Her first published novel, Postmortem, created a new genre, the
forensic detective thriller, which begat the television shows CSI, Silent
Witness and Waking the Dead. She defends her gruesome work,
saying that she is giving voice to victims of a forgotten war. “We are at
war with crime,” she says. “Every day someone is murdered or
attacked. These are acts of terrorism but against our own people. Is it not
an act of terrorism when someone goes to shoot 30 students at a school?”
And yet, considering most real-life murder victims are young males, it is
striking that all of Cornwell’s are female (a few are children) and
that the murders invariably involve a sexual motive. Is she avenging real
crimes against women or is she a titillator? There is no doubt her
descriptions of brutalised female corpses and the bizarre, fetishistic
things her villains do to them – tattoo them with handprints, remove
eyeballs and fill them with sand – can read like some outré
type of pornography. She focuses on sexual violence because “it is the
worst. It is the absolute degradation of a human being. It is very rare,
unless it is a domestic situation, for a woman to be murdered without also
being sexually assaulted.”
But does she not worry that she will excite where she is trying to disgust?
“Men can easily get off on this stuff in the newspapers. I try to write
about crime not to celebrate it and make it sexy, but to condemn it. But I’m
going to show it to you. Because it’s not pretty. It’s ugly and nasty and
painful and frightening.”
To her, there is power in knowledge; she would rather “know what goes on than
merrily go on my way, thinking it’s never going to happen to me”. So she
still attends a few autopsies each year – “Because if I don’t go visit the
dead, then they’re not gonna talk to me any more” – and has experienced most
things she writes about, spending days at the “Body Farm”, a forensic
college at the University of Tennessee where scientists observe decomposing
corpses, which gave the title to her fifth Scarpetta novel. With Book of
the Dead, however, she stopped short of cooking human flesh on a grill
so she could describe its smell. “Although,” she says, “I could have got
someone at the Body Farm to let me try it.” For all her professed
seriousness, you can’t help thinking she relishes the gore.
It is often assumed that the sharp-dressed, meticulous Scarpetta is Cornwell
herself, but rather she is her own idealised mother. “Scarpetta is a fantasy
of what I wanted around me when I was a kid,” she says. “When I was held
hostage in that foster home, if Scarpetta had walked in that house, she’d
have said, ‘You’re out of here!’ She would have saved me. That patrol man
would never have done that to me. Or if he had, she’d have cleaned his clock
in court. Unlike my mother, she’d have known what to do.”
Cornwell can be seen in Lucy, Scarpetta’s niece, who evolves over the series
from a neglected, angry, geeky child into a lesbian action figure, flying
choppers, shooting guns from the back of her motorbike, joining the FBI and
hostage-negotiating teams. Like Lucy, Cornwell owns an oversized Breitling
pilot’s watch, a Harley and a Ferrari, and has learnt to fly a helicopter.
And, although once married to a man – her college professor, 17 years her
senior – Cornwell has been out, or rather outed, since 1992, when she had an
affair with Marguerite Bennett, an FBI agent, and was exposed by Bennett’s
jealous husband and fellow agent, Eugene. A shoot-out ensued between the
Bennetts in a church and Eugene was jailed in 1997. But the case refuses to
go away, with an account of the affair, Twisted Triangle, published
this month; Cornwell views it as a last-ditch money-making venture.
The outing was painful, but it expelled the poison of secrets. These days
Cornwell can barely utter a sentence without mentioning her partner, Gruber,
whom she met while researching Book of the Dead. “The first time I
saw her it was just like the air shifted in the room,” she says. She tells
me how Gruber, 40, a vegetarian, has kicked her, a passionate cook, out of
the kitchen to concoct delicious tofu dishes. She recites Gruber’s sheaf of
Ivy League degrees, which she finds mighty classy. It helps also that
Gruber, a neuropsychologist, is an expert in bipolar disorder, for which
Cornwell has taken medication for years, and therefore understands her
volatile highs and lows.
The couple were married in 2005 in Massachusetts, the only US state that
permits gay marriage. It was a private ceremony because, Cornwell says, with
sadness, “I wouldn’t invite my family. They know about it, but we don’t talk
about it.” Her mother and Ruth and Billy Graham all accepted Gruber. “The
people at the centre of the evangelical universe are kind and
non-judgmental. It is the rings around Saturn you have to watch out for.”
Her marriage has radicalised her politics. A long-time Republican donor who
was close to George Bush senior, she will vote Democrat in the presidential
elections – for Hillary Clinton, she hopes. What she calls her “pilot light
of anger” has flared up against the religious right. “I didn’t used to be
political. I used to keep my mouth shut. We have politicians who want to
overturn the constitution [to invalidate gay marriage] and elected officials
who say homosexuals are more dangerous than terrorists. I don’t feel good
about the far right at all, so much of their creed is discriminatory. I
don’t care how they worship. Why should they care about how I live my life?
Jesus would have been happy to carry a rainbow flag.”
When Cornwell was growing up her mother once declared that the worst thing in
life was to turn out a homosexual alcoholic: “And I grew up to be gay with a
DUI [Driving Under the Influence conviction],” she laughs grimly. Cornwell
totalled her car after a drunken night in Los Angeles, just after her
success had rocketed her from a salary at the morgue of $27,000 to a $1
million advance. Living in Malibu, she hung out with Demi Moore, Bruce
Willis and Woody Harrelson. She calls this her Elvis period, a folie de
grandeur in which she scooped up properties – she owned five at one time
– and went on epic shopping sprees in which she bought expensive clothes,
cars and jewels. It was insecurity, she says. “I was scared to death! I
didn’t know how to behave around superstars. I didn’t know how to handle the
money. I had no boundaries. I didn’t even know how much I had.” During that
period of her life, she was hot, with movie studios desperate to make a
Scarpetta film. Of all the blockbuster authors, she is the only one whose
work has never been filmed. Stars dropped out: Jodie Foster (Cornwell’s
first choice) declined, Demi Moore’s interest faded. There is talk that
Cornwell was too controlling of her vision, but she says the scripts were
never good enough. And now, with a glut of forensic dramas on television,
one suspects that Scarpetta’s big-screen moment may have passed.
Cornwell has pared down her life and no longer feels the need for an office of
eight people to carry out her ideas. But she still has that limitless
American thinking and epic philanthropy, which means that she chucks $1
million donations at police crime scene academies and scoops up the college
and medical bills of deserving cases who cross her path. She understands,
and enjoys wielding, the magical power of money. It is also therapeutic, she
says, this giving. I ask if she regrets never having children and she says:
“I want to be my own mother and take care of myself. And my own father. He
never paid a penny, never did anything for me.” Providing for nieces and
nephews, paying their way through college, being the strong parent she
herself lacked, has healed her inner, neglected little girl.
After our interview, we are both making use of the extravagant rest rooms of
the Harvard Faculty Club when Cornwell calls to me from an adjacent stall.
“You know one of the worst things about visiting a crime scene? You can’t
use the bathrooms because it destroys evidence. You can be busting to go for
hours.” She clearly loves all that police procedure, relishing her place
behind the yellow tape. And she is a little in love, too, with her own image
and mystique. Giving me a lift in her Porsche 4x4, she remarks that it has a
gun turret. She’s joking, but I have to ask to make sure. And as we say
goodbye, she gives me her bodyguard’s number in case I need help while in
town. “Or if you want someone killing,” she adds drily. I like her a lot: I
just wouldn’t want her for an enemy.
