| Patricia Cornwell | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 9, 1956 Miami, Florida, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, 1990–present |
| Nationality | American |
| Genres | Crime fiction |
| Spouse(s) | Charles Cornwell (1979–1989) Staci Gruber (2005–present) |
|
Influences
|
|
|
www.patriciacornwell.com |
|
Patricia Cornwell (born Patricia Carroll Daniels; June 9, 1956) is a contemporary American crime writer. She is widely known for writing a popular series of novels featuring the heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner.
Contents |
A descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe,[1] Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida to Marilyn and Sam Daniels. Her father was one of the leading appellate lawyers in the United States and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Cornwell later traced her own motivations in life to the emotional abuse she says she suffered from her father, who walked out on the family on Christmas Day 1961.
| “ | He was on his deathbed. We knew it was the last time we’d see each other; he grabbed my brother's hand and mouthed 'I love you,' but he never touched me. All he did was write on a legal pad 'How's work?'[2] | ” |
In 1961, Cornwell's family moved to Montreat, North Carolina, where her mother was hospitalized for depression. Cornwell and her brothers, Jim and John, were placed in the foster care system. Cornwell attended King College in Bristol, Tennessee, before transferring to Davidson College, where she graduated with a B.A. in English.
In 1979, Cornwell started working as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer and soon began covering crime. Her biography of family friend Ruth Bell Graham, A Time for Remembering (renamed Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham in subsequent editions), was published in 1983. In 1984, she took a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia. She worked there for six years, first as a technical writer and then as a computer analyst. She also volunteered to work with the Richmond Police Department. Cornwell wrote three novels that she says were rejected before the publication, in 1990, of the first installment of her Scarpetta series, Postmortem.
The Scarpetta novels include a great deal of detail on forensic science. The initial resolution to the mystery is found in the forensic investigation of the murder victim's corpse, although Scarpetta does considerably more field investigation and confrontation with suspects than real-life medical examiners. The novels generally climax with action scenes in which Scarpetta and her associates confront, or are confronted by, the killer or killers, usually concluding with the death of the killer. The novels are considered to have influenced the development of popular TV series on forensics, both fictional, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and documentaries, such as Cold Case Files.
Other significant themes in the Scarpetta novels include health, individual safety and security, food, family, and the emerging sexual self-discovery of Scarpetta's niece. Often, conflicts and secret manipulations by Scarpetta's colleagues and staff are involved in the storyline and make the murder cases more complex. Although scenes from the novels take place in a variety of locations around the U.S. and (less commonly) internationally, they center around the city of Richmond, Virginia.
There are two remarkable style shifts in the Scarpetta novels. Starting from The Last Precinct (2000), the style changes from past tense to present tense. Starting from Blow Fly (2003), the style changes from a first person to a third person, omniscient, narrator. Events are even narrated from the viewpoint of the murderers. Before Blow Fly the events are seen through Scarpetta's eyes only, and other points of view only appear in letters that Scarpetta reads.
Cornwell shifted back to a first-person perspective in the Scarpetta novel Port Morturary (2010).
In addition to the Scarpetta novels, Cornwell has written three pseudo-police fictions, known as the Trooper Andy Brazil/Superintendent Judy Hammer series, which are set in North Carolina, Virginia and off the mid-Atlantic coast. Besides the older woman/younger man premise, the books include discomforting themes of scatology and sepsis.
Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She wrote Portrait of a Killer—Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, which was published in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world and among Ripperologists.[3][4][5] Cornwell denied being obsessed with Jack the Ripper in full-page ads in two British newspapers and has said the case was "far from closed".[6][7] In 2001, Cornwell was criticized for allegedly destroying one of Sickert's paintings in pursuit of the Ripper's identity.[8] She believed the well-known painter to be responsible for the string of murders and had purchased over thirty of his paintings and argued that they closely resembled the Ripper crime scenes.[8] Cornwell also claimed a breakthrough: a letter written by someone purporting to be the killer, had the same watermark as some of Sickert's writing paper.[8] Ripper experts noted, however, that there were hundreds of letters from different authors falsely claiming to be the killer, and the watermark in question was on a brand of stationery that was widely available.[9]
Cornwell says that there are numerous links between herself and the main character in her novels, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist. They are both Miami-born, divorced, and had difficult relationships with their late fathers.
In 1979, shortly after graduating from Davidson College, Patricia Daniels married one of her English professors, Charles L. Cornwell, who was 17 years her senior. Professor Cornwell later left his tenured professorship to become a preacher. The couple separated in 1989, with Patricia retaining her married name after the divorce.
From 1991 to 1992, Cornwell was involved in an affair with Margo Bennett, a married FBI agent, after meeting her at the Quantico FBI academy, where Cornwell had been doing research for her Scarpetta novels.[10] The affair came to light in 1996 after Margo Bennett's estranged husband, FBI agent Gene Bennett, was arrested for and later convicted of the attempted murder of his wife and the abduction of Margo's church minister, among a host of other charges. Cornwell has denied any responsibility for the incident, calling the affair "very brief".[10]
In 2005, Cornwell married Staci Ann Gruber, an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard. She didn't disclose news of her marriage, which was officiated in Massachusetts, until 2007.[11] Cornwell later stated that turning fifty had made her see the importance of speaking out for equal rights and spoke of how Billie Jean King had helped her come to terms with talking about her sexuality publicly.[12]
Since childhood, Cornwell has been friends with the family of the Reverend Billy Graham and his wife Ruth Bell, often serving as the family's unofficial spokesperson on Don Imus' radio show.[13] Cornwell was previously a personal friend of former President George H. W. Bush, whom she referred to as "Big George", spending a number of weeks at the family's summer retreat in Kennebunkport.
Cornwell has in the past suffered from anorexia nervosa and depression, which began in her late teens.[2] She has also spoken openly about her struggle with bipolar disorder, stating that she is "wired differently":
| “ | My wiring's not perfect and there are ways that you can stabilize that. I have certain things that run in my own ancestry... It's not unusual for great artistic people to have bipolar disorder, for example. The diagnosis goes back and forth but I’m pretty sure that I am. I take a mood stabilizer.[2] | ” |
Since 1998, Cornwell has donated at least $130,000 to the Republican Party, and has made additional individual contributions to Republican U.S. Senate candidates, including George Allen, John Warner, and Orrin Hatch.[14] She has occasionally supported specific Democratic candidates as well, including Hillary Clinton, Nicola Tsongas, Charles Robb, and Mark Warner.[14]
Cornwell has spoken negatively of the presidency of George W. Bush:
| “ | I was supportive of young George W. 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.'"[15] | ” |
On January 10, 1993, Cornwell crashed her Mercedes while under the influence of alcohol. She was convicted of drunk driving and sentenced to 28 days in a treatment center.[16]
Leslie Sachs, author of The Virginia Ghost Murders (1998), claimed there were similarities between his novel and Cornwell's The Last Precinct. In 2000, he sent letters to Cornwell's publisher, started a web page, and placed stickers on copies of his novel alleging that Cornwell was committing plagiarism. The United States District Court of Eastern Virginia granted Cornwell a preliminary injunction against Sachs, opining that his claims were likely to be found baseless. The court shut down his web site, ordered him to stop affixing the stickers and required booksellers to remove the stickers already on their copies.[17]
In May 2007, testifying in a Virginia court in her libel suit against Sachs, Cornwell stated that Sachs had accused her in online postings of being a "Jew hater" and "neo-Nazi" who bribed judges, conspired to have him killed, and was under investigation by U.S. authorities. She hired bodyguards to protect her against anyone who might believe Sachs' accusations. She asked the court to enforce a broader injunction to stop his online accusations, charging he was engaging in libel and cyberstalking.[18][19] Sachs chose not to participate in the proceedings.[20] In June 2007, the federal judge, finding actual malice in forty-five false statements by Sachs, ordered the removal of Sachs' defamatory postings until the case was resolved.[21] In December 2007, the court awarded Cornwell $37,780 in damages to cover the costs of defending herself against Sachs' internet attacks. It also permanently enjoined Sachs from making the defamatory accusations against Cornwell. Sachs again chose not to participate in the proceedings.[20]
Sachs fled to Belgium to avoid arrest. He says it was to escape an international neo-Nazi conspiracy by his lawyer, Cornwell, George Bush, Google, the news media, Jimbo Wales from Wikipedia, the CIA, and others to torture him to death in prison because he somehow threatens their power. He also asserts that that "the EU Commission" is investigating the conspiracy after the King of Belgium intervened to prevent him from being murdered by the American ambassador. Currently, Sachs continues making charges against Cornwell, such as "When Patricia Cornwell gets drunk and on drugs, she admits her 'stalking' stories against Brussels Jew Les Sachs were all perjured and false, a way to spread media and internet slanders that would defame Sachs. "[22][23][24][25][26][27]
Cornwell has made several notable charitable donations, including funding the Virginia Institute for Forensic Science and Medicine, funding scholarships to the University of Tennessee's National Forensics Academy and Davidson College's Creative Writing Program (the result of which is the Patricia Cornwell Creative Writing Scholarship, awarded to one or two incoming freshmen), and donating her collection of Walter Sickert paintings to Harvard University. As a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital's National Council, she is an advocate for psychiatric research. She has also made million-dollar donations to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the Crime Scene Academy and to the Harvard Art Museum.