Patricia Cornwell - Author HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk.

I am Steven Sackur.

There is a select club of fiction writers whose next book is eagerly

anticipated by legions of fans around the world.

And my guest today is in that club and has been for

more than two decades.

Patricia Cornwell can lay claim to have invented the whole

genre of crime scene forensic detective fiction.

Her investigator, Kay Scarpetta, has featured in two dozen novels

and inspired a host of imitators.

The author herself talks of her determination to confront

and control her fears.

Do her books tell us what she is frightened of?

Patricia Cornwell, welcome to HARDtalk.

Thank you.

I've heard I do the same thing you do.

What's that?

Autopsies.

Well, this isn't going to be an autopsy, but it is going to be

a dissection of what you do.

I want to begin by asking you, when did you first realise you had

a gift for telling stories with an edge of darkness to them?

Truth is, I realised it at a young age, because I was always making

up stories, you know, and the kids loved

to hear my stories.

I realised very early on that I could tell stories

in a very frightening way.

One day I was holding forth in a vacant lot near my house,

I was probably nine or ten, in North Carolina where I grew up,

and I scared these little boys so badly they burst into tears

and went racing home.

I felt awful, and I went, "Oh, my goodness, I have the ability

to make little boys cry."

I should have acted on that and made them cry a whole lot more,

but I felt bad about it.

So I knew that I could scare people at a really young age.

Very interesting, and you say you felt awful, but I dare say

you felt a little empowered too.

Because it gives you a certain power.

It didn't stop me, in fact, you know, I was writing stories

constantly, including in school, and they would pin them up

on the bulletin board, like when I was in the fourth grade,

a little kid.

But I will tell you the most common phrase in any of my stories

was "all of a sudden".

You know, because everything was spooky and scary

and it's someone walking under a street light in the shadows,

and the moon and clouds going by, then I had to put a witch on a broom

and draw a picture, so it was all spooky.

My favourite holiday was Hallowe'en.

I planned for it for months, loved it.

You are painting this picture of you at nine or ten,

I know by nine or ten your own life had had a lot of fear and sadness

and upset in it, because your dad left home when you

were very small child.

I know your mum had mental issues, and had a breakdown

when you were still a child.

Was there a sense in which you were trying to impose control

on your life, find a way of controlling things by writing

stories, where you were the author of everything?

You know, when I was little, I have to say if I had not,

did not have artistic and some means to lift myself out of

what was all round me, and it is not that it would be

necessarily as bad to someone else as it was to me,

but I am very sensitive.

I don't know what it was, but I took things really hard,

and my father leaving when I was five, and I adored him,

and on Christmas morning of all things, I was -

I still remember it as if it was yesterday,

really, and a lot of other things, and my mother, several times

when she had deep depression, she was hospitalised,

and we went into foster care, and that was really bad,

and I wasn't allowed to leave the house and things like that.

So I developed this ability to transport myself,

it is no accident that Star Trek was my favourite show on the rare

occasion I was allowed to watch it.

I wanted to beam myself somewhere else, and creativity

gave me a chance do that.

I think you are right, I think it has been tainted by fear

and horror and going into those dark places, because I think I felt

if I could go into them, maybe I wouldn't be afraid

of them anymore.

What is amazing, you have not only gone into them

but you have stayed in them, to a certain extent.

I guess, without trying to be a sort of pop psychologist, psychiatrist,

you may have written to a certain extent to control

and confront demons, but you have stayed doing it.

Some people might have thought you conquered the demon,

you had great success with the books, you could have moved

on, but you keep writing them.

It is like when Mary Shelley created Frankenstein, she didn't know that

monster was going to live with her for eternity, right?

So we create something that might actually be a means to you dealing

or coping with your own psyche, and it kind of controls

your life after that, but in my case I am happy it does.

It is a good thing, it is better than what I came out of,

which is a life with no control.

This is the latest book, Chaos, I think it is the 24th.

Yes.

Of your Kay Scarpetta series.

That is right.

Would it be right to see all of them as a form of therapy?

You could say that.

Hopefully they don't read like therapy and they don't read

like some neurotic drivel, which my early ones did,

trust me, the ones that didn't get published.

I work through a lot of things in this, and I have Scarpetta

do the same.

Her biggest underlying motivation is that she became an expert

at death at a young age because she watched her father dying.

I became an expert at loss, and the loss caused me

to fear death.

If you are little and you feel abandoned and alone and you are not

sure who is taking care of you, you worry you won't survive,

and I am lucky I did.

You know, I really, really am.

So I return to my own crime scene through a very poetic way of dealing

with the life of Kay Scarpetta and the cases she works.

She deals with the loss of her father by always

being this expert in death, but no matter how much she picks it

apart and puts it back together again,

he will never be alive again and neither will any

of her patients.

How do you do that as human being?

That is what is fun about these books, and interesting for me.

How does she go on, and how do any of us, and so it is not

just about a thriller, it is about much bigger

subjects than that.

Well, in a sense, and I said it at the beginning,

you were the inventor of a genre which introduced us to the skills

of the forensic investigator, interpreting crime scenes,

using science, using research, and it seems to me there is linked

there also with your beginnings and your professional life

as a journalist, which was you going out finding stories and researching

them, and also your obsession almost with the fine detail.

It seems you really really want to dig.

I am a bit of a weirdo that way.

It is true, when I started out at the Charlotte Observer,

within no time when they put me into the police beat,

it happened within six months of my being hired as general

assignment, and that was after I did the TV magazine and sent it

to hell in a hand basket.

I was the worst TV updater they have ever had in

the history of newspaper.

When I got into the police beat, I used wear a necklace that had

a pendant with nothing on it.

I felt like when I went off to college in life,

I didn't know anything about anything, I had never

written a term paper.

Shakespeare meant going to see the movie when I was in high school,

didn't know crap about life, and so when I got into journalism,

everything was a brand-new experience to me.

So I would take a story that had been written 20 times,

and I would say look at it as if no-one had ever told it

before, and next thing you know you are winning awards,

because you are telling something that is right in front of everyone,

but they don't see it when they walk past,

and it is a great story.

So that has just been my method, it is what I still do.

Millions of people love these books, and, you know, there are, I guess,

other writers too in the same sort of genre who write great detective

fiction which sells by the million.

There are other people who frankly aren't interested in crime fiction

because of its predictability.

I mean, the bottom line is, you know, when you write,

read a crime thriller that there is going to be resolution.

I mean, you know you have written two dozen, so we suspect you are not

going to kill off Kay Scarpetta, she is going to come out on top.

She may fire me some day, I worry about it all the time.

Do you see that point, that you know, for anybody

who doesn't want to enter a story sort of knowing what the outcome is,

there is a problem with a lot of crime fiction.

Well, you know, I think especially if you are talking about

the more traditional, where it is conventional

and there are certain tricks to the trade,

I remember the first mystery convention, one of the only ones

I went to in the early days, and they were talking about red

herrings and buried clues, and I went what?

This is coming out of the context of watching autopsies and crime

scenes, a red herring is probably some weird food.

I didn't know what they were talking about.

And from the beginning, I have always gone away

from the conventions of the genre, and you don't know necessarily.

In Chaos, you probably have a pretty good idea

who might behind a lot of this, but you don't know what is going

on because it is more like real life.

Have you ever written a story where there is no resolution,

where the perpetrator walks away from the scene, scot-free?

Yes, but he has got caught later.

That is the point.

I have had my fourth book, the person didn't get caught.

You don't do that.

But I went why not?

It happens in real life.

We will get him later.

He didn't get caught for a long time.

A really long time.

One person we thought was caught isn't, so that is the way it works.

That is life.

You mean when you say he got caught eventually in a different book?

A different book.

She finally got - Scarpetta did him in,

but it took a while.

The other temptation a lot of readers have is to try to figure

out how much of Kay Scarpetta, who so many people feel

they know so well, is actually Patricia Cornwell.

Well, there are many things about us that are similar,

in term of our DNA you might say.

I think like she does, I solve cases the way she does,

I have the same sensibilities.

I would like to think I am the type of humanitarian,

have the same values she does.

Beyond that there are huge differences.

I am not Italian, I am not a fallen Catholic, I am more

of a fallen everything else.

I am not that smart, I am not educated the way she was,

I couldn't really do an autopsy.

I wouldn't try, it would be wrong.

I don't really collect evidence at crime scenes,

but I know how to describe it, so there many differences.

And the other thing is, she is probably a lot...

She has a much thicker skin, and she is much more disciplined

than I would be.

I am volatile.

I am an artist, I get moods - she can handle it.

She is much more disciplined.

I would be a terrible Kay Scarpetta.

She wouldn't make a very good Patricia Cornwell.

That is the truth.

She's seen a lot of the results of graphic violence.

And much of it directed at young women.

Not all of it, but much of it.

Some of it is fetishised, a lot of it is sexual.

How close to the edge of taste, I suppose,

but also questions about voyeurism and titillation even...

How close to the edge of those issues do you feel you get?

It's funny you would say that.

I am much more mindful of that edge than a lot of people would know.

You want to get up close to it, but you don't want to cross it.

The problem is knowing what that means, where is the edge

and what does crossing it mean?

And for my case, it's where it becomes violent in a way that's

no longer safe.

In other words, if you're showing what the killer is doing as opposed

to showing what Scarpetta imagines, how she cleans up after the fact

and solves things, the first part of that is a lot more dangerous

than the latter part.

You're safe when you're with her.

So when I went to the third person point of view and started,

in some books, getting into the mind of the killer, I did that for a few

books and in my opinion I started getting over that line and I didn't

like the way it felt.

That's one of the reasons I stopped doing it.

I should say, I thought you stopped doing that,

writing in the third person rather than the I form, reading the book

as though you were Kay, I thought you stopped doing that

because the audience didn't seem to like it very much?

They didn't like it.

They didn't like it at all, but then I didn't like it either.

And now I understand why they didn't like it, because...

Maybe you shouldn't care that they didn't like it.

As an artist, you surely have to write from within rather

than write simply what you think your audience wants?

I don't write what I think they want but I do care

what they don't want especially.

If something is disturbing and upsetting to my fans,

like when I killed off Benton Wesley, it's like the little

boys crying in the parking lot, I made the little boys cry

in the parking lot, dammit, you know?

And my fans were heartbroken, outraged, upset and...

And when you talk about your fans, I'm just thinking to myself,

you sound a bit like...

Readers, whatever you want to call them.

Whatever, but you sound a bit like a sort of franchise and I just

think, when we think about the biggest selling

thriller writers...

I'm turning around squaring off at you now!

Notice my body language has changed anyway.

Well, that's good, but think about James Patterson

and some of the others.

They sell by the gazillion, but it's a bit industrial, you know?

They have teams of writers, Patterson, overseas,

and he presents them with sort of plot ideas and then they go

and write it in the style of Patterson and it all becomes

a little industrialised.

Are you getting close to that?

Never.

Scarpetta is not going to let me share that writing with anybody.

I wish I could sometimes, but she only talks to me.

And she doesn't always talk to me.

If I thought I could hire a team of people and produce three or four

of these every year that the readers would love, I would do it.

I would make more money, probably, than I do now.

But I can't do that.

These come from some place inside of me.

I give them everything I've got while I'm doing it.

I do care what the readers think.

They spend their good money on these books and I wouldn't be

here today if it wasn't them.

Does it take it out of you?

Yes, yes.

Because we've talked about the dark places and there is darkness

in the books.

You say this is personal and your writing from your

heart and yourself.

And yet what is miraculous about what you do is pretty much

every year there is a new one.

I think you've been writing these books for pretty much 25 years

and sure enough there are Scarpettas.

So you churn them out.

I try to.

I try to do one a year.

Occasionally I might do something else instead,

like when I did Jack the Ripper, which the new one of those

is coming out...

So things like that, but...

The books themselves, what they take out of me

is, it's exhausting.

It takes of all my focus and it hangs over my head the whole time

I'm doing it.

It's really hard.

If the research that has taken the most out of me.

When I first started doing all this, you really don't know what it's

going to do to you until it's already happened, and then

it's too late.

There's no getting out of it and no going back.

And I changed my life in a way that I may well have given

myself a disease.

I won't get over this!

What do you mean, a disease?

Because I have, like, post-traumatic stress type stuff.

I have images and things that are like malware,

I can't get them out of my head.

I've seen things I don't show my readers.

I've heard things I don't ever tell my readers.

And when those scenes visit me, when I least expect,

like when I'm lying in bed just trying to relax a bit and then

I just get up and I have to just leave the room.

Because they are too hard.

And if I didn't write about it, that's at least something I can do

with this really morbid a rather horrible database that I have

in my head.

To be honest with you, it's been hard.

No, I haven't heard you talk quite like that before.

It actually brings me back to where we started,

with stuff that is in you that goes all the way back to childhood.

Yeah.

Including come and I have to ask you about this because I just wonder

if it's still there in you, really close to the surface...

You were abused as a child.

I think that the two things I remember most is that I won't get

over and I probably worry about it all the time,

have the feeling of being existential, having no power,

that nobody cares, you're invisible, you're nothing, you're not

going to amount to anything.

There's a part of me that will always feel like somehow it's

going to turn out that way again.

I will live running with that chasing me, that I will be

that helpless child.

Once again.

And that's what keeps me going.

And you don't get over these things.

Sometimes, I have so immersed myself in the traumas and the tragedies

of other people because I sort of desperately need to try to heal

other people because I know what it feels like to have nobody who can do

that for you.

And then when somebody finally does, and I was given that gift

with people like Ruth Graham, who make me feel like,

wow, if that lady paid attention to me when I'm just this is nobody

in this little town, maybe there's something special.

It's really about healing yourself, isn't it?

It's about healing myself and one of the ways we heal ourselves

is to heal others.

In fact I don't know of any other weight to heal yourself then to do

that for other people.

What I hear in your voice is actually an insecurity in a way

that is release of rising for a woman who is one

of the bestselling authors in the world, you know,

who travels with an entourage, who has come up what all of us

from the outside would regard as a fantastic life

and so much that's good.

And yet you still feel insecure?

Oh, I'll never change.

I'm still that scared little girl.

I'm still that scared little girl afraid to open the closet door

or look under the bed, and by god I'm going to because I can't stand

being afraid of anything.

And that's what people don't understand.

They think I'm some superhero like Lucy in these books.

I'm not.

I learned all the things to do them but I'm really at heart just

a little girl with a crayon writing poetry and making her own little

books and selling them together and drawing pictures.

And yet I've thrown myself into a house of horrors,

to write something that I felt would matter and would change things

and would empower people and take a character to do what I wish

I could do.

I wish I could kick butt the way she does.

I'm glad you talk about Lucy because I did want to talk

about her, but one particular aspect of her in particular,

which is, you introduce this character, she is the niece

of Scarpetta and she is a crucial character, and she's gay.

Yeah.

And you are gay and I don't know whether you actually wanted to come

out, but you did come out and it was quite a completed story

because you had a love affair and it got into the media

and it was all quite messy.

Oh, I tended to make mistakes in really big ways,

let's just put it that way!

But you have talked about Ruth Graham, who was a great

mental to you and she was obviously the wife of Billy Graham,

the pastor, the Evangelist, an internationally known figure

who was a Christian conservative.

In some ways, you've been quite conservative in your life and yet

you have made a point now of speaking out on gay marriage

and other issues concerning the gay community.

Have you left behind your conservatism?

I was never conservative.

I mean come as a kid I was conservative but only

because I grew up...

The first seven years in Miami and then North Carolina,

a place I wouldn't go right now, hello, by the way...

But anyway, in this little town where Billy Graham lives up

on the top of the mountain, everything was Evangelist

will Christian stuff, nobody had liquor in the town

that they admitted to, nobody was gay, that they admitted to...

So when you first realised you were gay...

That was really bad.

Were you battling with yourself?

Oh!

Listen, I'd never even heard of that when I was growing up.

There were spinsters and roommates.

I'd never heard of gay people.

That you were drunk or a sinner or a paedophile, a child molester...

But the gay stuff was not something that was common in the fabric

of my little sheltered world.

And never would I have thought that that would be what I would grow

up to be.

I mean, I didn't make the choice.

Why would I want to do that and get criticised and pigs on?

And you know something people don't know?

And I'll tell you and I've never said this in public before...

The truth of the matter is, when I got outed,

which was when Vanity Fair did this really horrible story

and there were things everywhere because some people just decided

to do that because they were, it was just really to be cruel...

When I knew this was all coming out and this was like in the mid-90s

and I was devastated and frightened and I had never had my privacy

exposed like this and I knew what this was going to mean

to people, I picked up the phone, I called Ruth Graham and I said,

Ruth, can I come and see you?

Because there's something I have to tell you and I'm going to do

it in person.

She said "Sure, honey, come on up".

So I got on my plane or my helicopter, I don't know

what it was, but I flew to the mountains in North Carolina,

I went up to her house, I sat down and I said,

"You need to know that I'm gay and the reason I'm telling

you is that you're going to hear about it anyway".

So here's what she did.

She said, "Oh, honey, I've no news since you were that big.

I know that's not true about you.

" And the fact of the matter is, she was always kind and loving

when Stacey and I, Stacey met her before Ruth died,

and she was always welcoming.

Stacey is your partner.

Yes.

But Ruth, she did not judge me, she never brought it up,

but even when Vanity Fair ask her about it, she's at the same

thing, "I've known her since that..."

She wouldn't go into it, she wouldn't accept it,

in a way?

Just denial.

Yes.

Did that hurt you?

It hurt me terribly.

It still hurts me.

Because as much as I sing her praises and love her and I know

that she was kind and she would never have like kicked us out

of the house or done anything like that, I don't think

she would have voted in our favour, based on that she just couldn't

deal with it.

It was too...

It was too much against everything that she'd ever been taught

and what she was surrounded by, what she lived with.

It didn't compute to her.

Because that story is quite a few years old now,

we're talking the 1990s.

Yes.

But the last time I saw her was 2006 and I was up in the mountains,

Stacey was there, we were in the bedroom talking and she couldn't

have been kinder.

But it's not something we could ever discuss.

You have vanquished a lot of demons.

But I'm getting the impression there are still some inside you?

Oh, how can you not have demons in this life?

There's so much to deal with, so much to overcome.

And then just when you overcome some things, you start getting older

and have to deal with everything else.

You know, so life is a struggle and it's what we make of it.

And as much as I'm so grateful to have the success that I have,

I also want to feel like have made the world a better place and that

I leave it a better place and that I'm honest while I'm here,

even if it's hard, which is one of the reasons I want to do your

show, because I like somebody who asks me the hard questions.

We should all be giving hard answers too.

This question of fear that sort of runs through the interview

from the get go, from the beginning of your life,

are you still fearful today?

Of course.

I'm fearful of failure, I'm fearful of death, you know?

And loss and violence.

I know way too much about everything bad that can happen to everybody.

I know the liabilities of all things because I've seen so much.

But the thing is, I get to produce something beautiful out of it.

The art is fun and if I entertain people then I've taken something

and actually created something really good out of something that

maybe didn't start out so hot.

Patricia Cornwell, that is a great place to end.

Thank you so much for being on HARDTalk.

Thank you very much.

It was great to talk to you.

Thank you.

Hello.