Patricia Cornwell on Her Dark Childhood and Best-Selling Novels

When your meetings are powered by AI, quality matters. Shor builds video conferencing solutions engineered for collaboration, giving AI the clarity it needs. Shor, built for collaboration. Learn more at shur.com.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times. And today we have two conversations on the show. We're going to hear from Patricia Cornwell, author of the award-winning forensic thrillers, featuring the beloved character, Case Carpetta. Those books have now been made into a series starring Nicole Kidman. Cornwell is out with a new memoir, and it is quite a surprising story. We're going to hear all about it. But first, the Pulitzers were announced this week, and the big prize, the prize for fiction, went to Daniel Krauss for his book, Angel Down. Hi, I'm Gilbert. I got to call Daniel the morning after the announcement to talk about this crazy book of his, and to hear how he was thinking about what this all means for him, and the types of stories that he writes. We at the book review put your book, Angel Down, on our list of top 10 books of the year, last year. So there might be some people who are already familiar with it and have read it and bought it. But for those who haven't had a chance to get to it yet, and might do so now that it is won this amazing prize, could you give just the briefest of summaries? And then I have so many questions for you about the book. Yeah, it's a World War I novel about these five soldiers, these five privates who are some of the five worst in this division. And they're left behind to essentially euthanize a soldier who people can hear screaming out in no man's land, presumably tied up in barbed wire. This kind of thing happened. But essentially when they go out there, what they don't find is a soldier at all, they find an angel who has been shot down out of the sky by artillery, which was sort of new and high flying during World War I. And this angel has been hit and has fallen into the barbed wire. And then these men realize very quickly they have some sort of miraculous being on their hand. And this being has incredible ability to heal and help and could potentially even end the war. But instead, it almost is that of an angelic account and kind of turns into this hellish encounter because every man has their own way they want to exploit the angel. And so it ends up sort of tearing them apart. It's a good and surprising story. Something that also is very surprising is the way that it was written. It's written essentially as one sentence from beginning to end, which is a fascinating conceit. I think it takes some people just a minute or two to get into it. Did the conceit come first or the story or how did those two sort of meet? Oh, definitely the story. I started writing the book in a more or less traditional format and it was, I had gotten about 20 pages in maybe and it was going well. But I remember saying to somebody, not every book has to be great. You know, I was like, this is, this may not be firing on all cylinders, but it's sort of working. But I was frustrated with it. It didn't seem like I had chosen the right approach. So I literally just sat down and this is something I don't often do. I don't think I've ever done this. Just sat down and thought about what is this book about? What are the themes? What am I trying to say? And how could that inflect? Usually it's much more distinctive than that. How could that inflect the prose? And what I came up with was that this is a story about among other things. It's a story about how World War I and sort of my hypothesis began this cycle of industrialized violence that once we began it, we are incapable of stopping it. It just moves like a wheel that we're trapped inside. And so I had the thought that what if I wrote it all in one sentence and the end of the book circles back to the beginning of the book so that once you start reading it, in effect, you're trapped in the book forever. And it's this ongoing wheel. So that's fine enough to say, but then you have to actually do it. But within a paragraph, if you want to call it paragraphs when there's no end to the sentence, but within the first paragraph, I knew it was working for me. Like I loved it right away and I felt like, oh, my fingers can't move fast enough. This is providing me the right energy. It was doing all sorts of things. It was thematically relevant. It had this breakneck pace because suddenly it felt like I was tumbling and I was running so fast and just trying to stay on my feet. And that felt like war to me as well. And then I started, I had this idea that I was going to start every paragraph with the word and so that it kept feeling like it was that sense of one thing after another. The bombs fell and then we did this and then this happened and then that happened. And so it was this, this cumulative effect. And then as a sort of additional layer, once I started looking at the pages like this because I'm breaking the sentence up into these sort of paragraph sized chunks, it began to look like poetry or even more accurately like a Psalm. It looked like Bible verses and there's a lot having to do with religion and particularly sort of churches and hymnals in the book. And I liked how it started looking like a Bible in a way. It's one of those rare times where I feel like just the idea and the voice and the format and the perspective all just sort of dovetailed in a really meaningful way. What did you think would be the challenges of this approach? And then what were the actual challenges? I like Highwire Acts. I do that with a lot of my books. I try to set out a certain kind of format or style that it's going to be difficult to keep up. That's what kind of keeps me interested. I like limits and not having periods within the prose generally was an exciting limit to have. So I wasn't that concerned about the writing of it because I've had in other previous books of mine, I've had little stretches where I would do longer sentences. So I knew I kind of understood what that meant in a kind of rhythmic way. What ended up being the big challenge of it was clarity. You know, like I wrote the book relatively quickly. I was so energized by the style of it that it came relatively quickly. But then when I set to revising it, I'd never had a book that was such a mess because sort of the trade-off of that kind of velocity in the writing is sort of spatial confusion. So there was a lot of just going through the book. You know, like after I do the first draft, I usually print out the whole thing and I do a draft on paper and mark it up with red pencil. And it was just all red. Like the whole book was just, the paper just looked pink because it was nothing but red pencil everywhere. And it was all clarity. It was all like I had the rhythm, you know, the book. When you don't have periods, you sort of essentially depend on that sort of rhythm of tires beneath a car on the highway. It's like buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh. It's like this heartbeat that goes speeds up and it slows down, but you sort of, you can plug into that rhythm. But I never knew what was, it was unclear who was standing where, what was flying by. That stuff, which is really sort of nuts and bolts stuff, like in a way kind of the easy stuff in a normal book became the hard stuff in this one. I think this is a, it's a lot of things. This book is a war book. It's also a horror book, I think. I don't know. Do you consider it to be in that genre? Yeah. I mean, I don't know where to put it. I honestly don't. I had the same issue with my previous book, Whalefall. Like I don't, I don't, I've seen it shelved in horror and sci-fi and literature. Same with Angel Down. I found it everywhere. So I don't know. It definitely has like my roots are in horror and I grew up on horror. So I think whether or not I would call it a horror novel, there's elements of horror that sort of in fact, which is a fun word, all of my books, like there's, there's just something intrinsic to me that I always sort of look toward the horrifying side of things. But usually in aims of doing the opposite, like I will have things that are terrifying or gross, but always I've tried to write about that kind of stuff as beautifully as possible. I've always been really interested in writing beautifully about the grotesque. I've always felt like there's something about that that feels very, I never had been able to put into words very well, but very accepting, like they're very open. If you can find beauty in the most like repellent of things, it feels like your mind is really wide open to anything, like whether it's a type of place or type of person or a type of art that you're consuming. It just to me, it's it's almost been the thing that I've hung my whole career on is sort of trying to find beauty with or shouldn't be. Yeah, I mean, and you know, I say this with the highest respect because I am a horror fan, horror movies, horror books, love it all. This book is incredibly gross. So it was waylful, you know, and so in its own way. And I'm curious about how you when's the like the push and pull when you're like more viscera, less viscera, squishier, less squishy, you know, like how do you how do you how do you hold that line? How do you make that balance? I it must be instinctive because I don't I don't really ever feel like I'm ever holding back on it. Like I rarely do I pull back on something and say that's a little too gross or too much. I think in some ways I'm a maximalist in this way. Like I I want things to be sort of overtly big sometimes like we you know, we were you were just talking about horror. There's this sort of what people call sort of a 24 horror, you know, this sort of this kind of creeping dread on the corners. I love that stuff. But I also love horror that just runs right at you, you know, like like something in a in a fun house carnival, like just like some sort of little, you know, laughing zombie figure that comes out on a rail right towards your face. There's something really effective about that. And I think sometimes we can outfox ourselves trying to be subtle and we should just be sort of powerful and straightforward. And for me, that really plays in a lot when I when I think about gore, which I think about by sort of not thinking about it. I want to go particularly in early drafts, go all the way, like, like do everything, be as grandiose and as hysterical even as you need to be like, particularly in a book like this, where you're in a scenario that is grandiose and hysterical and absurd and hyper violent, like embrace all that, push everything to the to the max. And I've certainly done books that do the opposite. But there is, I think, real value in just grabbing someone by the neck sort of, you know, figuratively speaking and just saying this is all coming at you all at once. Just like war. And it just felt it felt wrong. And I don't think in editing, I pulled back on much at all as you can probably tell. You know, there's, you know, the the maximum kill your darlings has never worked for me. Like I've always been of the opinion of like nurture your darlings and let them mature and grow into incredible monsters. Like, like, like, like devote yourself, give in to the things that you love. Don't don't cut them out of reduce them focus on them. I went down this little haunted path because, you know, you just won the Pulitzer Prize. Pulitzer Prize is not necessarily a space or or most literary prizes, to be honest, in my opinion, where speculative fiction, certainly not horror is often found. And I'm curious what what that means, what a prize like this means for the type of work that you do and others do in this space, which means a lot to a lot of people. Um, I haven't thought about it too much yet, but I've seen it like I've seen it start bubbling up from people I know who have been messaging me and saying what it sort of means to them. You know, and some of these are a lot of them are horror authors. And so while it wasn't something I thought of immediately, I think it's it's coming this sort of idea. I think it has to come sort of externally. And it is this idea that there are genres that don't usually get this kind of attention. And you see this talked a lot about the movies, how they're sort of this been in this horror renaissance over maybe the past 10 years. And it's happened in books too. There's been, you know, horror novels are I've been on, I think on the rise for a number of years. And you have these sort of breakthrough books that have been coming out. And I to be part of that is, is, you know, wonderful. It's not I write knowledge genres. So it's like it's not like I'm not single minded about it. Like this is something I want to do specifically with horror or whatever. But again, my my my roots and my the things I grew up on or horror, you know, like, like horror saved my life as a kid, like almost literally. So to to be a piece of bringing that to maybe a wider audience, you know, horse multifaceted, obviously, feels really good. And it feels it feels in some ways like I've held true to that, you know, eighth grader who was renting Don the dead and faces of death and all sorts of horrible things in the VHS store in my little hometown in Iowa. Like I'm still I that's when I learned to write you that that's when I learned how to how to write just for you. And I was watching this movie is just for me. And it's yeah, it's it is meaningful. I think you're convincing me here as I'm talking that yeah, it is it is something I think I'm going to find a lot of meaning in as we go here. Without asking you to totally talk about a different book, you just published a book this year about the director George Romero about his breakthrough horror film Night of the Living Dead. And part of the title is this phrase that you just said how the living dead saved my life. You just said horror saved your life. What what do you mean by that? Well, it's nightly dead opened the door for me for horror. And I think there was really at all times my life, but specifically, most emphatically when you look at sort of the middle grade years, which were very difficult years for me. And they are for a ton of people. But they were difficult just in terms of like socially bullies and all these kind of things. And I felt very, very vulnerable and very anxious and all these things going to school is a real trial. But coming home, I would rent all these the most insane over the top, disgusting, unrated horror films from my local Adventureland video, it was called. And I only sort of realized when I was writing that book, partially devoured. People always ask horror writers, why do you write this stuff? And I sort of figured it out that watching those movies, I was building a suit of armor and reading those horror novels, Clyde Barker novels and stuff that I was reading. Like, I was mastering something. I was mastering terror in a certain way so that I could feel like, well, they can do what they want to me in the daytime, but at night, I'm watching stuff they could never watch. I'm understanding, I'm reading Fangoria magazine and I'm learning how this stuff is done. I'm a fan of the monsters and the special effects artists. And essentially, I'm creating strength that then I can sort of wear to school and in life to some degree. And it was extremely important and I felt like a lifeline. I wanted to ask you about someone who's also been on the Book of You podcast. He was on here talking about Frankenstein, which is one of your collaborators, Guillermo del Toro, who in his own way, you talked about, you know, horror in the movie space. Like, this is a guy whose movies have been nominated for best picture. You know, this is an artist who has brought this formerly disreputable, you know, genre to the heights of the Academy. I wonder, you know, how you think about your work with him and what the two of you are doing in your own sort of different spaces. Well, when we work together on the shape of water, that's the thing that always struck me is that, you know, when he was a kid, he was living in Mexico. And I was living in a small town in Iowa. We couldn't have been further apart. But on our own, we were both watching horror movies. And in particular, we had both watched the creature from the Black Lagoon. And we had both seen something in it that people, most people didn't see. We both saw a sort of beautiful tragic story about a creature who got a raw deal, basically. And then when we sort of met and got together and shared this idea, it was this great feeling of, you know, and this is the magic of art. Like, that movie can be broadcast on a channel and some midnight show. And two people in different countries can see it and have the same reaction. And then when you find each other and people, you know, anyone who uses the Internet understands this, you find someone who found the same thing in it than you. And I think in some ways, Garmo and I were, were and are interested in that thing I spoke about earlier, like finding the beautiful and the grotesque as a way of finding beauty everywhere, finding beauty anywhere you shouldn't see it. Just finding beauty in the day-to-day life, whether you're walking down a dirty subway tunnel or whatever, like you have to open your eyes to this stuff, you have to open your heart to this stuff. And that's something I felt like Garmo understood in a way that I understood. We were very copacetic in that way. Well, he is a best picture winner. You have won the Pulitzer Prize, Daniel, for your novel, Angel Down. Incredible work. Congratulations. Thank you so much for joining the Book Review Podcast. Hey, thank you so much. Coming up after the break, my conversation with best-selling crime fiction writer, Trisha Cornwell. I called this editor who had rejected me three times and I said, well, what am I doing wrong? And she said, well, these stories, is this what you see in the morgue? I said, no, it's nothing like what I see at the morgue. And she said, well, I want to see what you see. Built for collaboration, learn more at shure.com. Some songs that I've written, I started on the piano. That happened with All in One for Christmas is You. If you couldn't tell, that is Mariah Carey. I'm John Caramanica, one of the critics behind The New York Times's 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project. We interviewed some of the songwriters on our list, including Taylor Swift, who hasn't sat for a video like this in a long time. These are not ordinary conversations. You're going to watch these videos and learn about intimate approaches to craft in ways that you rarely have access to. My mom had got me this notebook and I was just writing it really small because I didn't want anybody to read what I was writing. Okay, Jay-Z's Teenage Notebooks. I need to see those. Watch all the video interviews for free and check out the entire 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project at nytimes.com slash 30 Greatest or In The App. And let us know if you agree with our picks. I bet you won't. Patricia Cornwell is best known for her series of books featuring the character K. Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist and chief medical examiner. The series launched with the book Postmortem in 1990, and it was one of the first crime novels to make forensic science an integral part of the story. That book went on to win all five major crime fiction awards in a single year, the first book to ever do that. Over the next few decades, Cornwell expanded the story of Scarpetta across almost 30 books. The series has sold millions of copies, and just this spring, Amazon Prime adapted the story for a new TV series starring Nicole Kidman. But Cornwell's extraordinary success did not come easy. It almost never does, and she documents her remarkable journey in a new memoir, True Crime. And when we talked, she said that she knew exactly where to start the story. And I thought it has to start with my mother burning the clothes. Probably January of 1965, we'd been at home from school for quite a while because of these massive snowstorms that kept hitting. In fact, it was the worst in recent history, and we would be out of school like over a week at a time. And of course, that was loads of fun for kids, sledding and snowball fights and all that, but it was a nightmare for my mother. And she was in the throes of a psychotic depression. I mean, we know that now. I didn't know what was going on then. And it had, you know, it had been going, it had started. This had gone on since the fall and gotten worse and worse. And I think it all had to do with the fact that my father had come up to see us and he came up there with his new wife who was pregnant. And this was in the fall. And then by January, she'd had the baby and I have a feeling my mother must have heard about it. And that just set her over the edge because she kept hoping that she and dad would reconcile. I mean, she never got over him ever my whole life. And so I woke up this one morning. I'm looking out the snow out the window and I hear my mother's wrapping footsteps up and down the hallway. And my brothers are yelling at her from their bedroom saying, no, no, no, please stop. So what what's going on here? So I get up and she's carrying arm loads of their clothing into the living room and throwing them into the fireplace. There's this raging fire going and we're just all terrified and shocked. We don't know what's going on. And then she took a clipper ship off the bedroom in my brother's bedroom. And she, we must, she must not have burned our coats because she said we're going out. And she starts walking us up the snowy hill. And she has my older brother holding this clipper ship and up we're going. I didn't know where we were going. And so there's this orange Jeep coming down with the snow plow and it just so happens that that very moment she's doing this, that Billy Graham's caretaker was coming down and he saw us and it must have looked very strange. Here's this woman with three little kids and one of them is carrying a clipper ship and they're walking up a snowy mountain road. So he stops and he knew who we were. The Graham's didn't. And he says, Mrs. Daniels, where are you going? And she said, well, we're going up. See the Graham's, they're expecting us. Well, he knew that wasn't true. He said, well, you know, why don't you just hoppy up on in here and I'll take you up there. You can't possibly walk and that's true. We never could have gotten up there. It's unbelievably steep and all that. So he drove us up there. And the next thing you know, Ruth, I mean, I remember coming around the curve and seeing that house all built out of old split logs. I mean, this amazing place she built and smokes coming out of the chimney. And then the door opens and here's this woman walking out and she was standing out there with long skirt on and a shawl holding it against the cold with her hair kind of all pinned up as I remember. And Mr. Rickman leads us into the house and we sit in front of her fireplace. And I don't remember what all my mother said to her, but no doubt my mother was talking about Florida and how she had to come here and why she moved here because of Ruth's husband. And by the way, Ruth had heard this from all kinds of disturbed people trying to come up to her house. This was not new. But at this time it was a neighbor and my mother handed Ruth a note and said, I'm there. There's going to be a great flood and I'm sailing away on a ship. Please raise my children in your kingdom. Wow. Ruth obviously couldn't keep these three strangers. She had five children and Billy and that just wasn't going to happen. But they did arrange for people who have retired missionaries from the Congo had agreed that had volunteered to take care of us. And while I am so appreciative that they did that, it was an absolute nightmare. Yeah. It was something that shaped my life forever was being was the foster mother. You go into great detail describing how terrible this foster mother was. I don't necessarily want to go into those details here at one point they're doing you and your family a favor at the other point. She's sounds just like an absolutely terrible person. But it was something that needed to be done at the time because your mother had to go into a hospital. You talk about meeting Ruth Graham at this very young age and then you talk about many years later as you say it's the spring of 1976. You write that it's a turning point in your life. You just come out of a facility. You were at a church service. Ruth Graham walks up. As you say, she gives you a dark red leather journal with a brass clasp. She said she had gotten it in Switzerland. It's very fancy and she encouraged you to write. And eventually this led to you writing your first full length book. You began it right after you turned 20 and it ended up being about 300 pages long. What was that book? That was what I thought was a novel but it was a thinly devailed autobiographical when Ruth said, and when you know I'd come out of this hospital and yes I'd gone to church. I couldn't stand to sit there. All the neighbors were staring at me because now I would been in a psychiatric hospital just like my mother had been. So, oh I must be, you know, my fate seemed to be sealed. Of course the eating disorder is a very different thing but even so I was very depressed. I felt hopeless and I walked out of church because I felt so uncomfortable and the minister saw me walk out. So the next thing I know I get called when I was home and he said, come to Vespers tonight. I'll pick you up. He came and picked me up, took me to this Vespers group and the chair next to me was empty. It was all a plot. You know, Calvin, the minister had arranged for Ruth to be there. She came and sat right next to me. I know what he did. He called her and said, Houston, we've got a problem. And so, because that's what they did. And so she sat next to me and after it was over she looked at me and she said we should have lunch. And I thought, right, I'm sure that's going to happen. Never. I mean, Mrs. Billy Graham's going to call me for lunch. Sure enough, the next morning she called. And I still can see the phone on the kitchen counter and how thrilled I was. What? Ruth Graham's calling for me. She said, I've got to go to Asheville. You want to come with me and go to Pizza Hut? I said, okay. So that's what we did. And she gave me the journal at that time and I still have it. It's in my bookcase over here. And she said, I know you write poetry and I believe that you're talented and I know what you've been going through. And I want you to write your story. Will you do that for me? And that is how that all started. You wrote this book, these 300 pages. It was a lightly fictionalized version of your own life up till that point. What did you do with it? There was a draft. Did you put it away? And that... I wrote many drafts. I mean, from this time I started writing it right before I turned 20 until I graduated from Davidson in 1980. I was, in 1979. I was doing one draft after another of it. The whole time I was at Davidson, when everybody else was out socializing, I was working on this. I was writing the next draft of it. And by my junior year, it had become my honors thesis. They gave me permission to graduate with honors if I would do a project. And I would, you know, like writing a master's thesis or something. And I said, well, what about the book I'm writing? And they agreed. And that... So I kept doing it for that reason. And then when it was done and I got honors in English, I put it in a box. All of that multiple drafts because there was more than one that I had saved. And, you know, I saved things. And then when I started becoming well known as a writer, all this stuff, we started archivaly preserving these things. And so, literally, the manuscript that I looked at had been sitting in an archival box, or I had not looked at it since I finished writing it in college. And it was very strange to look at that, pull it out of that box. And I think, oh, God, this is awful. It's awful. It really is bad. I'm not kidding. Do you think that writing and rewriting this fictionalized version of yourself in your late teens, early 20s, what do you think... Were you trying to sort of work through your life up to that point? I was trying to turn my experiences. I think that must have been it. I thought that I was trying to write a good story, but that really wasn't it. I think it was my therapy. I think that was my coping skill. And the funny thing is, it's still my coping skill, because with all of the trauma and violence that I have seen, you know, turning it into stories is a way of venting it for me. If I had to keep that all inside and never do anything with it, that would be very haunting. But I suppose you're probably right when I was doing that in college. It must have been more for therapy, because I never even tried to get it published. I never sent it anywhere, not even once. When I finished it and got my grade, so to speak, I thought, okay, well, I'm not sure what this was all about. It's not ever going to be published, but I got a grade, and I didn't really think about it anymore. You eventually got a job as a journalist at the Charlotte Observer. First, you started writing TV listings the way you describe it. You make it seem like the most horrible thing. It was awful. And it was, oh my God, it was so boring and tedious. I could imagine. I could imagine. Remembering what TV listings used to read like. You were eventually promoted to the Metro Desk, and then the police beat. This is 1979. And as you were right, you were really covering some pretty tough stuff. You know, you say, quote, for the first time, I was afraid to go home. You bought a BB gun pistol. You say you were perpetually jumpy and afraid to be alone in the dark. You were seeing things, terrible things. How were you like taking that stuff in, metabolizing it? This is you're doing, you're seeing reality or having a face reality now as a journalist. What did that lead you to think about crime, about the thing that you would eventually really lean into with your fiction? You know, the town of Monttreet, for all of the horrors of my childhood, I mean, there were tough stuff for sure, but the town itself, it had a zero crime rate. So nobody even locked their doors. So to go from that to the crime beat where you're going to homicide scenes and you're talking to rape victims or you're going to talk to the parents of a child who's been abducted, whose body shows up on a lakeshore. This was not something that I'd ever had any exposure to. And the reason I think I was good at it, had an aptitude for it, and was so relentless is because it was so shocking to me. I had to find out everything I could. And I think in my own weird way, I was trying to help with the investigation. And I became very close. The police were, you know, I spent a lot of time with them. And that wasn't necessarily a good thing because the newspaper didn't want me solving crimes. It just wanted me writing good stories about them. But it was, that changed me. If I had not been a journalist, I would not be who I am today. I never could have done these books. I had a journalistic, I learned how to be a journalist when I got the job at the Charlotte Observer, writing all kinds of stuff, death crime, but other things too, general assignment, obituaries that I would get wrong and have the wrong person dead, that kind of thing. But if I hadn't done all that, I wouldn't have a journalistic approach to my research. And that is the hallmark of Scarpetta. I mean, it's almost like journalism that you turn into a novel because I research things as if they're real, but I weave them into a story. And so I never looked at the world the same way after I started seeing the kinds of stuff that really happens out there. Something else that changed the way that you look at the world, I imagine, is when you got a job at the Chief Medical Examiner's office in Virginia. You started working there. You met another woman in your life who was important for your development, for your career. Tell me about her. Tell me about Dr. Marcella Fierro. Well, first, let me just say that my arrival at the morgue and I ended up working there was never planned. And a lot of people think that I started out working in a medical examiner's office. And the truth is I went there to do research because I wrote the biography of Ruth Graham after I left journalism. And when that was done in 1983, I said, well, now what am I going to do with myself? What am I going to do for a living? And I didn't really want to go back to journalism. And I thought, you know, I'll write books about crime. The only thing I didn't really know anything about was what happened to the body when it left a crime scene because I'd never talked to a medical examiner and the one in Charlotte would never get on the phone. So I had an appointment to go down there. And that was my first encounter with Dr. Marcella Fierro, who was one of like 10 female forensic pathologists in the country. And quite frankly, just legendary. She was so good at what she does. She was just amazing. And I started doing research there, talking to her whenever she'd let me. I wanted to see an autopsy. She said, no, there's no validation for you being down there seeing something like that. And I said, well, what would it take to give me validation? She said, well, I guess if you became a volunteer police officer, so I did that. But the big thing is I started, I was writing books. I started getting rejected. And I wrote one and then another and then another post mortem was my fourth attempt. And by the time that got published, I'd been at the Emmy's office for six years. It was my full time job. So in that time that you were at the medical examiner's office, you started to write mysteries, which are different from what you eventually ended up making a career out of. I started writing a mystery right after I finished the Ruth book. And I didn't know what the medical examiner would do. And I was stymied. And I was already working on a novel called the Stick Doll Murders where I had created a blow gun. And they're in a shadow box on my wall right in this room. But anyway, I was doing all that and I finally got this appointment. So I went to see her and I went through all the stuff that I was going to do so that the person would get away with the crime or think of it. And she would say, no, that's not going to work. No, that's not going to work. Nope, I'd figure that out. No, toxicology will tell you otherwise. And I'd say, what do you wear to a crime scene? Do you wear a lab coat? Nope, I don't wear a lab coat to the crime scene. And it was all these dumb questions. But this is how I began to learn what really happens. And meanwhile, I'm going there doing research and doing working on the Stick Doll Murders. Well, that all got rejected and I started another one. And I'm still doing research. I'm going, I'm not getting, I mean, I wasn't working there yet. And then the chief came to me one day and he said, if you want to do something helpful around here, he said, maybe you can help edit my medical legal book, a journal that I published a couple of times a year. I said, okay. So I started doing that. Then they got a computer and he said, if you really want to be helpful, maybe you can figure out that blasted thing in the room that they expect us to start using. So we started getting computerized. And meanwhile, I'm still getting rejected as a novelist. I'm writing at home when I go home after work. And I learned computer programming and I began that out of necessity. I became their computer programmer because while I'm writing books that nobody wants. And so that that was, it was a very, it was an ordeal that I never thought would happen. But if I hadn't been there that long, I wouldn't have learned what I needed to do and what I needed to do, you know, for writing these books. Coming up, how Patricia Cornwell cracked the thriller writing code and became one of America's most popular authors. Did you know that India is the biggest adopter of crypto globally and that Estonia offers online voting in all its elections? I'm Catherine Benhold, host of The World, a new daily newsletter from the New York Times. I spent 20 years reporting from more than a dozen countries and it occurred to me one day, you know, what kind of newsletter would I like to read? I don't live in the US. I want something that's written especially for a global audience. Something that helps me understand what's going on and why it matters and ideally something that doesn't just get me down. The world is just that. Each weekday morning we bring you the biggest stories, dispatches from my colleagues on the ground and a few delightful surprises with video too. The World Newsletter from the New York Times. Sign up now at nytimes.com slash the world to get it in your inbox each weekday morning. You were writing books that you say nobody wanted, but you eventually wrote a book that started a series that everyone, you know, wanted at some point, which is the Scarpeta series. I want to sort of ask you at this time in your life, this young moment in your life, what was it about forensic pathology that was so intriguing to you, particularly given all the things that you had seen and that had troubled you while working the police beat at the Charlotte Observer. And then how did you end up incorporating that into your fiction in a way that sort of unlocked what you would eventually do for your career? When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an archaeologist. That was my pipe dream and I read every book I could find on it. I was intrigued by and I was always digging for things. I was looking for gold. I mean, I was just this weird person wanting to look for stuff. But forensic science and forensic pathology are very similar to archaeology in that you are taking little pieces and parts of something and reconstructing a life and not only the death of that civilization or the people, but who they were before it happened. And that to me is absolutely fascinating that you can find a fleck of paint in a wound on someone's leg who's been hit by a car and you take it upstairs to the scanning electron microscope and you do other tests and you not only find out, you find out the making model of that vehicle and then you begin to track down who ran over this person and why. There's just something about all that that I am insatiably curious. I want to know what happened and that that's the journalist in me. I want to know the truth. I want to tell me and I don't know why that is, but that is that's just how I'm wired. And so forensic pathology and forensic science fed right into that with me. By the way, it's not because I like gore. I'm squeamish as heck. I mean, I really am squeamish. I don't like it when I have to go in the morgue. I got used to it after a while because I was down there all the time. But when I haven't done it in a while, it's very offensive. I mean, the smells, the sights. I mean, it's not pleasant. I would have to a lot of my research like going to the body farm. That's a that's a horror show. And I have to steal myself to walk in there and do that. And I don't wear a mask. You have to be brave, but I don't like it. There was a series of events that happened in 1987 that led to you writing your first book or that you incorporated rather into your first book, Postmortem. Could you tell us about those killings that were happening at the time? Yeah. Well, there were several things that came into play. First of all, I'd finished, I turned in my third book and after about eight or nine months, it was making the rounds and being rejected by everybody. And I was at my wits end. It was now four years I'd been there or something like that. And I did something you're not supposed to do. I called this editor who had rejected me three times. He was really nice in her notes. And she got her name was Sarah and freed of the mysterious press and she got on the phone. I was surprised when I said who it was. And I said, I know I'm not supposed to do this, but can you just tell me should I quit? And she said, um, no, I don't think you should quit. I said, well, what am I doing wrong? And she said, well, these stories, is this what you see in the morgue? I said, no, it's nothing like what I see at the morgue. She said, well, I want to see what you see. And secondly, your best character is this woman medical examiner is a minor character, make her the main character. And I thought, oh my God, I don't know if I can do that. I don't know enough to do that. I said, well, thank you and I will try. Well, meanwhile, around the same time, the serial murders were starting in Richmond. And it turned the whole city upside down. I mean, it was one of the worst things ever. And I was working at that medical examiner's office while this was happening. I was riding with the police on the weekend. So I was seeing the homes of these people. We'd sit outside and we'd talk about the case. I had nothing to do with the cases in terms of what happened at our office. Dr. Fierro wouldn't let anybody, nobody was present during the autopsies except certain key staff people. And she sealed the records and locked them in a drawer because she was so afraid of leaks because this was such a nightmare situation going on. And as this was happening and I was watching how Marcella was dealing with it and I was traumatized. I bought my first gun. I started taking shooting glasses. I put a deadbolt on my bedroom door and my apartment because I was terrified of this person who was crawling through people's windows. But I thought to myself, what would Scarpetta do if this were happening in her jurisdiction? If this were her and these were her cases, what would she do? And that was the impetus what started post-mortem. And it's definitely inspired by the South Side Strangling cases but does not mirror them. But that was when I decided to let Dr. Scarpetta take over and try to walk in her shoes. And I remember sitting a very long time at my computer, my word processor going, she did da-da-da-da. No, no, no. I da-da-da-da-da. No, no, no. It's gotta be she. I couldn't figure out who's going to tell the stories. She or I, and I thought, how am I going? I'm an English major who fled from every science course and can't do math and wouldn't go to funerals. So what the hell am I doing writing about a chief medical examiner? But that was the beginning. Now, post-mortem, I think it was rejected by at least half a dozen houses before Scribner took it on barely. And so just by a thread, if that editor, Suzanne Kirk, had not seen, she said she liked the Scarpetta character. She thought she was worth watching and they took it. If that hadn't happened, I really would have quit after that. I wouldn't have tried anymore. That had been four strikes you're out. You write, however, that post-mortem came out and even though it eventually kicks off this massive series, you were still a newly published author. Several reviews weren't great. There wasn't really marketing or publicity behind it. It still, it was on a thread. And I'm wondering, what was it that led you to keep going with this series? And then also, how did you feel as you write about, I don't want to call it like a moral issue, but this idea like, am I writing this the right way? Am I doing it in a way that is not exploitative? Am I doing it in a right way that is not making this violence seem exciting? That's always, and that's a really good question because, you know, I remember one time somebody in the UK, I don't remember who it was, I said that you can write about violence, but you don't celebrate it. And because the stories are told from Scarpetta's point of view, there's an element of condemning this violence as opposed to make it scintillating and exciting and sexy, because you'll never get that from her point of view. And that's the point of view I write from. And but it's a very, very good question because it's something I struggled with at that time. I thought to myself, I'm seeing the real thing every day. How do I write about this? How do I let my imagination let this infiltrate it? And how can I do this while I'm condemning it and not celebrating it because I do not want to add to the problem? But the thing is, these things do happen out there. And by the same token that it may seem very graphic and some people could say it's exploitive, but, you know, we need to know these things even if they're painful. We need to know what goes on in the world. We need to know the dangers out there. And I can't tell you how many people I've had tell me over the decades of how they lock their windows at night. They don't do this anymore. They don't do that, that they're much more careful about certain things because they've read the Scarpetta books. Are you still someone you think who is afraid of the world? You describe growing up with a mother who used to run you through emergency drills at home and you've had many terrible things happen to you. You started working adjacent to the police where you see so many terrible things happening. You worked in a medical examiner's office where you saw the end results of the most terrible thing that humans can do to another human sometimes. You have reasons to be afraid of the world, but you also now exist and have for a while in a world that you are somewhat able to control because of the success in the wealth that you have accrued. Is the world still scary to you? Oh, God, the world is a very dangerous place. Absolutely. I don't live my every day as if, oh my God, chicken little, the sky is going to follow me if I dare go out the door. It's not that sort of thing, but I'm very aware of the things that people do. I'm the sort of person who I'm going to read crime stories. If I'm looking at the Wall Street Journal or better put, the New York Times app, which I have on my phone just so you know. Thank you so much. If I'm looking at that every day like I do and I see a big crime story, I'm going to read it. I want to know exactly what happened to those people. So yes, I am like the embodiment of an emergency siren. You put me in a room or you take me on a little walk and we should do that sometime and I'll tell you all the scary things I see that you should be aware of. That sounds like a very relaxing afternoon. It will be. We'll walk through a parking lot and I'll tell you to look at every car you walk past and see what you can tell about the driver from what they left inside of it because that's what predators do. The baby shoes hanging from the rear view mirror, the gym bag in the back that has a woman's name and her address on the tag. I can't help it. I look at all these things in passing and I go, I wish they didn't do that. I wish they hadn't done that. Be careful over here. This is the world according to Patricia Cornwell. What can kill you, maim you, abduct you. I'm going to think about it. What you can trip over or fall down the stairs while you're looking at your phone and it's relentless. It's all true, but it's also relentless. You know, the world according to Patricia Cornwell has been good. You, you, you know, there was this big moment when you had true blockbuster authors, Tom Clancy, who I understand maybe was a friend of yours, John Risham, Stephen King. They dominated the world of publishing and you joined that club. You had big advances, giant crowds at your signings. I'm curious what that was like as someone who grew up in the circumstances that you detail in at the beginning of this book to through hard work and time arrive at a point where you're flying helicopters. You're living in homes that have gates around them. You're showing up at bookstores and there are thousands of people waiting in line. What was, what is the dissonance if there was one between that? It was, I don't, I did not even, I couldn't comprehend it. It happened, you know, it was very, first of all, you have nothing happened forever. And then postmortem came out and it didn't seem like that was going to go anywhere. And then it started winning all these awards is what, is what changed everything. You know, I got $6,000 for postmortem. I got 120,000 for body of evidence. That was, that to me was like, oh my goodness, because I was earning like $27,000 a year at the ME's office when I was full time there. So, but then, I mean, within another year, I was a millionaire and you will appreciate a hope. I went through an Elvis stage, which was like, ain't nothing I'm going to, if I wanted, I'm getting it. I'm going to drive that Mercedes. I'm going to get that fancy outfit. I'm going to dress all in blaze orange and look like a traffic cone when I walk in the restaurant. And then wonder why people are staring at me. I wish I'd had a really good advisor, someone who has said, and maybe let's don't do this right. You know, maybe don't go on that shopping spree. You don't need this and that and the other. But it was, it was crazy because I went from having nothing to I almost could, there wasn't much I couldn't afford, or at least it felt like it. But I have to say the truth that was a bit destabilizing. You know, well, first it was all the money. And also then you have all these movie stars and stuff. You know, you're running around with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis and meeting people like Woody Harrelson and Robert Redford and, you know, Rob Reiner. I remember sitting on a plane with him and I have a story about that in my book because I didn't know who he was. Here I am at Demi Moore's birthday party and we're in the big old corporate jet for the Gulf Stream flying back to LA from Las Vegas. All the big famous people are in the back. I'm sitting up front by myself and there's this bearded man sitting across from me and he said, hello. And I said, hello. And he said, no, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm blotty blah, you know, here because of Demi when I write these books and he's and I said, and what do you do? Well, it was only the director of the freaking movie who's playing we're on. It was Rob Reiner. And he said, well, I used to be on this show called All in the Family. And you know, for the rest of and I'm so sorry what happened to the Reiner's. But for the rest of the days that I knew him and I would run into him from time to time, I always kidded him about that. I said, you were so kind to me at a time when I felt so out of place and scared and overwhelmed. And I've never forgotten it because you couldn't have made me feel like an idiot at that moment. It was destabilizing and I didn't have anybody in my life that I could really talk to who could help me with how to cope with all of that. And it's no wonder I had that car wreck. I mean, it was like it almost seems inevitable in hindsight that I was going to literally run off the road. Yeah, you write about this incident. You know, you you're in contact with Demi Moore because you're trying to get a big screen version made of a scar Pettus story. Several actors sort of pass through Demi Moore is is very interested. And you are involved with writing trying to write a screenplay. Yes, a lot of pressure. And if you can tell the story, there is a very, very terrible car wreck that you were involved in. Well, you know, so what happened is when post mortem came out and when it one started winning the awards and the L.A. Times book reviewer Charles Champlin, who had given a wonderful review for post mortem, which also was rather a game changer, he came to one of my awards ceremonies. And he said to me he was very nice. And he said, you know, Jodie Foster ought to play Scar Pettus in a movie. And I know I'm even talking really about movies to me before this. I said, oh my goodness. Well, yeah, I mean, but I also would like to have a castle somewhere. I mean, but OK, he said, I'm going to I'm going to arrange for you to meet her because I'm talking to her. I'm interviewing her in the fall or something or whenever it was. So sure, I flew to L.A. for that to meet Jodie Foster. And of course, fans, everybody would have for years thought she would be such a perfect Scar Pettus. But anyway, that was the beginning of that. And while this was going on, I got word that Demi Moore was interested in playing Scar Pettus. And so I said, well, I have. Well, that's unbelievable, but I have to make sure that I have to know that Jodie won't do it. And she made it very clear that she wasn't going to do it. I didn't we should chat about it. And so that's how the Demi thing started in the summer of 1992. And for the next almost six months, I mean, I was at her house in Malibu. I was at her house in Sun Valley. I went to her birthday party in Las Vegas. I mean, she came to Richmond to the Emmys office. She came to the FBI Academy with me or went to a party with her in a premiere in New York. I mean, there were lots and lots of stuff while I'm writing the screenplay for this and we're developing it. But here's the thing. Most people don't know I didn't have a contract and I'd never I wouldn't pay to penny. This was just a verbal thing that we were doing and the hindsight that probably wasn't the smartest thing. So but it was just I'd never written a screenplay before start with that. So I became I was feeling overwhelmed all the time. She's overwhelmed. And so a psychiatrist in Richmond that I would go see from that time to time for therapy, she said, you know, I'm going to put you on project. That might help you just to calm down a little bit. Well, did the opposite. That was gasoline on the fire for me. I started drinking more because I couldn't calm down. And that is what led to that terrible accident in January of 1993 and which pulled the plug. You know, then that was that was the end of that whole thing. You know, I was supposed to have go back to the FBI Academy with Demi and I canceled it. I went into a treatment center. I didn't tell her that I lied and said I was on a safari somewhere for book research or had my staff tell her that my or somebody tell her that I didn't have much staff back then. But but that's how that all happened. And that it's I'm just lucky that I wasn't killed. Really, that was terrible accident. Yeah, the way you describe it, it's quite it sounded quite serious. Somehow decades later, you do have finally someone playing case, Carpetta who would have believed it would happen after on the screen. I know major actress and not just a someone. I mean, she's I've heard, you know, Nicole had been Nicole Kidman. Nicole Kidman had been mentioned to me for over 20 years. And and, you know, she was always a top contender for who would be a great scar Peta, along with a couple other people. But to me, you know, to me was completely out of the picture and I talked to Susan Sarandon, then it was Angelina Jolie and a number of different people. And then it circled back around to Nicole. And so, you know, Scar Peta was so huge in the 90s, especially, but but it's harder to sell that today. There's so many shows out there, so many people writing about forensic stuff and all the rest of it. And it may not be that it's not the same thing that I do, but but I did not after so many failed attempts. I just didn't see how this was going to happen ever. And so to have it happen and then in such a big way is still I'm not sure I've wrapped my mind around it to be honest with you. Well, isn't it nice that there are still things that can surprise us? I am so grateful. I mean, I'm so happy with what they've done. It's a really it's a it's an excellent show. It's not identical to my books, but it shouldn't be. I'd like to circle back as we near the end here, Patricia. Ruth Graham told you all those years ago, you should tell your story. In 2013, when you did a by the book interview for the New York Times, you said, I can't imagine writing my memoirs anytime soon. This was in 2013. I hope I have too much ahead for that. And there are still many people around who might feel uncomfortable about ending up in a published memoir. Ultimately, yes, I will want my story told with glaring, unflinching honesty. That was 13 years ago. Do you think you've accomplished that here? Yes, I have. That doesn't mean I've told you everything. I don't know. I mean, you know, there's some things that that I don't tell in that memoir that I will never tell because they shouldn't be told, including some things that I've seen in doing my research or witness that that were so bad that that I literally had to go home because I couldn't and that that scar you. But I've told the important stories and it's not been easy because I don't really like talking about people, particularly if something's negative. And I've tried to be very careful about that, but I cannot. I have to say the things that happen that shaped me. And I think that if Ruth would read this, if she were still here and could read this, I know most of all she would laugh and she would say, you know, I've tried so hard to straighten you out, but you've just always been a bit of a mess now, haven't you? Are you glad that she gave you that very fancy Swiss journal all those decades ago? Yes, most of all, I'm glad that she told me to write my story. The journal wasn't what I wrote it in. I didn't write any of it in that journal. I wrote poetry in the journal over a period of years, but I borrowed the neighbor's typewriter, literally my next door neighbor, because I didn't have one. And I would go over there every day and work on the story that Ruth wanted me to write. That was what started me writing that story that I wrote in college that preserved some memories that have helped me with the memoir that I just wrote. And it is quite a memoir. True crime. Patricia Cornwell, thank you so much for joining the Book Review podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure and an honor to be with you today. Thanks again. The Book Review is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, and Patricia Sulbaran. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Alicia by ETube. Special thanks to Dahlia Haddad. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email at thebookreview at nytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.