a wetsuit – a clone of one Scarpetta wore in the books. She is that rare mythical beast: a writer who makes money from books. Lots of money. So much money from the equally gung-ho Scarpetta, that she failed to notice for a long time that her accountants had defrauded her of more than $50m.
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