JUDGING by her jacket photograph, Patricia Cornwell is the spitting image of her lead character, the one who has just won her a $24 million advance on three crime novels and made her a bundle on the previous seven, the most recent of which, Cause Of Death, was published in the US this month.
But Patricia Cornwell doesn't really resemble Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia. Her hair, possibly lightened for the pictures, isn't blonde, and her eyes appear a less vivid blue.
Still, she has walked Kay Scarpetta's walk, talked Kay Scarpetta's talk, and if she has not been the target of a serial killer, as Kay Scarpetta was in her first novel, Postmortem, she has been stalked and is as fully aware as her fictional protagonist of the terrible power of evil.
(And, last month, she was involved in a scenario that had all the elements of a torrid thriller. Eugene Barrett, the husband of Cornwell's FBI agent sweetheart, Marguerite, discovered the liaison and orchestrated a shoot-out with his wife in a local church.)
She is among the most famous people in Richmond, Virginia, USA, where she lives in a gated community, and her book signings, often attended by thousands, are monitored by four to six police officers doing bodyguard duty and trying to weed out wierdos.
Cornwell's knowledge of Richmond's streets, some of which are as mean as any major city's, is encydopaedic, but the centre of her novels, the centre of Scarpetta's life and the wellspring of Cornwell's work, is the morgue. Late in the afternoon, Cornwell enters the large, nondescript building with the confidence of a big-time alumni visiting her old high school. These are her buddies here: all of them have their counterparts in her novels.
On the ground floor, the sweet stink of disinfectant permeates the air, all the way past the unloading bay and into the corridor where so many of Richmond's dead have been wheeled for their last physical. It is a walk that begins the cataloguing of death, for Cornwell the first steps in a journey through the life of a murder. There is the requisite look at the toe tag, then on to the X-ray room and beyond to the autopsy room.
Next door sits the walk-in refrigerator, in which bodies zippered into pouches rest, like so many outsize grocery bags, on wire racks. Down the hall is the misleadingly cosy room in which, years ago, families waited while the loved, or unloved, one was wheeled into view. "I've had some limited exposure to the relatives of victims, and it is so much easier to deal with the suspect," says Cornwell. "Who wants to deal with some mother who's screaming? It tears your heart apart."
UPSTAIRS again, Cornwell and a forensics expert show me one of the notorious Black Talon bullets, which have flanges that open up and shred the flesh. The expert - young, pretty and cool as a cuke - shoots it into a tank of water, where it opens like a deadly metal sea anemone. "Do you want it for a souvenir?" she asks. "No," I say, muttering something about believing in evil. "That's good," Cornwell says. "Because evil believes in you."
Prison inmates write her fan letters, the violence-prone saying "I know this looks bad, but I didn't do it and the white collar criminal - the embezzler, for instance - asking for a job with her when he's sprung. But even though a John Updike or a Robert Coover probably hears from nuts, it is safe to assume he does not have Patricia Cornwell's particular problems with a sometimes over-zealous public. Nor does he have a splendid suite of offices and an eight-person staff seemingly put on this earth to ensure he has nothing to do but write for an average of 14 hours a day. His output is unaccompanied by the kind of memorabilia more commonly associated with blockbuster movies and basketball teams (a closet in Cornwell's office stocks Patricia Cornwell T-shirts, visored caps with the Scarpetta logo and poster-like maps of Richmond with the landmarks in Scarpetta's life blazoned in blood-red ink). And soon, Comwell may indeed cave that blockbuster movie: F46m Potter's FieId (1995) her sixth Kay Scarpetta, is to be filmed.
A $24 million advance (and a one million first printing for Cause Of Death) for Patricia Comwell is not the lucky chance it might seem. The reason is not simply that her novels have sold well into the millions and been translated into 22 languages, and that the orders for Cause Of Death were cause for champagne well before publication. It's that mystery readers are on the whole, addicts.
Cornwell is among those at the top of the list of good, solid mystery writers. Her prose is crisp and clean, and although her books tend to be lengthy; little if anything, is extraneous. Cornwell, however, insists that "the mystery genre doesn't apply to what I do, and if you expect that, you're going to be shocked or disappointed. My books are crime novels and about the people who work in crime and not mysteries, which I've never read in my life anyway.
Cornwell doesn't "do clues", as she puts it. Nor does she "do red herrings". Instead, she tells the reader what it is like to be elbow-deep in blood and looking for pellets, and how hard it is to remove a shirt from death-stiffened arms. She can tell all this because she has done all this, often in the company of an off-duty policeman named Michael McKee, researching it in the interests of an accuracy that is sometimes tough to take - not only for the reader but for her. When I ask if the body farm in The Body Farm (1994) - where corpses are left outdoors so that the FBI can study the rate of decay - is real, she answers sharply, "I don't make up anything".
If Cornwell is sensitive to the reality of violence, it is because she has seen so much of it, and if she is a Stakhanovite among novelists, it is because her work-ethic is inextricably linked with survival. Like Scarpetta, she was born in Miami. Her parents separated when she was five, and two years later her mother moved her and her two brothers to Montreal, North Carolina.
"When I was nine, my mother had her first nervous breakdown," says Cornwell. "We were out of money, out of fuel, out of clothes, the car was snowed in at the bottom of a hill and my mother just couldn't take it anymore. So she walked us up to the top of the hill and tried to give us to Ruth and Billy Graham the US evangelist, who didn't even know us. Ruth made us spaghetti for lunch, and I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen."
Ruth Graham, herself the child of missionaries,, installed the children with missionaries just back from the Congo and opened an account for them at a local department store. She remembers Comwell as "plucky and smart as a whip". The kids stayed with the missionaries for three months while their mother was hospitalised.
After a childhood in which "I didn't always know what was going to happen", Cornwell graduated from Davidson College and married an English professor 17 years her senior. She worked at The Charlotte Observer, North Carolina, eventually as a police reporter, and in 1981, moved to Richmond so her husband could study for the church.
For five years they lived in tiny seminary housing, and Cornwell turned a profile of Ruth Graham she had done for The Observer into a book. Once bitten, Cornwell wanted to write more books - books, as befits a former police reporter, about crime.
A doctor friend referred her to MarcelIa Fierro, then a Virginia deputy chief medical examiner. "When she started talking about how you make the body talk to you, I was just blown away," says Cornwell. "Dr Fierro couldn't see me again for a month, so I asked if there weren't something I could do on my own. `Become a volunteer police officer', she said, and, sure enough, I'm out on the streets in uniform."
Cornwell was also foraging in the morgue's medical library, but before she could watch an autopsy, she had to audit forensic science at the police academy. One thing led to another technical writing, computer analysis, the coveted autopsy observations, and "next thing I knew I'd been there six years."
In 1984, when Cornwell finally began to write crime novels, she bought two Agatha Christies, one Dorothy Sayers, one P.D. James and one Dick Francis to guide her. It was a disaster. "I would take all this esoteric research I was doing and try to put it into a mystery mould," she says. "The main character was a walking-wounded, poetic, polished, handsome detective named Joe Constable. Is that not awful? Dr Kay Scarpetta was a minor character."
She wrote three books over four years, all of which were rejected. "By now I was desperate. I was working full-time in a morgue, we're still dirt poor, living in a seminary and I thought I'd ruined my life. Here I'd been an award-winning journalist and biographer and look at me now. I was a failure." So she called the editor who had rejected her last novel and asked what she was doing wrong. As Cornwell tells it, the editor told her to ditch Joe Constable for Scarpetta and to stop writing about archaeology sites, buried treasure, esoteric poisonings, fights over wills and missionaries with diamonds from the Congo. "Is this what you see at work?" the editor asked her. "No, I've never seen any of this in my life," Cornwell replied. "Then," the editor said, "I want to see what you see.
Around that time, Richmond experienced a rash of serial killings, "professional women about my age who were being raped and strangled and tortured," Cornwell says.
When the second one, a neurosurgeon whom I had seen doing a brain cutting, was found, I went nuts. At the time I had separated from my husband and was living alone. I remember the women doctors and I would go home at night and check our closets and behind the shower curtains because this guy was getting into people's houses. That's when I bought my first handgun." She pauses. "Then a thought entered my mind. In cases like this, who better to handle them than Scarpetta?"
That was the genesis of 1990's Postmortem. Seven publishers rejected it before Scribner's took it. It went on to win all five major mystery awards for that year, and the paperback sold in the hundreds of thousands, as have the subsequent Scarpettas. "I get paid a lot more than most movie stars do that's pretty outstanding," says Cornwell. "But I spend a lot of money, too. Renting the private jets and helicopters, the research and the staff it goes right back into my work."
With her new contract, she'll have even more to pour back into her empire. But Putnam didn't woo her with that $24 million; it was Cornwell, ever driven, who made the first call.
Cornwell is admittedly demanding. "I really must have a lot of creative control over what is being done. What I write about is very serious to me, and I don't want it made cutesy." What Cornwell writes about is the kind of people who kill for sport but unlike, say, Thomas Harris, she's not interested in crawling inside the mind of a serial killer. On the contrary. "In America we've become so focused and so curious about these aberrant people, we almost celebrate them," she says. "They have women whoa want to marry them, for crumb's sake." Cornwell herself has never met a Ted Bundy or a Jeffrey Dahmer because Scarpetta doesn't have to.
Besides she was a healthy respect for evil, which is not, she says, "something out there. It's in us, in our capacity, so why would I want those dormant cells awakened?" Her killers' nemeses are Dr Scarpetta; her computer genius niece, Lucy; police officer Pete Marino and a supporting cast made up mostly of FBI agents.
Scarpetta is of Italian descent because her work is "dark and hard", Cornwell says, "and when she comes home I want music and wine and beautiful bright colours and lush foliage for her." She is about 40, as is Cornwell, and holding. The next Scarpetta novel, Unnatural Exposure, is finished and will be published in a year.
Cornwell's social life is quiet: "I don't have a significant other. What do you do? Advertise? It would be wonderful to have some exciting relationship. But how many candidates do you think there would be for somebody like me? Most men wouldn't deal with it for more than five minutes.
Cornwell always wears three gold rings. The first is a wedding band bought in Verona, the home of Scarpetta's fictional ancestors, and symbolises her commitment to her work. The second symbolises her new task, which is Hornet's Nest (a non-Scarpetta book about a female police chief and a young police reporter), and the series that may follow it. The third bears the Scarpetta logo and celebrates, in a sense, their marriage. "She works me like a do," says Cornwell. (The New York Times).