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 successfuclass="underline" 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