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.’