Best-selling author Patricia Cornwell will finally see her main character come to life in a new TV adaptation of her Scarpetta novels. Photo / Getty Images
The bestselling author’s gutsy female pathologist Kay Scarpetta is finally arriving on screen in a starry new drama. If she were a man, would it have happened years ago?
Patricia Cornwell is describing chucking someone out of her helicopter. It was necessary research for her latest novel, in which a character is thrown out of a mysterious flying object and found splattered in an abandoned theme park. “We made a figure out of ballistic gelatin, which is like jelly but really thick and hard,” she says. “We put Jelly Man, as I call him, on the skid, and then when it’s time, boop, he goes overboard to simulate, for example, someone who’s skydiving and their chute doesn’t open. Is this a suicide, a homicide, an accident? What are the crime scene investigators going to find?” To make the experiment more realistic, Cornwell even bought animal innards from the supermarket to stuff Jelly Man with organs.
The phenomenally popular author – she has sold more than 120 million books worldwide in 36 languages, and earned multimillions – has always been meticulous about research. At the beginning of her career, determined to become an author, Cornwell spent six years working as an assistant in a mortuary in Virginia before Postmortem, her first novel focused on the forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta, was published in 1990. Since then she has learnt to scuba dive, fly helicopters and, on one occasion, got a supermarket turkey tattooed to analyse the effects on the skin.
“I wouldn’t do anything that’s gratuitously foolish or gratuitously dangerous,” she says from her Boston home, where she lives with her wife, Staci Gruber, a Harvard neuroscientist, whom she met 20 years ago at a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts while researching a novel, and their rescued English bulldog, Lola.
“I’m not as much of a daredevil as people think I am. I’m just brave.” She then launches into a horror story about the time she was caught in a thunderstorm while flying a helicopter. “That was probably one of the closest times I’ve ever come to dying.”
Cornwell is a complete blast. At 68, and having just released Identity Unknown, the 28th in the Kay Scarpetta series, she is speeding up rather than slowing down. After decades of false starts the books are finally being adapted into a television series, Scarpetta, for Amazon, with Nicole Kidman playing the gutsy pathologist lead and Jamie Lee Curtis playing her sister, Dorothy.
“It’s been a long journey and it’s hard to say why it’s not happened,” Cornwell says. “Some of the [scripts] I was never even shown because my agent said, ‘Trust me, you don’t want to see this.’” In the Nineties Demi Moore was teed up to play Scarpetta after Columbia Pictures acquired the rights for novel four, Cruel and Unusual (reportedly for a seven-figure sum), but it crumbled. In the Noughties Angelina Jolie signed up for the lead role in a series of films for Fox 2000. That fell apart too.
Lee Curtis, who is enjoying her own career purple patch with recent roles in The Bear and the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, sniffed out the Scarpetta books after setting up her own production company in 2019. “I said, ‘Well, Kay’s actually free right now. She’s single!’ Jamie has been the hero that’s done this,” Cornwell says. “When you have Jamie Lee Curtis as your first person that’s involved, that has star power and gravitas, and you attract other big talent.”
Cornwell will meet Kidman (surely the hardest working actress in Hollywood) when filming starts imminently.
The show already feels like a cultural triumph for older women. In addition to Cornwell, Lee Curtis is 65 and Kidman is 57. Would an adaptation have happened sooner if the author or the protagonist were male? “Very possibly because, and I can’t vouch that this is true, but my agent told me very early into this that if Scarpetta were a man Tom Cruise would like to play her/him,” she recalls in her southern lilt. “I said, ‘Well, what an honour to think, but I’m sorry, she’s not a man.’”
It irks her that various Hollywood players sat on the options for the novels without getting them on to the screen. “Then you wake up one day and CSI [a drama about crime scene investigation] is all over the place,” she says. “That put a big damper on bringing Scarpetta to screen because the forensics were being showcased by something else.”
Now the author seems sanguine about letting her Scarpetta family be adopted by other writers. “My biggest job is to keep an eye on the technical part of it, the forensic science,” she says. “Jamie calls me the Swiss army knife. I’m the little tool that helps fix a few things.”
Away from work Cornwell has had a tough time: she recently underwent colon surgery and is grieving her mother, Marilyn Daniels, who died last year. “When you lose somebody that’s been part of your life for as long as you’ve been here, you’re losing a part of yourself,” she says. “It’s like lights in a room that go out, and the more people you lose, the more those lights go out. You never anticipate what that feels like when you realise you can’t tell that story with that person any more, and they’re the only ones who knew it.”
Growing up first in Miami, Florida, and later in Montreat, a tiny town in North Carolina, her childhood was extraordinary. After her father left on Christmas Day when she was 5, her single mother moved the family to Montreat to live near Billy Graham, the televangelist. One day she burnt all their belongings before dropping her three children off at the Grahams’ house. Daniels was then taken into psychiatric care. “I loved my mother very much, but I did not have what I would call a normal mother-daughter relationship with her,” reflects Cornwell, who was later fostered. “In many ways I was more the one who took care of her, even as a child.”
Cornwell relays crushing stories from her childhood – searching the streets of Miami for food, getting sexually assaulted by a paedophile who’d just been released from prison and testifying in court about the assault – in a can-you-believe-it tone that is devoid of self-pity.
The Christmas Day when her father walked out remains clear in her mind. “I knew instantly what was happening and I just went hysterical. I started screaming, ‘Don’t leave, don’t leave.’ I grabbed him around the leg to try to prevent him from going out the door. And he shook me off like a dog that’s jumping up,” she recalls. “It was an awful time.”
She shoots down the idea that her dedicated work ethic – she has written more than 40 books and typically publishes one every year – is about proving herself. “I think it’s filling empty spaces. My work keeps me company and it has done ever since I was old enough to hold a crayon,” she says. “My childhood was emotionally very desolate.”
Her latest novel has a bonkers plot involving suspicions about an alien abduction. “I absolutely believe there is intelligent life beyond humans,” Cornwell says. “When I watch the news, I pray that there is intelligent life beyond us, something more highly evolved, perhaps that’s not divisive and wanting to destroy everything.”
It also involves a plotline about child abuse and a murdered young girl. Where’s the line between detail and titillation? “‘Less is more’ is more of a mantra that I have now than I did in the earlier days,” she says. “We see so much on television that I don’t need to spend 20 pages describing an autopsy. I’m not here to quote ‘gross you out’.”
Cornwell talks about possibly writing her memoirs – “how do you tell the truth and not really ruffle certain people’s feathers? If I wait for everybody to die, I’ll be dead too” – and about ruffling feathers with her non-fiction books, which made the case that the painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.
“It’s easy to say that someone’s conclusions are baseless if you’ve never bothered to look at them. I think a lot of people were offended because the idea that a prominent British artist could be a serial killer was very offensive, particularly to the art community. They really went after me full tilt,” Cornwell says, gleefully. “The idea of an American novelist coming over and being so cheeky as to think she’s going to solve Jack the Ripper. I can understand why that pissed everybody off.”
She happily hops from talking about selling her Ferrari FF last year (“I’m not interested in getting a Ferrari and drawing that kind of attention to myself because the world is a lot more dangerous than it was”) to discussing whether she’ll ever retire the hard-working Dr Scarpetta. “If people didn’t want to read about her any more, I wouldn’t want to write about her any more,” Cornwell says bluntly. “I’m not doing this just to entertain myself.”
Predator, 2005
695,800 copies
Kay Scarpetta has become the head of the National Forensic Academy in Florida, an institution founded by her wealthy niece. They take on a case that stretches from the Sunshine State to snowbound Boston.
Trace, 2004
659,448 copies
Five years after Scarpetta was sacked as chief medical examiner, she is invited back to Richmond, Virginia, by her successor. It starts as an investigation into the death of a 14-year-old girl, but soon Scarpetta is involved in the internal politics of her old department.
Book of the Dead, 2007
643,075 copies
Scarpetta is in Rome, assisting the sexist Italian police with the murder of a young tennis star. Back in the US she opens a private practice, and other murders occur that may be linked to Rome.
Blow Fly, 2003
618,709 copies
Hounded by the media, Scarpetta has moved to Florida, where her past, in the shape of Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, a werewolf serial killer, comes back to haunt her.
Scarpetta, 2008
506,697 copies
Scarpetta is in New York, where the NYPD asks her to examine an injured man in a psychiatric prison ward. He claims the injuries were from a murder that he did not commit.
Figures supplied by (and copyrighted to) Nielsen BookScan, taken since records began, from 1997 to 2024.
Identity Unknown by Patricia Cornwell is out now.
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London
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