P
atricia Cornwell was five
when her father, a lawyer,
walked out of their Miami
home on Christmas Day and
“everything just went to hell in
a handbasket”. Her mother,
Marilyn, took to religion and became
obsessed with America’s favourite
evangelist, Billy Graham.
She decided somewhere close to the
Graham family would be the best place
to bring up her three children. She
piled them all, plus a cat called Sydney,
into her Chevrolet Impala and drove
800 miles to Montreat in rural North
Carolina. But close wasn’t good enough
for Marilyn. One day she burnt all Patri-
cia’s and her two brothers’ clothes and
made them walk up the hill to the Gra-
ham house.
They were met by Ruth, Billy’s wife.
Marilyn handed her a note that read:
“Please raise my children. There’s
going to be a flood.” The Grahams took
in the children temporarily before
arranging for them to be fostered. Her
mother descended into psychosis and
ended up in a mental hospital.
Patricia’s life became nightmarish.
She had already been molested by a
security guard and forced to testify in
court. Then one of her foster parents
turned out to be an abusive bully. In
her teens she became anorexic and
depressive. Somehow she survived.Marilyn is now in a care home.
Twenty years ago Cornwell decided to
offer her mother a form of closure. “I’m
only telling this story now,” she says,
“because I don’t think my mother will
be in a position to have anybody read it
to her where she is, thank goodness.”
She was by then one of the best-
selling authors in the world. She took
Marilyn up in her helicopter and flew
over the Graham house. She landed in
the yard and, again, they were greeted
by Ruth. A circle had been closed.
“My mom had been so humiliated
and ashamed, when it wasn’t her
fault. It was the smart thing to do.
Who better to give us to, right?”
The plots of Cornwell’s books are
extraordinary, but her life has been
even wilder and weirder.
“I’ve had a bizarre life. And I didn’t
ask for it and probably don’t deserve it.
It’s been like a fairytale and sometimes
a very bad fairytale. But you can’t have
good fairytales without bad fairytales.
The things that were awful when you
were going through them are the things
that some day are your treasures.”
Those treasures appear most
famously in the character and adven-
tures of Kay Scarpetta, the forensic sci-
entist heroine of 24 of her novels, who
first appeared in 1990. Ever since the
books have succeeded in making the
blood and guts of forensic science sexy.
Scarpetta has inspired a range of TV
series including Dexter, CSI and Cold
Case. She is up there with Sherlock
Holmes and Philip Marlowe, a globally
celebrated crime-fighter. But here’s
a strange thing — nobody knows
what she looks like, not even Cornwell,BOOKS
I’VE HAD A
BIZARRE LIFE
I DIDN’T
ASK FOR IT
Crime queen Patricia Cornwell was dumped
on the doorstep of the evangelist Billy
Graham by her psychotic mother with a
note that read: ‘Please raise my children’
who never once offers a description.
“I’ve never seen her face. Even
when I describe her looking in the mir-
ror I can see she might have bloodshot
eyes and messy hair. But I don’t know
what she really looks like. I only see her
from the rear, walking down the hall-
way in her lab coat — she’s average
height maybe and she has blonde hair
like mine that gets a little help from her
friends these days.”
After a long gap — five years — she
has produced her 25th Scarpetta book,
Autopsy. The last one, Chaos, came out
in 2016, the year, she notes, Trump was
elected. Why the gap?
“When I came back from that book
tour I just thought I don’t have this in
me any more.”
Part of the problem was the vastbackstory she had created for Scar-
petta and all the surrounding charac-
ters. Checking every detail had become
intolerable: “It would take me for ever
going through 25 books to try and
remember what colour somebody’s
eyes were.” She solved that by hiring a
retired Nasa scientist to trawl through
the Scarpetta data.
But the big problem that stalled her
was technology. Her books depend on
the latest and best gizmos and she is
never happy until she has tried them
herself. “I have to feel what it’s like in
order to really describe it. It goes back
to being a journalist. For me, I had to
go out and get a story and I’m describ-
ing what I’m experiencing first-hand.”
This proved impossible in the latest
novel because, in part, the action is in
space. We do learn, however, of the
intriguing frangible bullets. These
break up on impact, killing the guy
they hit but not the guy behind him
and not penetrating the spacecraft’s
hull. But I’ve already given away
too much.
Stalled after Chaos, she mused that
the only thing left was to send Scar-
petta into space — not something sheI could be the No 1 gay,
helicopter-flying, morgue
expert, 65-year-old
author in the universe
THE BRYAN
APPLEYARD
INTERVIEW