Patricia Cornwell (born Patricia Carroll Daniels; June 9, 1956) is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.
Early life
A descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cornwell was born on June 9, 1956, in Miami, Florida, second of three children, to Marilyn (née Zenner) 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. She has said, "He was on his deathbed. We knew it was the last time we were seeing 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?'"
In 1961, Marilyn left with three children in tow and moved to Montreat, North Carolina. Ruth Bell Graham, wife of the evangelist Billy Graham took the wayward family in and arranged for Cornwell and her brothers, Jim and John, to be raised by Lenore and Manfred Saunders, who had recently returned from Africa. Marilyn Daniels, suffering from severe depression, was hospitalized. Cornwell turned to Ruth Bell Graham as an authority figure, and it was she who noticed that Cornwell's talent lay in writing and encouraged her literary efforts. A bright student, a capable cartoonist, and a talented athlete on the tennis court, Cornwell attended King College in Bristol, Tennessee briefly before transferring to Davidson College on a tennis scholarship (which she later rejected), from where she graduated in 1979 with a B.A. in English.
Career
In 1979, Cornwell began working as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer, initially editing TV listings, then moving to features, and finally becoming a reporter covering crime. In 1980, she received the North Carolina Press Association's Investigative Reporting Award for a series on prostitution. She continued at the newspaper until 1981, when she moved to Richmond, Virginia with her first husband, Charles Cornwell (married in 1980), who enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary. The same year she began working on the biography of Ruth Bell Graham, A Time for Remembering: The Ruth Bell Graham Story (renamed Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham in subsequent editions), which was published in 1983. The biography gained a Gold Medallion Book Award from the Evangelic Christian Publishers Association in 1985. It also, however, was a major blow to her friendship with Graham – they weren't on speaking terms for 8 years following the book's publication.
Cornwell began work on her first novel in 1984, about a male detective named Joe Constable and met Dr. Marcella Farinelli Fierro, a medical examiner in Richmond, and subsequent inspiration for the character of Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In 1985, 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, based on real-life stranglings in Richmond in the summer of 1987. The novel won her various awards including the British John Creasey Award, the French Prix du Roman d'Adventure and the American Edgar Award.
Scarpetta series
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.