thought she could try for herself. But
what about getting a ride in the Jeff
Bezos rocket? “If he offers me a rocket
ride, you betcha I’ll take it!” (I prom-
ised to mention that in this piece in the
hope she will get a call.)
Her conversation is playful, funny,
eager — not what I’d expected. She is in
a rented house on Cape Cod with her
wife, Staci Gruber, a Harvard psychia-
trist. She looks more or less as she has
always seemed to look — fit, slim, short
blonde hair etc — but, to my relief, she
is not the toughy I was expecting.
She is 65 and has evidently mel-
lowed. She still has a helicopter and a
2012 Ferrari FF, but the Harley-
Davidsons have gone. She no longer
has guns at home. “I don’t need them
where I live... But don’t show up unin-
vited just because I said I don’t own a
gun right now!”
Mellow also applies to her politics.
She was a friend of George HW Bush,
she has been a Republican donor and
most of the 100 million plus books she
has sold are hard-boiled, gun-laden
murder mysteries. Like many of her
readers, it was assumed she was a rock-
ribbed Republican who voted for
Trump. “No, I did not. This is the first
time I’ve said that in public. I cannot
vote for anybody that’s lying about a
‘plague’ and acting like it’s nothing and
watching people die.”
There are new political pressures,
however. Like most writers she has
discovered there are words that are
forbidden thanks to the wokeist
“progressives”.
“I deal with this all the time, like
you can’t say a vehicle is ‘manned’. It
has to be ‘crewed’. I spent about 45
minutes yesterday trying to figure out
the politically correct way to refer to
people who fish for a living. Can’t call
them ‘fishermen’. So I called them
fisherfolks.
“Everybody’s so worried about
offending everybody ... I mean, when
are they going to say you can’t call
them black holes any more? What will
it be — a non-white hole?”
Social media horrifies her with the
brutal categories and the endless rage.
“Instead of pulling everybody together
it’s divisive. They keep saying we are
different. We’re treated different
because I’m a woman, or I’m gay or I’m
black or I’m white, or I’m Hispanic or
trans or whatever it might be. And that
is a real shame. This has got to change,
or the planet won’t survive.”
She married Charles Cornwell in
1980 and they divorced in 1989. She is
married to a woman. Did coming out
affect her audience?
“I think there have been
people who probably lost
interest in my work when
they found out about that,
and then there’s prob-
ably plenty more
that gained inter-
est in my work.It’s hard for me to know. You know,
the truth is I almost don’t ever think
about it.” She doesn’t like labels but, if
she did, she’d make a great big label. “I
could be the No 1 gay, female, morgue
expert, helicopter-flying, 65-year-old
author in the universe. I doubt there is
another one.”
Most authors won’t talk about their
next book — they regard it as bad luck
— but not Cornwell. Scarpetta, she says,
will be back. Again. “I was going to end
the series with this one. Then I thought,
‘Oh no, she’s not done.’ ”
Autopsy starts with a quotation fromSherlock Holmes: “The world is full of
obvious things which nobody by any
chance observes.” Nobody except Scar-
petta and her creator.
“That quote is everything. It’s the
detail that’s going to tell her something
that nobody else would bother with.
And the whole point of Autopsy — you
know the Greek word ‘autopsia’ mean-
ing to see for yourself — that is the
secret to her success. She has to see
something for herself. She goes to the
trouble. And what I try to tell every-
body in life is just show up, you never
know what might happen.” cAutopsy, the
new Kay
Scarpetta
thriller, is
published by
HarperCollins
on Nov 25
at £A life dissected
Patricia Cornwell.
Below, from left:
her mother Marilyn,
Ruth Graham and
Patricia reunite
PATRICK ECCLESINE