Patricia Cornwell’s best-selling crime novels are based on obsessive detail and gory research. But, as she reveals to 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: "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. Cornwell took them to court and the verdict was breach of fiduciary duty, and she was awarded damages of more than $50 million, though the case is now under appeal. "I'm the first to point out that I'm not thrifty," she says, though it hasn't made much dent in her lifestyle. She still drives a Ferrari and pilots a helicopter and lives comfortably in Boston with her wife, Staci Gruber, a Harvard neuroscientist. Think of her as an older, feistier American version of J. K. Rowling with a set of motorbike leathers.
I come to understand the italics. Because if her work majors in imagining creative new ways bad people will try and get you, it's because bad people really have tried to come and get her. The latest Scarpetta stretches the envelope of credulity - not least because of the Byzantine back story that has to account for the plots of the last 22 novels - but Cornwell's own story is far more compelling and terrifying, not least because it's true.
Why the particular interest in psychopaths, I want to know. Is it as a narrative device? "No, it's fear," says Cornwell. "It's because I grew up with terrible fear. I grew up in such a frightening way."
She was just 5 when her father walked out of the family home in Florida on Christmas Day. But that was only the start: "You find you are wandering the streets by yourself in Miami because no one is looking after you. And then you get molested by a patrolman.
"He started with the kissing and the touching and putting his hand in my pocket. He found a hole and he was just putting his finger through the hole when my brother rolled around on his bicycle. He was about to pull me into his car. We found out later that he was a convicted paedophile. I would probably have ended up in one of the canals down there. I would probably be dead."
Cornwell testified before a grand jury. Her mother, worrying about the safety of her children and having discovered the teachings of Billy Graham, moved Cornwell and her brothers to Graham's home town in rural North Carolina. It was there that Cornwell says her mother started unravelling. She suffered a psychotic episode and was detained in a psychiatric hospital. "It was just terrifying seeing somebody destabilise in front of you when you're 9 years old." During her mother's illness, Cornwell was fostered by a woman who bullied and terrified her. Later, as a teenager, she suffered from severe anorexia.
Patricia Cornwell in the morgue at the VA medical examiner's office, where she worked before becoming a novelist. Photo / Getty Images
"A select few of us come into this world not bothered by gruesomeness," says Scarpetta in the opening pages of Depraved Heart. "In fact, we're drawn to it."
It's not clear that Patricia Cornwell came into the world that way but she's certainly learned it as she's gone along. In her fiction, she invented a new genre: she revelled in the gory details, but through Scarpetta she expounded them in a cool, precise, scientific way. She respected the victims. And strove to bring them justice.
In person, Cornwell has a similar openness and forthright demeanour. Maybe it's the haircut, but I can't help thinking there's a touch of the Jane Fonda about her. "I will not be governed by fear," she says. It's her personal motto. And in book after book, she's had Dr Kay Scarpetta - a blonde, blue-eyed alter ego - confront wrongdoers and expose abuses of power.
A lot of novelists shy away from autobiographical interpretations of their work, and while Cornwell will point out all the ways they're different (Scarpetta is a scientist, Cornwell adds up on her fingers), when I suggest that she seems to be rewriting the past in her novels - only this time, making sure everything turns out all right - she agrees immediately.
"Constantly. It's exactly what I'm doing. I'm supposed to be writing my memoirs and I keep going, 'I kind of already am. I do it in every book.' That's what artists do. We take things and filter it through us and it comes out in a different form."
Through Scarpetta, Cornwell has confronted her fears and overcome them. Within minutes of us meeting in an airy Boston apartment overlooking the waterfront, she's demonstrating how she tested which knives Jack the Ripper might have used.
Jack the Ripper has been a long-time obsession of Cornwell's. A decade ago, she wrote a book in which she points the finger at Walter Sickert, a painter of the period. And the apartment, next to the home she and Staci share, is her "crime library", filled with objects she's gathered in the course of her search. There's all sorts of Ripper-related material and framed Sickerts and decades' worth of original Times newspapers in bound volumes, as well as modern forensic kits and a human skeleton. "That's her pal," her sister-in-law Mary - who works for Cornwell - tells me.
Knives, daggers and great curving swords are laid out across a table and Cornwell picks them up in turn to show them to me. "There are only a few pages of one autopsy report," she says about the Ripper's victims. "The big question is what inflicted the kind of injuries they had. So I went and bought all the different kinds of knives you'd have been able to buy in the period, and I would experiment to see what would be the most likely weapon that could cut through so many layers of clothing, the throat, disembowelling. I'm sorry," she says and demonstrates by stabbing a dagger into the air. "But you have to think of these things. I experimented. I'd buy a big old piece of rump roast and wrap it in wool."
A what?
"A big side of beef that you get in the grocery store. I would wrap it with fabric of the period and then try all this stuff, cutting into it," she says.
She picks up a Victorian dagger from the table and demonstrates how Jack the Ripper might have cut open his victims. It's this attention to detail - a dogged, quasi-scientific approach right down to dressing a dead cow in period materials and mutilating it - that is Cornwell's hallmark. She started out as a journalist, but when she chose to try her hand at crime writing, she decided to do her research.
For most people, this might be a site visit and an interview, but Cornwell wanted to know exactly what the forensic scientists did and how they did it. She visited a laboratory, "and I just thought: 'Wow, there is so much to learn here.' And I said: 'I will do anything you will let me to be useful if you just let me hang around."' She started out as a volunteer, but then took a permanent position and ended up working there for six years. Six years!
"I didn't set out to work there for six years. I honestly was so dumb, I thought when I got there I would do this for a few months and then write this great novel. Well, I wrote one and nobody wanted it. I wrote a second and nobody wanted it. I wrote the third and nobody wanted it. And then I went back to the newspaper to see if I could get a job. I thought: 'You've really failed. Like usual. Loser, loser, loser.'
"Nobody was writing about that sort of stuff back then. I kept being told, nobody wants to read about laboratories or morgues. And a woman who does it? No, thank you! Wow. Well, I guess that turned out not to be true."
She sold the first one, Postmortem. And the rest is history, or at least CSI. Scarpetta was a pioneer. Now, in a neat turn of metafiction, the character grumbles her job has become harder because juries have watched too many TV shows. "I know," says Cornwell. "I'm literally chasing my own tail. But Scarpetta just turned 25 and I can't write the same thing now that I wrote in 1990. We don't live in the same world. It's not even similar."
It's also made the characters an awful lot harder to write, I can't help thinking. Lucy, Scarpetta's niece, who came out as gay in the series at a time when there weren't many lesbians in mainstream commercial fiction, is now so successful a character she seems to have left the plane we know as reality - she's a cross between comedian Ellen DeGeneres and Mark Zuckerberg.
And poor Scarpetta has got so much baggage, it takes whole chapters to explain exactly who tried to kill her previously, and when. Cornwell hasn't quite painted herself into a corner, but it's going that way.
The research has got trickier, too, she says. "People are much more wary of me coming to see them. I did a tour of a nuclear power plant to discuss how terrorists might take it over for Cause of Death. Well, nobody is going to let me do that today. They were showing me the plans."
And while she's made a point of always being up to date about the latest, most cutting-edge criminal threats - Depraved Heart features an NSA-inspired plot line about modern surveillance - she thinks people should be much more scared than we are.
Patricia Cornwell with wife Staci Gruber after taking the stand against her former accountants. Photo / AP
"The technology out there is dangerous and it's outpaced any sort of sensible regulation," she says. Cornwell distrusts the internet and she distrusts the state with our data. "I'm sorry to say losing privacy is the same thing as losing freedom. I don't care what they say about the limitations and boundaries they will install. They won't. I've seen it with police and I hang out with cops all the time. If you make it possible for someone to look at something, they will."
It is perhaps not a coincidence that Cornwell's fear of "data fiction", as she calls it in Depraved Heart, followed her experiences in court where her private emails were read out by her accountants' defence team. "It was a terrible violation because it's a dirty pool. They subpoena every email you've ever sent and will put anything into the middle of the courtroom to embarrass you. It's ugly.
"Most people don't see it [the threat of a loss of privacy] because they live in naive bliss," Cornwell says. "They don't realise how they are making themselves vulnerable and hopefully that never catches up with them."
What might seem like paranoia in someone else is probably fairly sensible avoidance in her case. Even after she became successful and had put her past behind her, Cornwell seems to have been dogged by the kind of incidents that, if they turned up in a novel, would be frankly unbelievable. She had an affair with the wife of an FBI undercover agent who, when he found out, kidnapped his wife's priest, strapped a fake bomb belt to him, and threatened to blow him up. He was found with a map of Cornwell's house on him when he was arrested.
More recently, after she launched the lawsuit against her accountants, she found herself targeted by the FBI for political campaign finance fraud. The charges were eventually dropped, but not until she'd been investigated for a year. "It was a harrowing experience. I lived an entire year pretty certain that I was going to go to prison because once the FBI sink their teeth into something, they don't let go." Her revenge in Depraved Heart is to never pass up an opportunity to say how useless the FBI are. "I saw such an ugly side of them. It didn't matter that you hadn't done anything, they just want to nail you for something."
Her action-woman persona is perhaps a statement of intent. It's the opposite of victimhood. She says she took up diving because she'd made Scarpetta a diver and her insistence on researching every last detail demanded it. Her can-do, no-fears-will-hold-me-back attitude is probably not unrelated to the misery of her early childhood. Even without the paedophile and the abusive foster parent and the absent father and the mentally ill mother, it would have been difficult.
"We moved from Miami and we didn't talk like the other kids. My mom was divorced when nobody else was. And we lived in a very religious little town where girls weren't supposed to do anything but get married and have children - and I was a tomboy."
It was Billy Graham's wife, Ruth, who Cornwell credits with turning her life around. She took her under her wing when she was released from psychiatric hospital after being treated for anorexia, and encouraged her to try her hand at writing. "I don't know that I would be alive today if it wasn't for her."
Through the Grahams, Cornwell came to know George Bush snr, but since Ruth's death, she's become estranged from the family and politically, she's a supporter of Obama these days. But it was quite a journey, she says, coming from where she did, to coming to terms with her sexuality.
"It was such a puritanical place and very ignorant. You never heard anything about women being gay. It didn't exist. It was only men. And they were paedophiles, of course. That was the mindset."
But her strategy with this as with everything else has been to turn all setbacks to advantages. Though, she claims, this wasn't so much a choice as just the way she's made. "I am a survivor. I don't know why. I was just lucky that I can take things that have been traumatic and use them as rocket fuel." Her mother, in contrast, wasn't able. "She had very traumatic experiences in her childhood and was never able to get over them."
While Cornwell has the confidence of someone with money and staff, there's an unusual and winning degree of humility to her.
"I really do try to give people the very best that I can," she says. "I still do the same things I've always done, the research and all that - I put so much in. But I also know there are a lot of talented people out there who do amazing work and they don't reach this level so it is a little bit like a lightning strike. I thought I was destined to be the biggest failure on the planet."
Not everything goes to plan in life. And Gawker may just have got it right. The world perhaps does need more 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.
