Dust

Profile of Patricia Cornwell

‘I always have the same dilemma when I start a book. What am I going to say? What can I show people they haven’t seen before? But I also have to do things that are at least within the realms of possibility. If I don’t, it would fly in the face of everything my characters are. If Scarpetta had this little divining rod that revealed the killer, I think my readers would throw my book in the trash.’

For most of her fifty-seven years, Patricia Cornwell has lived a life of seeming perpetual motion. Any hopes of childhood tranquility diminished the moment her parents divorced, after which Cornwell was shuttled between a depressive mother and abusive foster parents. Her adolescence was wild and scattered, as intense ambition (to play professional tennis) attempted to conceal, or at least compensate for profound vulnerability: Cornwell battled anorexia for much of her adolescence, until the intervention of her mentor, Ruth Graham. A palpable restlessness pursued her into early adulthood. After graduating university, Cornwell tried her hand at several jobs: a short-lived but successful career as a crime reporter led to her writing the biography of Ruth Graham. She finally began the approach towards her vocation in 1984 when she went to work for Dr Marcella Fierro, then Virginia’s chief Medical Examiner.

Six years and three unpublished novels later, Patricia Daniels Cornwell touched down cleanly and fully-formed, or so it seemed, when she published Postmortem in 1990. The novel landed quietly (just 6000 hardback copies were printed at first), but gradually won admirers, then awards (the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony and Macavity) and finally readers — a lot of readers. Cornwell had arrived, but success quickly accelerated the frenetic pace of her existence. As Postmortem and its successors reached number one on bestseller charts around the world, there were reports of nights out with Demi Moore in Hollywood and weekends with George Bush (senior) in Kennebunkport. Cornwell was becoming almost as famous for flying her helicopter, driving fast cars, and later crashing them, as she was for transforming the forensic thriller into mass entertainment. An exposé in Vanity Fair joined the dots between rumours of FBI agents held hostage in churches, secret sexuality and depression. The headlines rolled in. Accusations of plagiarism. Lawsuits to stop an internet stalker. Vocal advocacy of the Democrats after years spent supporting the Republican Party. Millions of dollars were earned and then, as headlines from late 2012 demonstrated, millions of dollars were misappropriated.

Whatever the triumphs or turmoil, whether personal, political or economic, Cornwell continued to write the rate of over a book a year: novels for the most part, but also non-fiction and even cookbooks. Indeed, if one was searching for a single thread to unify Patricia Cornwell’s jet-propelled flight through the past two decades, one could do worse than highlight the four characters that she first created back in Postmortem and who have populated almost every novel she has published since, including the one you have just read. Pete Marino, the unreconstructed macho homicide cop with well-concealed depths. Benton Wesley, the smooth but enigmatic FBI profiler. Lucy Farinelli, the brilliant but unstable computer whizzkid. And, of course, Kay Scarpetta, aunt to Lucy, wife to Wesley, employer of Marino — forensic pathologist extraordinaire, the heroine of twenty-one novels and the centre of Cornwell’s imaginative universe. This isn’t to suggest that Cornwell’s cast has stood still. Lucy Farinelli was just ‘an irritating ten year old’ when the series began. Half the group — Wesley and Scarpetta — is now married to one other. And while Pete Marino has not matured exactly, there are signs that he might at last be considering it.

But, whether they are investigating murders in London or New York, Florida or Rome, Richmond or, most recently, Boston, their intersecting relationships provide the backdrop to the series as a whole and, one could argue, to their creator’s very existence. ‘I don’t really cause my characters to behave the way they do,’ Cornwell says. ‘I know that sounds strange, but I just report on them. I do know that one of the reasons my books take on a life of their own is that I am very honest about letting them do what they need to do.’

This instinctive bond between creator and character was present from the very start. After finishing Postmortem, Cornwell had no plans to revisit any of Scarpetta’s supporting cast again. ‘I finished the second book, Body of Evidence, before Postmortem even came out. I didn’t know Marino was going to be in that story until a car came to pick Scarpetta up and he was behind the wheel. I would never have guessed that any of them would become such dominant figures.’

What Cornwell had guessed from the very beginning was that Scarpetta at least would be a fixture in her imagination. It might be stretching logic to suggest that without Kay Scarpetta, there wouldn’t be a bestselling author called Patricia Cornwell, but the character's genre-defining combination of forensic expertise, physical courage, grace under pressure, dogged determination, and strong stomach has ensured both places in the crime-fighting pantheon. From Postmortem onwards, Scarpetta has been the series’ hero, its conscience and its moral centre. Just as importantly, she is the reader’s guide into an alien and alienating world of ligature marks, enzyme defects and DNA testing.

Back in 1988, Scarpetta’s impact was more practical, but no less crucial. Her first appearance, which actually occurred pre-Postmortem, was as a bit-part player in Cornwell’s third unpublished novel, The Queen’s Pawn. Scarpetta was the tech-savvy sidekick to a hero named Joe Constable, whom Cornwell recalls as a poor man’s Adam Dalgliesh. The story’s uneasy fusion of cosy mystery and unflinching forensics may not have won its author her longed-for publishing deal, but Scarpetta’s fleeting appearances convinced one editor, Sara Ann Freed at the prestigious Mysterious Press, to send the following encouragement: 1. Ditch Joe Constable; 2. Write what you see in the morgue, not what you read in Dorothy L Sayers; 3. Make Kay Scarpetta the lead.

The seeds of Postmortem were sown. The story itself took root when Cornwell allowed Scarpetta to carry the emotional as well as the narrative weight. She fashioned a plot inspired by real-life serial killer Timothy Spencer (also known as the Southside Strangler) who brought her newly adopted hometown of Richmond, Virginia, to a standstill in 1987. Newly separated from her husband and living alone, Cornwell was terrified like many other women in the city. She not only dissected these fears, she transferred them to the tough but vulnerable Scarpetta. ‘I thought, why don’t you take the bold step and walk in her shoes? How’s that for scary? If this kind of awful case was going on for her, what would she be doing? If these women who were doctors and lawyers were being killed in their homes, how would she react?’

Despite her many and diverse investigations, Scarpetta has proved remarkably resilient as a character. Indeed, she is by far the most consistent of Cornwell’s dramatis personae. This stability goes to the heart of her appeal for readers and her creator alike: her unyielding integrity, whether this is loyalty to friends and colleagues or her passion for forensic science. There are superficial differences, of course: Scarpetta was a smoker in Postmortem, and is glimpsed in stonewashed denim in All That Remains. But in all important respects, she is not just unchanged and unchanging, but seemingly unchangeable. When Cornwell returned to first person narration in 2010’s Port Mortuary after a gap of seven years, we reacquainted ourselves with an older and wiser Kay Scarpetta, but one who had weathered the ravages of time as, perhaps, only an iconic fictional hero can. Her looks had, enviably, escaped wear and tear over the years: ‘My blue eyes and short blond hair, the strong shape of my face and figure, aren’t so different, I decide, are remarkably the same considering my age.’ Her enthusiasms too remained largely unaltered: ‘a passion for food, for drink, for all things desired by the flesh, no matter how destructive. I crave beauty and feel deeply…’ But Scarpetta’s core steadfastness was more than skin-deep: ‘I can be unflinching and impervious. I can be immutable and unrelenting, and these behaviours are learned.’

Cornwell will admit to superficial parallels between herself and Scarpetta. Compare their timelines, and one can see that they tend to move house at similar times and to matching locations: Richmond, Florida, Charlotte, New York, and Boston. Both have had to cope with the vagaries of celebrity. Both have suffered at the hands of an internet stalker. Both married at roughly the same time, away from the public eye: Cornwell wed Dr Staci Gruber in 2005, a couple of years before Scarpetta and Wesley tied the knot offstage between Predator and Book of the Dead.

‘A lot of what she feels is something that I can relate to. I’m not sure that I could write about what she feels if I didn’t feel it myself. We have a lot of things in common. Where we are similar is our sensibilities, and the belief that at the root of all evil is the abuse of power.’

Nevertheless, Cornwell is quick to highlight their differences. Here, in lighthearted mood, on their appearance: ‘Scarpetta is holding up a hell of a lot better than I am,’ she laughs. ‘She doesn’t run to the dermatologist all the time saying, “Fix me! Fix me!” I’m jealous. She can’t age as fast as I am or she will be retired. She will stay around fiftyish, with good bones and good genetics, while the rest of us struggle.’ Or, more seriously, on Scarpetta presenting an idealised reflection of herself: ‘She is a bit of a fantasy version of me. I wish I could be like her. If you were having this conversation with her, she probably wouldn’t say anything she shouldn’t; I am Miss Rattlemouth. I get myself in trouble. I’m an artist; she is very disciplined. She is not going to get a DUI and flip her car. She is not going to say something stupid that gets touted all over the internet. She is not going to go on spending sprees without trying clothes on and then none of it fits just because she is in the mood to do it.’

Cornwell’s admiration for Scarpetta is profound: the character and her adventures have provided Cornwell with imaginative shelter from the various storms of her life. But she will identify weaknesses when prompted, even if they do stem from Scarpetta’s desire for perfection: ‘She has tremendous emotional discipline, but that is also a bad thing about her. She would be better off if she could go beyond it sometimes because she is so careful. She learned to be careful as a child, and she has to be careful as a scientific doctor.’ Cornwell's own personality inverts this equation: she argues that her inherant weaknesses have become her greatest assets. Without her early battles for emotional stability, she would not have been compelled to write. ‘Can you imagine what these novels would be like if Scarpetta wrote them? She would say, “Why would I ever want to talk about that kind of pain and suffering? And frankly, I don’t want to have this interview because I don’t want to talk about it now”.’

Scarpetta’s measured, crystal-clear perspective dominated for ten books until 2003’s Blow Fly, when Cornwell switched from first person narration to an omniscient third person point of view. The transition had several consequences. The reader was suddenly distanced from Scarpetta, and just as suddenly brought closer to those around her. We were also granted access to the demented imaginings of Scarpetta’s adversaries (for the record, she names her recurring villain Jean-Baptiste Chandonne as her favourite baddie). These uncomfortably intimate portraits of serial killers did not make for easy reading, but she strove to give even her most dastardly murderers three dimensions. ‘As I’ve gotten older, I don’t dehumanise killers as much as I used to,’ she told me when we met in 2007 to discuss The Book of the Dead. ‘I’ve realised that although what these people do is extraordinarily wrong and devastating, and they should be removed from society, it doesn’t mean they are entirely unlikable or unsympathetic, or that the best thing to is to kill them. In fact, at this point I really don’t think [the death penalty] solves anything at all. I think we have such an inequality in the judicial system and criminal justice system. People who have no means don’t get the same representation as the rich. And those with no means are more likely to get capital punishment than wealthy people — if they go to jail at all.’

This sympathy reflected a broader shift in Cornwell’s political affiliations. ‘Back in the nineties, being involved with Republicans was very different than it is right now,’ she said told me in 2010. ‘They had a lot of values — fiscal responsibility, smaller government, law enforcement, very pro-civil rights in many ways. Now, the Republican Party has become the morality gatekeeper of the country, and they don’t believe in the separation of church and state any more. It’s not a democracy so much as it wants to become a theocracy. And those are not the principles that this country was founded upon.’

Where her writing was concerned, this change of perception did not come without making sacrifices. Cornwell may have been painting on a broader canvas, but she dispensed with one of the more striking innovations of her early fiction: denying the reader any knowledge of the killer until the very last pages. Her early works weren’t whodunits, or even whydunnits, but how and when-dunnits that were shaped by Scarpetta’s concentration on method rather than motivation. Postmortem derives much of its unsettling effect not from providing insights into the terrifying mind of the killer, but from making the reader complicit with the increasingly paranoid speculation about who they might be. By the end, this list includes just about everyone Scarpetta encounters — including Marino for a few sentences. In this, we are aligned with the vulnerable and the victims. Cornwell’s subversion of one of crime fiction’s great consolations — the plot as a puzzle to be solved — did not meet with universal approbation. She recalls learning that one British reviewer hurled Postmortem across the room in frustration upon reaching the climax.

This denial of readers’ expectations is an inevitable consequence of narrating in the first person. ‘Unless Scarpetta knows the killer personally, you are not going to see him until the end,’ Cornwell explains. But it also evokes the terror that saturated Richmond during the reign of the Southside Strangler. The same fear that made Cornwell believe she was the next victim could also convince her that anyone might be the perpetrator. ‘The FBI once told me that the moment of recognition that someone is a violent psychopath is one minute before he kills you. You are riding in his car or having a pleasant chat on the elevator, and then the monster steps out.’

More significantly for the series as a whole, Cornwell’s shift to the third person in 2003 shepherded Scarpetta’s supporting cast into the limelight. Over the next seven years, the personal trajectories of Farinelli, Marino and Wesley often proved more extreme and dramatic than that of Scarpetta herself. No one’s personal trajectory has been more extreme or dramatic than that of Lucy Farinelli, although whether she loved being the centre of attention or despised it remains open for debate. Kay Scarpetta may be the character closest to Cornwell’s heart, but Lucy is probably the character closest to Cornwell herself.

‘I have a lot of Lucy in me,’ Cornwell acknowledges. ‘She is the troublemaker, the fiery one who lives life to the fullest. She takes risks that are not in Scarpetta’s nature to take. Lucy is always a renegade.’

Our first sighting of Lucy is as a child, disappointed that her ‘Aunt Kay’ has failed to take her to Monticello because of work. Bored, the ten-year-old teaches herself to re-format Scarpetta’s computer, much to her aunt’s dismay which quickly segues into amazement when she realises the upgrade has been accomplished perfectly. ‘Any dickhead could figure it out,’ Lucy responds nonchalantly with her soon to be characteristic ‘dirty mouth’.

She may be a child in this opening scene, but all of Lucy's adult personality traits are in place. Already acquainted with her native genius, the reader learns about her ‘tantrums, her arrogant and angry outbursts.’ But it only takes a second for this superficial bravado to crack and expose the vulnerable, lonely girl cowering beneath. ‘I don’t want you to die! I don’t want you to die!’ she sobs, wrapping herself around Scarpetta for all she is worth. Lucy has been reading newspaper reports about Charlotte’s serial killer and saw an accompanying photograph of Scarpetta herself.

Cornwell and Lucy have come a long way over the past twenty- three years, and have often done so in tandem. Both share a love of flying helicopters and driving Ferraris. Both have crashed their sports cars, but thankfully not their helicopters, when under the influence. Both have earned vast sums of money (Lucy in computer software and programming) only to see their fortune dwindle after financial mismanagement. Both are highly intelligent, creative and prone to emotional volatility. Both are openly gay. ‘Someone asked me recently, “Why did you decide to make Lucy gay?” I replied, “I most certainly didn’t.” In fact, I had a big dilemma when I realised she was because I knew I would get in trouble for it.’ Cornwell recalls ‘outing’ Lucy in 1995’s The Body Farm. ‘She walked into the living room. I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid. I went, Oh my god, she is gay. I could sense from her body language that she was gay. I couldn’t tell you what her face looks like, but when I saw her walk in, I just intuited right away.’

Cornwell, who was yet to acknowledge her own sexuality in public, knew this revelation ran the risk of alienating parts of her fanbase, not to mention the neanderthal Pete Marino. ‘I actually called one of my editors and said, “Houston, we have a problem.” He replied, “You don’t do this in popular crime fiction.” Nobody gave me a really terrible time about it, but I was told to be really careful, because it might offend some of my fans.’ Cornwell herself felt she had no choice in the matter. ‘This comes back to the point about truth. I can’t make Lucy something she’s not. That was before there was anything out about me either. It was not the politically astute thing.’

Political astuteness is not a term one would associate with Pete Marino, one of Cornwell’s two leading men. Here is Scarpetta’s first impression of him as described in Postmortem: ‘He was hard to read, and I’d never decided if he was a good poker player or simply slow. He was exactly the sort of detective I avoided when given a choice — a cock of the walk and absolutely unreachable. He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his graying pate…Marino was the stuff of tough-guy flicks — a crude, crass gumshoe who probably had a foul-mouthed parrot for a pet and a coffee table littered with Hustler magazines.’ Postmortem and many of Scarpetta’s subsequent cases will both reinforce and disprove this initial assessment. Many of the good graces associated with civilised behaviour do seem absent in the sweaty, overweight detective. Nevertheless, what he lacks in refinement, he makes up for with intuition, courage and decisiveness.

This infuriating mix of smarts and vulgarity was inspired by Cornwell’s encounters with policemen from her days as a crime reporter from the early 1980s. ‘Marino was a composite of detectives I’d ridden with and spent time with going back as early as my years at The Charlotte Observer.’ Charlotte’s intensely macho police force treated the paper's first female crime reporter with disdain bordering on sexual harassment. ‘It was so adversarial that when I went into the duty office, the cops would swivel around in the chairs and turn their backs to me. They would say, “Did somebody hear something in here?” The duty captain would say, “If you want to come sit on my lap, I might tell you some stuff”.’

This sexist bullying bears comparison with Scarpetta’s early encounters with Marino. She eventually earns his respect, however uneasily, in much the same way that Cornwell tamed the sexist policemen in Charlotte: through persistence, charm, and home cooking. ‘Next thing you know, my nickname was “Scoop” because I always got all the stories nobody else did.’

The detente between Scarpetta and Marino, fragile at the best of times, degenerated first when Scarpetta became his employer, and later when she married Wesley. This provoked one the most controversial incidents in Cornwell’s oeuvre. In The Book of the Dead, a drunk, drugged and desperate Marino attempts to rape Scarpetta. At the time of publication, Cornwell explained the assault in these terms: ‘There is no question he was sexually attracted to her, and is in “love-hate” with her. She makes him feel small with her power and intellect, even though she doesn’t try to. There is a power struggle. She doesn’t return his feelings and never would. This can’t go on forever with Marino turning into a greater jerk because of his frustration with her. What he’s really doing is committing suicide for the relationship.’

Only Scarpetta, and possibly Cornwell herself, seemed able to forgive Marino: both Benton and Lucy plot revenge, although nothing comes of either plan. ‘One reason you can’t hate Marino after that act is because Scarpetta doesn’t,’ Cornwell said back in 2007. ‘She’s not capable of it. This is not a stranger, this is somebody she has known for seventeen years, and a part of her understands it.’

Admirable as these sentiments are, Scarpetta’s stoicism does beggar belief: the vicious attack seemed to be brushed under the carpet until 2012’s The Bone Bed. Today, Cornwell admits to certain regrets and describes the scene as a last-ditch attempt to reboot the character rather than a carefully considered plot device. ‘In Book of the Dead, I had to shatter Marino to start him all over again. It was either that or kill him off. He’d gotten cornered as a character and I couldn’t deal with him any more. In hindsight, I should have toned down his attack on Scarpetta and his despicable betrayal of her in general. While it says everything about her that she understands why he did what he did, his drunken violent act should not have happened.’

If Lucy is one foil for Marino’s basic instincts, the other is Benton Wesley. From Postmortem onwards, the cultured, reserved and intellectual FBI ‘suspect profiler’ has provided a counterpoint to Marino’s instinctive but crude machismo. The character was again inspired by Cornwell’s first-hand encounters with law enforcement officers. ‘I spent time with a variety of profilers at what was then called the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. I used to hang around there quite a lot in the early days of my career.’

Wesley is first seen, once again in Postmortem, reading the Wall Street Journal and lusting after a drink: ‘Some days I’m so desperate I fantasize the water cooler outside my door is full of gin.’ Where Marino provokes, Wesley apologises; where Marino is sardonic, Wesley is gently amused; where Marino is sweaty, overweight and balding, Wesley is elegant, impeccably dressed if forbidding, and where Marino operates on gut feeling, Wesley is methodical and educated: he has a master’s degree in psychology and had worked as a high school principal before he began busting Mafia bosses. Scarpetta’s first description of Wesley sounds a little like autobiography: ‘I’d gradually warmed up to Wesley. The first time I had met him I had my reservations. At a glance, he made one a believer in stereotypes. He was FBI right down to his Florsheim shoes, a sharp-featured man with prematurely silver hair suggesting a mellow disposition that wasn’t there.’

Wesley’s aloof demeanour is no more instructive about his real character than Marino’s boorish surfaces. Indeed, despite his initial formality, he is responsible for two of the series’ most notorious storylines. The first is romantic: Wesley’s marriage, after years of flirtation, to Scarpetta herself. Cornwell accepts that it was a risk to bring the couple together: ‘Writing about couples can be boring unless there is plenty of mystery, friction, passion and pathos. I enjoy having Scarpetta and Benton together. Because of their remarkably intricate and intensely difficult and secretive careers, they have more non-conversations than open ones, and their dance together is unique. I go into quite a lot of detail about this in Dust.’

Wesley’s second contentious narrative arc was his ‘death’ in 1998’s Point of Origin, and subsequent resurrection five years later in Blow Fly. ‘Were I to start the series again, I would certainly match Scarpetta with Benton, but I would not have killed him off and then been faced with figuring out if he really was dead. While it’s worked out all right, it wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.’ Why did she do it? ‘I don’t know,’ Cornwell replies. ‘When I was writing Point of Origin I began to sense something awful was going to happen to Benton. I didn’t premeditate his alleged murder. That is the way my books seem to work. The stories tell themselves and I let the characters lead the way. Obviously, on some level I’m making decisions, and not always perfect ones.’ As with Marino’s attempted rape of Scarpetta, Benton’s demise freed a plot impasse. ‘I was feeling that their relationship was an obstruction and not going anywhere. In the next few books I realized how lonely Scarpetta was without him — that something was missing. She is better balanced and more interesting when he’s around — just as she needs Marino and Lucy. Plus my fans were outraged and I felt I had to bring him back for them, too.’

Whether planned or expedient, successful or regretted, such sensational and cleansing plot twists are inevitable for any long-running series, no matter how successful: you only have to recall Sherlock Holmes’ plunge over the aptly named Reichenbach Falls in Arthur Conan Doyle’s inaptly named ‘The Final Solution’. Cornwell may repent some of her more baroque storylines, but, she argues, these warts-and-all developments are not just the stuff of serial fiction — they hint at the stuff of life itself.

‘Characters grow and transition just as people do. Benton is more flexible and warm-blooded, and more proactive. Marino isn’t as bigoted, for sure, and he’s becoming more enlightened. I think the characters are more self-possessed and independent. Lucy is more mature, although no less accomplished and fierce. While they definitely constitute an ensemble, they are no longer extensions of Scarpetta’s life and world. Each of them could be the main character in a series.’

In much the same way that Patricia Cornwell today is both recognisable as the person who wrote Postmortem back in 1989 and also different from her, so Scarpetta, Farinelli, Marino and Wesley are the same, and fundamentally changed. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Even dependable Scarpetta isn’t exempt from growth. ‘Scarpetta is less regimented. She doesn’t just solve cases by following procedures; she gets the job done no matter what. I find her bolder, more emotional and less inhibited than she used to be. I feel very good about the way she has evolved, and I think you see a very commanding Scarpetta in Dust. She takes offense at corruption in government and sets about to destroy the official involved. She admits she wants him destroyed, and that’s a side of her we’ve not really seen in the past. She doesn’t break the law. She doesn’t need to.’

As for the future, Cornwell has no idea where Scarpetta, Farinelli, Marino and Wesley are headed. ‘Having characters is like having children. At times I don’t handle them perfectly or lead them along the right path. Then there are those other times when they don’t listen to me.’ Whatever happens, Cornwell is determined to keep pushing forward. She may have come to terms with the restlessness from her childhood, but that doesn’t mean it has vanished entirely.

‘You have to shift gears. I work really hard and I refuse to sit on my laurels. If other people want to do the same things I am doing, they are always going to be one book behind me. I will already have moved on to something else. That is the competitor in me. I will keep running to the next thing. What can I explore in this next book that puts me in a place that most people don’t go? I am going to show you something different. That’s really been my mantra from day one. Now it just takes me in different areas than it used to.’

James Kidd