Patricia Cornwell

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0:11Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading creative figures reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is one of the world's biggest-selling authors, the crime writer Patricia Cornwall. For over 30 years, her protagonist, the forensic scientist Kay Scarpetta, has been investigating murders across America, tracking down criminals by analysing evidence left on the bodies of victims. Since Cornwall's first book, Postmortem, published in 1990, she's sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Her latest novel continues the grisly theme with the title Unnatural Death.

0:55Patricia Cornwall, welcome to This Cultural Life. Well, thank you. So great to be here. You were born in Miami, in Florida, and spent your very early years there. What did your parents do? Well, it's funny you would ask because, you know, I don't believe anybody's ever asked me that before. Ever. In all these years, what did your parents do? That is hilarious. And it's kind of an obvious question. My father was very unusual. He was an appellate specialist, a lawyer. And in fact, he was the first person, I think, in the United States who became an appellate specialist as a profession in law. Basically, what he did is, you know, after there was a trial, whatever the verdict was on appeal, these kinds of attorneys are brought in to basically do an autopsy on the law.

1:40And so it's kind of funny that his attention to detail like that, I feel like that's a little bit where I get some of my very analytical qualities from is from my dad. He wasn't a great father, to say the least, but he was quite a human being. My mom, she started out modelling and then she was a mom. She had three little monsters to raise. Homemaker. Yeah, she tried. And then had to do it on her own because your father left when you were five years old. Yes. What do you remember of that? Well, I remember it very well. It was Christmas morning, which was down in Miami, and I was always the first one up and I was sitting under the tree looking.

2:19I'd always like to look up through the branches. Can I lie under there looking at them? And at everything else, wondering what was for me. And I remember, I knew for sure. I recognized, obviously, that one was a bicycle. That was when I got my first bicycle was at Christmas. What I remember is being out there, and I heard footsteps in the hallway, and I could hear my mother was upset. My dad was walking through the living room with his suitcase. And so I knew that he was leaving. I could tell from everything going on. And my mother was crying and rather hysterical. I remember grabbing him, screaming, don't leave, don't leave.

2:53And he just ignored me. And so I wrapped around one of his legs like yelling at him, please not to leave. And he just kind of freed himself of me and went out the door. And the next few days, because he came over, picked us up several days later and took us to a park. And we met this woman there who I think is the reason that he was leaving my mom. You know, it was pretty awful, actually. My brothers don't remember it. For you as a child, that must have been, well, probably even more difficult because it was Christmas Day when you're expecting good things and gifts. Does that mean Christmas is always tough for you?

3:28If you want me to be honest, it is. I've never really liked Christmas. When I was growing up in Montreat, you know, in North Carolina, Christmas was always for everybody else. My mom was the only divorced person in that little town. And I was always wistful about families gathered around the table and realizing that our house didn't feel like that. What impact did it have on you as a child, do you think, in the years afterwards? Well, you know, I think I wouldn't be who I am today because what I did was I didn't like the world I lived in, so I made up one of my own. And I created characters and I wrote stories.

4:01As a child? As a child. As soon as I could hold a crayon and could write anything, I started writing little books and I would illustrate them and I'd make little covers and I'd sew them together like with a piece of rawhide or a shoelace or something. And I got to be really good at it, of escaping. Did you need an audience or were you writing for yourself? No, I didn't have any audience back then. It was just me. You weren't reading the stories to siblings or to friends? I wasn't. Now, when I started babysitting at the age of nine or ten, that's what I did is I told stories to all the kids. And I was a very popular babysitter because that's all I would do and they wouldn't let me stop.

4:36At nine or ten, that's a very young age to be babysitting other people's children. Nobody should have ever been letting me babysit at that age. I mean, for God's sake, I needed a babysitter myself at that age. Your mother moved you and your siblings to North Carolina. What was the effect of all of that family split on her personally? Oh, well, my mother had trouble anyway. You know, my mother had a terrible life. I mean, when she was nine, her mother died suddenly. When she was 12, her father either fell or jumped off the 17th floor of a building in Chicago. and I'm to this day not sure he wasn't murdered, if you want me to be honest, because he was an inventor.

5:17He and his father were inventors from Germany, and they were very early into the air conditioning business, which was also at the same time Al Capone was that there was terrible organized crime in Chicago. And my mom's father, my grandfather, had just had a meeting on the 17th floor of what was sort of like the Flatiron building, you know, sort of like the sister to that in Chicago. And it was going to be the first building in Chicago that was air conditioned. And mysteriously, he went out the window, but his partner didn't. And my mom and her two sisters were orphans at that point. My mother went into an orphanage.

5:49I don't know whatever happened to the grandfather's business. It mysteriously vanished, right? Something very strange about all that. So my mother was in an orphanage. All those years that I would try to talk to her about her past, she has no memories, really, of whatever happened in that place. And I think that some stuff happened to her. So she had a lot of issues. and then she got with my dad and my mom was very beautiful and she was modeling down in Florida and they were pretty crazy about each other but I think it started going badly very quickly and they were terrible for each other and she had massive bouts of depression.

6:26She was in her bedroom with the drapes drawn and the door shut a lot of the time. And that possibly goes back to the death of her own father. It very well could. And you say there's so many questions unanswered about that death. Have you not ever looked into it? Have you not investigated? I've not investigated it, but I have looked up things that I can find, anything that was in the news about his death, and it was mysterious. For example, the newspaper story said that his coat was folded and left on the windowsill as if, you know, oh, I'm going to take my coat off and fold it before I jump. No, no, I don't think that's what that's for.

7:00I think that somebody decided it would be best if he wasn't around and they put his coat there to make it look like he did that. I mean, you know, you have to really look carefully at a crime scene because people plant things and they manipulate things to make you think what they want. And usually it just it's like a gong. Boom. It's off tune. You see something, you go, that's not right. That doesn't fit with human nature. Something's bothering me about that. And clearly you are still bothered about it. I am bothered about it because it ruined my mother's life. So why have you not investigated?

7:31I mean, this is the stuff of a great book, isn't it? Well, I'd have to, that would be a very big thing to do, to go to Chicago and try to dig up all those records. And I don't think you'd ever be able to prove anything. I'd be very curious who ended up with my grandfather's business. But here's the other weird thing about that. His father died from falling down an elevator shaft. And once again, the same business partner, from what I understand, was in the area. What, not the same one that was involved in your father's death? Mm-hmm. I didn't say he was involved, but, you know, there's some suspicious about it.

8:05Well, he was there when your father died or involved in the residence. I think he was present when both of them did. It's very weird, isn't it, that both of them fell from heights and died. I don't know. The thing with investigating stuff is that you also have to know when there's probably not anything you're going to find that's going to really help you at this stage of things, and I don't think I want my life consumed by that either, you know? But I did talk to my mother before she died. She died this past summer. And I told her, because she used to get very upset and say, why would he leave us?

8:38Why would he leave us like that? Us three girls. He was all we had. And when they came, after it was over, all the blinds were down. It was a shameful thing. You don't commit suicide. They were Catholics. And that was like a terrible sin. I told her, I said, Mom, based on what I've looked into, and this may be as much as we ever know, I think there's a very good chance your father did not kill himself. I think he either fell, maybe he was trying to show somebody leaning out the window where the outside unit was going to go and it was very windy. Or maybe somebody did something to him, but I don't think he did it to himself.

9:11Either way, she lived her whole life having lost her father and then she lost her husband and then she struggled to bring you up and your siblings. And she dealt with a lot of humiliation because if you live in a very... Where we moved in North Carolina, there was no such thing as divorced people. And then when she had psychiatric problems and had to go to the hospital and be there for months, that added to the shame factor. It was so stigmatized back in those days, particularly. She didn't need to have some of the suffering that she did. And then the evangelist, Billy Graham, and his wife, Ruth, were involved in your upbringing, which is a really interesting twist in your tale.

9:51Well, it's bizarre because my mother moved us to that town because Billy Graham lived there. So to be close to him? Yes. I mean, she was listening to him down in Florida, and she started going to church and all this, and she thought, I've got to get my children out of Miami, and I want to raise them in a place that's safe, and she figured wherever Billy Graham lived, that would be a safe town. So she put us in the car, and we headed there without even knowing where we were going. We had no place to stay. We just had a map. And then how did Billy Graham play a part in the upbringing? Well, okay, well, when I was nine, my mother had her first really big breakdown.

10:28My father had driven up to North Carolina to see us, and he brought this woman he was going to get married to. And I think she was pregnant, too. And that put my mother over the edge. And by the end of the year, she was acting very strangely. She was hallucinating, and she burned all our clothes in the fireplace and started walking us up in the snow. The Graham's caretakers coming down in his Jeep, because he plowed the streets around there when they snowed. They would do that for the neighbors. And he stopped the Jeep, and he knew who my mom was. And he said, Mrs. Daniels, where are you going?

11:02Because oddly, obviously, it looks strange, right? And she said, well, we're going up to the Grams. They're expecting us. Well, he knew that wasn't true. So he put us in the back of the Jeep and drove us up there. I still remember sitting in the back of that Jeep. I could smell the spare tire back there. Drove us up. Ruth came out. Most beautiful thing you've ever seen. Smoke coming out of the chimney. This house built out of split logs and stone. and we sat in front of the fireplace while she went and made a bunch of phone calls. My mom had given her a note that said, there's going to be a flood and I'm sailing away.

11:32Please raise my children in your kingdom. They, of course, could not do that, but Ruth made calls. We ended up going down the mountain and staying with these people who'd just come home from the mission field in the Congo. And that was not a good experience. They became a foster family. Yes, and we stayed with them for about three months or so. And it was pretty awful, to be honest. We were very strict and oppressive, and the woman was not a kind person. I had a very difficult time with that because she picked on me for some reason. I was just terrified all the time of her. And Mom finally came home.

12:08We were not allowed to see her or talk to her the whole time she was in the psychiatric hospital. And then, unfortunately, four years later, it happened again, and we had to go back to the same foster people. You know, she was never exactly, she was never, I don't know how to say it. She wasn't someone that really could be a friend and she wasn't someone who could really be a parent. I felt like I took care of her. And in fact, the first time she got sick, the woman we stayed with said that my mom would have been fine if I did a better job of taking care of things. And I was nine, so I'd learn how to embroider and do laundry and cook and set the table and all these things, which is fine.

12:41I didn't mind learning all that. Embroidering I could do without, thank you. I don't need to do that on pillowcases when I could be out climbing a tree or doing something useful, right? But this sounds like a traumatic childhood and still the memories are obviously very difficult. No wonder you escaped into storytelling. What was happening at school at the time in terms of cultural education? What were your interests in? Well, there wasn't much culture in that part of the world, my dear. I mean, I never took a book home the whole time I was in high school, ever. I never had to study. No, I didn't get much cultural experience in school in the early years.

13:18On this programme, Patricia Cornwall, I ask my guests to choose the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. And you've chosen the 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Why this book and when did you first read it? I don't even remember how old I was when I first read it, but I'd heard about it my entire life because Harriet Beecher Stowe is an ancestor of mine. And my grandmother on my father's side is a direct descendant of the Beecher family. And the weird thing is, when I was nine years old, I wrote a poem about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

13:52I was very upset about all this and slavery. And it must be from hearing my grandmother talk. And then I started looking into more of it myself. And when I read her book, I was really blown away because for lots of reasons. But some of the way she described things reminded me weirdly of a little bit of the way I think. It was real strange. I felt a familiarity with her writing, and I don't mean to sound arrogant. I just felt a kinship with it that was strange. And I also realized we write about the same thing, which is the abuse of power. And it is about inhumanity as well, isn't it? It's about brutality.

14:27Her descriptions of someone being sold into slavery and the families, and nobody had ever done that before. They'd taken on the point of view of these people. And, of course, it was incredibly controversial at the time. The men and women to be sold sat in a group apart, talking in a low tone to each other. The woman who had been advertised by the name of Hagar might have been 60, but was older than that by hard work and disease, was partially blind and somewhat crippled with rheumatism. By her side stood her only remaining son, Albert, a bright-looking little fellow of 14 years. The boy was the only survivor of a large family who had been successfully sold away from her to a southern market.

15:11The mother held on to him with both her shaking hands and eyed with intense trepidation everyone who walked up to examine him. How much of an influence has it had on the moral universe that you have created within the Scarpetta novels? I think it's a huge influence because you never want to act like you're teaching anybody anything or they won't participate. But I know that my work can teach you things if you want. And I know that Scarpetta is a moral force. I would never let her be anything other than that. She does not abuse power. She doesn't always play by the rules, but she does not abuse power.

15:45And humanity first, last and always. Uncle Tom's Cabin is a book, as you say, about 19th century slavery. And it's about survival and overcoming all this appalling adversity, mainly because of a Christian faith. I mean, in a way, it's a very deeply sentimental view of slavery as well, isn't it? I suppose so, and Charles Dickens certainly thought so. And compared to other things that had been written, it was. But to me, it's more what you're really saying is she gives pathos to it. She gives feeling to it. She humanizes. She puts a face on these people. You see someone whose wife or child are being sold.

16:21And lots of these people were not good people. Although many African-American writers have argued that it goes further than that. It's more than sentimentality. It's about creating stereotypes which have endured. You know, James Baldwin said this and Ralph Ellison. How do you feel about that sort of criticism? Well, I don't know. But you've got to remember you're looking in the rearview mirror. And at the time that she wrote this, you know, very different landscape and very different way of expressing oneself. You know, if she were to write something today that's putting a microscope on something like that, I'm sure she would express it very differently.

16:55But I know what you're saying. It's the very thing when I started writing what I'm writing today. When I was in the morgue and I'm looking at dead bodies on a table who've had terrible things done to them. and I'm going, you can't trivialise this, you've got to show it and you do not want to trivialise it by making it a puzzle to be solved, you've got to show it the way Scarpetta sees it, which is a crime against all of nature. Harriet Beecher Stowe is the person who supposedly, Abraham Lincoln when he met her said, oh, the woman who started the American Civil War and you say as a child you wrote a poem about Abraham Lincoln.

17:30I did. Was that with your ancestor in mind? I don't think so but it must have been in the context of that because why else would I be thinking, you know, he roamed the lands here and there and set slaves free everywhere and then one day he was shot in the head and the next day poor old Abe was dead. Now, why would I write that at age nine? Is that what it was? Yeah, I'm just quoting it for you. Is that the whole thing? No. No, there was a man, his name was Abe, he lived in the cabin when he was a baby, he roamed the lands here and there and set slaves free everywhere and then one day he was shot in the head and the next day poor old Abe was dead and now he's in heaven sitting on a golden ladder because the devil didn't get him, the devil's even madder and nobody's going to give me a Nobel Prize for that.

18:13Seamus Heaney's crown is safe. That last line wasn't part of the poem, that was you. No, it was part of the poem, Mr Kicker. What, seriously? Seriously, I'm just quoting the whole thing to you. That's amazing, at nine. Well, I have very few poems that I remember from way back then but I remember that one. But when you were writing these stories and these poems, did you want to write? Did you think? I just did it. I didn't know I wanted to. As a living? No. I didn't know what I was going to do because there were so many things I wasn't good at. And so the only thing anybody had ever given me praise for was writing.

18:49And then for a long time, I was pretty sure that wasn't going to happen either.

18:58Let's move on to another influential book, Your next choice for this cultural life is William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Where and when did you read it? I read that when I was a reporter at the Charlotte Observer. I had the paperback and I'd sit at my desk when there was nothing going on. I was waiting for the next police call and I would read and I couldn't put it down. And I was horrified by it because it is such a shocking view at human nature. Well, now that is an example of not sentimentalising something. It's pretty savage. It's another book about abuse of power again, isn't it? Oh, absolutely.

19:32Power structures and hierarchies. Yes. Meridue turned to Ralph. Aren't there any grown-ups? No. Then we'll have to look after ourselves. Ralph turned to him quickly. This was the voice of one who knew his own mind. Jack spoke. We've got to decide about being rescued. Ralph lifted the conch. Seems to me we ought to have a chief to decide things. A chief! A chief! I ought to be chief, said Jack with simple arrogance, because I'm chapter chorister and head boy. So you were reading this book whilst you were working as a reporter. What desk were you on? What was your speciality? Well, when I first started, I was actually a clerk for the TV guide.

20:17And then I was advanced to general assignment. And I wrote a lot of obituaries. What a surprise, right? Within six months of being at the paper, they advanced me then to the police beat. So I probably was on general assignment sitting around reading. Usually when the police beat, I was out running around in the car somewhere. But I was definitely reading it at the newspaper. And I don't even know why I started reading it. But that really distills the worst part of human nature. And it reminds you, don't ever think that you're not born with certain tendencies that you need to curb as you get older.

20:49Because it's our nature to grab, to take and to want and to complain. It's a book which details abuse and brutality and putrefaction as well. I mean, there is a head which is decaying, which is interesting, given what you were writing about later. Were you drawn at that time to crime? And is that how you ended up on the police beat? You know, I wasn't drawn to crime, but I was horrified by anything that was shocking, whether it was crime or somebody dying in a car accident. I think the horror of it compels me to be insanely curious. Maybe if I see everything and understand it, it won't be as horrible to me.

21:28I didn't get exposed to crime, though, until I started doing the crime reporting, and I didn't realize how relentless I was going to be about it. I mean, I had to find out everything I possibly could. And I'll never forget my first introduction to the morgue was when I was doing that crime reporting. And a couple of death row escapees had broken out of prison. And they killed one of their compatriots whose body was fished out of the river. And I was doing all these stories. It was front page news, running around trying to find these people who had escaped, which was really stupid. But long story short, I wanted to know what had happened to this murdered person, the guy that they had been with.

22:02And so I just, you know what, I'm going to call the hospital. And I just started making phone calls. and this nighttime nurse got on the phone. And I don't know why she did this. I said, well, what were his injuries? She said, I don't know. I didn't really get that good a look at him. And I said, well, where is he now? And she said, well, he's down in the morgue in the refrigerator. And I said, well, can you look? And she said, okay. I went, you know, I'm holding on the phone. I can't believe this person's going to do this. So I hold and she comes back upstairs and she says, well, he had this and this and this.

22:32So I basically inferred that he was kicked to death with their dingo boots, so to speak. You know, look, he had blunt force trauma. I didn't know what it was called back then. But I got all the gory from the morgue. And see, the medical examiner would not talk to me. Well, that was a mistake, because as soon as I moved to Richmond, Virginia, I said, I'm going to find a medical examiner who will. And I did. And just to be clear, your literary heroine, Case Garpetta, is the chief medical examiner, the person who in American law oversees the post-mortem investigations in cases of... Like the coroner over here.