Patricia Cornwell, queen of forensic fiction
Patricia Cornwell's name comes with more than a whiff of myth and expectation. Almost every woman writing thrillers with extreme violence gets compared to Cornwell's bestselling work featuring forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta. Interviews focus less on the books and more on Cornwell's Armani suits, personal security concerns or her obsession with solving the Jack the Ripper murders. And the publishing industry's current grim fortunes lend an air of urgency to last week's publication of "Scarpetta."
The Cornwell I meet in her Midtown Manhattan penthouse is candid but firmly in control of the conversation. She is less about myth and more about reflection -- on the economy, her 2005 marriage to Staci Gruber, a Harvard neuroscientist, jettisoning artifice in favor of honesty and her career arc. Twenty years ago, Cornwell, now 52, wrote the final words on what would become "Postmortem" (1990). The novel was published by Scribner with a modest first printing and advance (6,000 copies and $6,000, respectively) that came just when Cornwell was about to give up on writing fiction. Rereading "Postmortem" and immediate sequels reminded me why Cornwell was showered with virtually every major mystery award at the time: Scarpetta's first-person viewpoint lends an intimacy to the serial killing horrors she observes as Virginia's chief medical examiner (in real life, Cornwell once worked as a technical writer and computer analyst in that office), a profession rarely at the forefront of crime fiction at the time. "It was unlike anything we'd ever read before," remembers Richard Goldman, who, with Mary Alice Gorman, owns the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, Pa., and who was an early champion of Cornwell's work. "There had been autopsies in detective fiction and police procedurals, but they were just one of the elements, a sideshow. It was fresh and exciting to see the medical examiner at the center of the story."
Getting back
As Cornwell became more successful, her books changed, and not always for the better. Starting with "The Last Precinct" (2000), the first-person vantage point gave way to multiple and more omniscient perspectives that opened up the narrative but removed the jolt of immediacy for the reader. Kay's motivations for getting involved in a case became more opaque as she changed from a regional medical examiner into a nationally sought-after star of almost superheroic proportions. And even though the forensic techniques stayed on the side of realism, a direct counterpoint to the "CSI"-style fantasy forensics that continue to feed public appetite for the subject, minute detail too often overwhelmed character and plot development. Even Cornwell recognized something had to change after a friend from college pointed out that he found the characters unlikable.
