I created a monster': Interview with Patricia Cornwell
Trying to organise an audience with the writer sometimes dubbed the 'High Priestess of Crime' is a nerve-wracking experience. Dates shift almost daily, and I am warned that the location could change at any moment: Patricia Cornwell is scheduled to be at her apartment in midtown Manhattan, but might just as easily be at her house outside Boston. When I arrive in New York, I am told that Cornwell has cancelled. Her advisers are so anxious that I will spoil the American publicity campaign for her new novel, Scarpetta, that she cannot risk meeting me at all. A few hours later, Cornwell changes her mind again. By now the mood of suspicion has become contagious: I take my advance copy of Scarpetta and lock it in the hotel safe.
After all this, it is almost a shock to meet the 52-year-old Cornwell in the flesh. By the time we finally sit down in her minimalist living room 48 floors up, I have already encountered a doorman, a concierge, a publicist and a make-up artist. When Cornwell finally arrives and offers me coffee, I half expect a personal kettle-boiler to appear, but she does the brewing herself.
Strikingly good-looking in black shirt, trousers and cowboy boots, she is clearly excited by the imminent publication of Scarpetta. In these economically straitened times, the pressure on big-name authors is intense. Cornwell may not be quite as popular as in her 1990s heyday (she didn't make this year's Forbes top 10 literary earners), but she commands an ardent following and routinely hits number one on bestseller lists across the globe. This week she headed straight to the top of the UK hardback fiction chart.
It is 20 years since Cornwell created Dr Kay Scarpetta, the smart forensic pathologist who has starred in all her novels. It has been quite a ride for the pair of them. Cornwell has ascended from working at a morgue to living in millionaire splendour (she often flies between New York and Boston in her own helicopter). Scarpetta has defeated a host of serial killers, lost at least one lover (another, Benton Wesley, managed to come back from the dead), and, when we saw her last, was sexually assaulted by former comrade-in-arms Pete Marino.
The new book sees Cornwell continue to reinvent the formula that has earned her more than $100m. The early works, such as Postmortem and All That Remains, were tightly plotted affairs, heavy on forensic detail. In Blow Fly (2003), Cornwell switched from first-person narration to multiple viewpoints, including that of the murderer. Some fans became disgruntled as soap opera threatened to overwhelm her serial killers. In Scarpetta, personal relationships are again in the foreground. Gripping, if occasionally convoluted, the book has touches of gothic weirdness: one plot features a 'little person' killed by a sexual sadist; the chief suspect is the victim's boyfriend, who is convinced that mysterious forces are controlling his mind; and all the while an internet gossip website called 'Gotham Gotcha' is gunning for Scarpetta herself.
Cornwell sees the evolution of her novels as vital to her survival in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Widely credited with inspiring television shows such as CSI, Cold Case and Dexter, she worried that their success had sated the public appetite for her own forensic dramas. 'It's like I created Frankenstein's monster in my basement and then couldn't go down there any more,' she says. 'I went, "Well shit, I've got to do something else."' This challenge has awakened some serious literary aspirations; her conversation is peppered with references to Hemingway, Vonnegut and Dostoevsky. It seems that Cornwell, in common with other thriller writers such as Stephen King and Thomas Harris, wants a little respect. 'My pipe dream is that someone will notice that one of my sentences is really good,' she says.
In recent years, respect has sometimes been hard to come by. Her non-fiction book Portrait of a Killer, which argued that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, British artist Walter Sickert, earned widespread derision. She also provoked controversy by voicing her opposition to the invasion of Iraq. While her early books rarely contained political allusions, last year's Book of the Dead featured a traumatised veteran of the second Iraq war. Cornwell says this cost her friends in high places. She was a personal friend of George Bush Senior (or 'Big George', as she calls him), spending a number of weeks at the family's summer retreat in Kennebunkport. 'I was supportive of young George Bush because I liked his family. I thought he was going to be another Big George. Boy, was I ever wrong. It's not a democracy so much as a theocracy, and those are not the principles this country was founded on.'
Even when I ask about President-elect Barack Obama, it takes some time to prise Cornwell's hands from Young George's neck. 'I have to tell you, if this election had gone differently, I was already looking for apartments in London. I am serious. I absolutely would not stay here if McCain and Palin were in the White House.'
Originally a Hillary Clinton supporter, Cornwell has become increasingly impressed by Obama. 'You hope it's not just a silver tongue. And I don't think we are going to know anything until he really gets started. But I respect him. He has a much better grasp of what America is now, instead of envisaging a population that isn't there any more.'
Political outspokenness is not the only way that Cornwell has challenged sections of her readership in recent years. Her decision in The Body Farm (1994) to make Scarpetta's niece, Lucy Farinelli, a lesbian was just as risky. 'I actually called one of my editors and said, "Houston, we have a problem." He said, "You don't do this in popular crime fiction."'
Only a couple of years later, Cornwell was outed herself by the American press. Divorced from husband Charles Cornwell in 1989, her affair with FBI agent Margot Bennett made headlines when Bennett's husband attempted to kidnap his wife. 'I didn't really know until everybody else did,' Cornwell says now of her sexuality. Raised in a conservative Christian community in Virginia, she had been unaware that lesbians even existed.
Cornwell admits that her mouth can get her in hot water. Following another tirade against the Republicans, she puts the brakes on. 'I'm going to get in so much trouble as usual. I am going to get more hateful reviews on Amazon from people who don't like me.' The internet is clearly something of a sore point. 'It's the perfect place for bad people to hide,' she says. If this sounds close to paranoia, it is not without some justification. Scarpetta was written as she fought and won a long-running case against a cyber-stalker called Leslie Sachs. The harassment began a decade before, when Sachs accused Cornwell of plagiarising his self-published novel, The Virginia Ghost Murders
Cornwell sued and won. Sachs fled America for Belgium, claiming to be a political refugee. He set up a website accusing her of murder, neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, mass conspiracy and even, in a poem, of killing his cat. Cornwell sued again. 'It was all absolutely, disgustingly, venomously slanderous. Calling me a Jew-hater? I had to clear my name to answer people who said, "Well, if that ain't true, why don't you stop it?" Well, now I have. I have been to court twice and won.'
With my time almost up, Cornwell asks if I would like to talk to Staci Gruber, the woman she married in 2006. Gruber has never talked to the press before, except in her professional capacity as associate director of Harvard's McLean psychiatric hospital, but if I call back, Cornwell will see what she can do. When I return two hours later, the mood is markedly more relaxed: the make-up artist has gone, as has Cornwell's make-up. The couple are going to Elton John's charity premier of Billy Elliot, on Broadway, but can spare some time.
A decade younger than her partner, Gruber is petite, red-haired and highly intelligent. They met when Cornwell was researching sociopaths for a novel. I ask Gruber if she had any preconceptions about the world-famous crime writer. 'She thought I was a narcissist,' Cornwell interrupts. 'That's not exactly fair,' Gruber shoots back. Believing that Cornwell actually was a forensic pathologist, Gruber assumed that she had 'smugly' modelled the heroic and beautiful Scarpetta on herself.
Cornwell says she has more in common with Scarpetta's niece, the volatile Lucy. A life-long sufferer from bi-polar depression, she used to self-medicate with alcohol. In these manic phases, she thought nothing of spending $50,000 on clothes, or driving when drunk. By the time she met Gruber, most of these behaviours were in the past.
It was not a conventional romance. Gruber refused to ride in Cornwell's limousine ('What if I needed to escape?'). Cornwell wooed Gruber by buying a security system for her home. It was a hint of their life to come. Cornwell says that Gruber is routinely trampled by fans when they are in public. 'She is very gracious about it,' Cornwell adds. 'I would probably elbow the person back and tell them to get the hell out of my face.'
Nevertheless, it is Gruber who keeps tabs on some of the crazier Cornwell obsessives: she finds Sachs's accusations of anti-Semitism especially puzzling, not least because she herself is Jewish. 'Patricia has got people who are incarcerated who think they are going to marry her on release,' Gruber adds. 'They want to go from one form of punishment to another, I guess,' Cornwell deadpans.
With Manhattan's skyscrapers lighting up against the darkening skyline, my second audience draws to a close. Cornwell and Gruber have got to get ready, and Elton John waits for no one - not even the creator of Dr Kay Scarpetta.
Scarpetta is published by Little, Brown, £18.99