Patricia Cornwell Profile in the LA Times
The Calendar section of the LA Times runs my piece on the bestselling thriller writer, which is as much about the runup to her new novel SCARPETTA as it is a wonkish look at her contributions to institutions of a forensic science nature. Here’s the opener:
expectation. Almost every woman writing thrillers with extreme violence
gets compared to Cornwell's bestselling work featuring forensic
pathologist Kay Scarpetta. Interviews focus less on the books and more
on Cornwell's Armani suits, personal security concerns or her obsession
with solving the Jack the Ripper murders. And the publishing industry's
current grim fortunes lend an air of urgency to last week's publication
of "Scarpetta."
The Cornwell I meet in her Midtown Manhattan
penthouse is candid but firmly in control of the conversation. She is
less about myth and more about reflection — on the economy, her 2005
marriage to Staci Gruber, a Harvard neuroscientist, jettisoning
artifice in favor of honesty and her career arc. Twenty years ago,
Cornwell, now 52, wrote the final words on what would become
"Postmortem" (1990). The novel was published by Scribner with a modest
first printing and advance (6,000 copies and $6,000, respectively) that
came just when Cornwell was about to give up on writing fiction.
Rereading "Postmortem" and immediate sequels reminded me why Cornwell
was showered with virtually every major mystery award at the time:
Scarpetta's first-person viewpoint lends an intimacy to the serial
killing horrors she observes as Virginia's chief medical examiner (in
real life, Cornwell once worked as a technical writer and computer
analyst in that office), a profession rarely at the forefront of crime
fiction at the time. "It was unlike anything we'd ever read before,"
remembers Richard Goldman, who, with Mary Alice Gorman, owns the
Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, Pa., and who was an early champion
of Cornwell's work. "There had been autopsies in detective fiction and
police procedurals, but they were just one of the elements, a sideshow.
It was fresh and exciting to see the medical examiner at the center of
the story."
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As often happens, a lot of good material got left on the cutting room floor, including a follow-up question to what's part of the Cornwell origin story: if Sara Ann Freed, the late and legendary editor with Mysterious Press, was so instrumental in convincing Cornwell to change the protagonist from a cop named Joe Constable to a medical examiner named Kay Scarpetta, why didn't she buy POSTMORTEM?  "I was surprised Mysterious Press rejected it," Cornwell answered. "This is probably apocryphal but I was later told that when "Postmortem" crossed her desk, [Freed] thought it was a rewrite of one of my earlier books. She hadn't realized it was a new one." That left the door open for another legendary mystery editor, Susanne Kirk, to buy it, and now we know the rest of the story…
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<strong>UPDATE, 12/12: </strong>Turns out those ellipses were a good call, because as with any story, there are several sides of it. Margaret Maron, who worked with Freed for a number of years, writes in with her recollection of Freed's version of tale "told more than once":
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><font size="3"><span style="font-size: 13px;">[Sara Ann] was<br /> working at Mysterious Press back when it was owned by Otto Penzler. <br /> Her path had crossed with Cornwell’s and she agreed to read Cornwell’s<br /> first manuscript.  It was unpublishable, but she thought that C. had<br /> talent and made the sort of suggestions any good editor does to<br /> encourage a beginner to forge on.  When C. sent her the next ms., Sara<br /> Ann liked it, but thought that cops had been done to death. On the<br /> other hand, there lurking in the background with other minor characters<br /> was this female ME.  She suggested that C. bring that fresh new kind of<br /> investigator to the forefront and yes, keep her a woman.  (This was<br /> when a whole new crop of female characters were exploding onto the<br /> scene and women protagonists were suddenly hot.)</span></font></span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><font size="3"><span style="font-size: 13px;">Knowing<br /> good advice when she read it, that’s exactly what Cornwell did. <br /> POSTMORTEM was the result and when Sara Ann read it, she loved it and<br /> was wild to buy it.</span></font></span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><font size="3"><span style="font-size: 13px;">Unfortunately,<br /> Otto Penzler refused to let her.  His reason?   And here I quote Sara<br /> Ann directly, “He liked boy books and said he wasn’t going to buy any<br /> first novel from any woman writer.  So he made me reject it.”</span></font></span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><font size="3"><span style="font-size: 13px;">One<br /> of Sara Ann’s endearing traits was loyalty to her employers whoever<br /> they were, so she would not have told Cornwell the real reason there<br /> was no room on Mysterious Press’s list for that book, but I’m pretty<br /> sure she suggested that Cornwell try Susanne Kirk and probably put a<br /> word in with Kirk as well.  She felt vindicated by the book's success<br /> and always regretted that she wasn't allowed to shepherd it through to<br /> publication herself.</span></font></span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><font size="3"><span style="font-size: 13px;">And now you do have the rest of the story.</span></font></span>
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