“Nothing,” he decides.
We get up to go inside because it’s getting chilly and if I drink much more, I won’t be safe with the deep fryer or the grill or anything.
Benton puts his arm around me and I wrap mine around his waist and the thick grass makes a dry sound as we walk on it. The grapefruit this year are huge and pale yellow and the oranges are big and pebbly and the wind rocks the trees as we move through a yard I pay to keep up but rarely sit in.
“Let’s get Dorothy to talk about herself so we won’t have to talk about anything at all,” I suggest as we climb the three steps that lead to the door.
“That will be the easiest thing we’ve ever done,” Benton says.
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Six years and three unpublished novels later, Patricia Daniels Cornwell touched down cleanly and fully-formed, or so it seemed, when she published Postmortem in 1990.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?’