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Interview with Patricia Cornwell

Out author Patricia Cornwell is one of the major international best-selling crime writers. Her recent book, The Scarpetta Factor, continues her highly respected series featuring forensic pathologist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Cornwell has won numerous awards for her work, including the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author and a Galaxy British Book Award.

Her work is known for featuring the latest in forensic medicine, compelling characters and intricate plots.

Cornwell come out publically in an interview with The Daily Telegraph after she was, as the Advocate puts it, “unceremoniously shoved out” of the closet when her brief relationship with married FBI agent Margo Bennett was revealed. Cornwell has since married her partner, Staci Gruber, a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Cornwell recently spoke with AfterEllen.com about her new book, why she believes it is important for her to be out, and whether or not Scarpetta herself ever had a lesbian fling. AfterEllen.com: Can you talk about what inspired The Scarpetta Factor? Patricia Cornwell: First of all, I wanted to do the follow up to Scarpetta, which came out last year at Christmas time and was set in New York. The first book [in the series] is set in New York and that was a deliberate decision. All of my career I’ve halfway joked that the inevitability for Scarpetta is that she will end up in New York someday because that’s the ultimate. There is no bigger stage.

I never did it for one very good reason: It is a daunting world. Even with all of the experience that I’ve had in forensic science and medicine and police work, to try and comprehend [New York] in terms of how they work crimes and run their agencies and departments is like starting all over again. You might as well assume you don’t know anything because the way that New York does stuff is unlike any other place here or abroad. So when I decided to do this, it was a big decision.

But I wanted that challenge. When you’ve been doing something for a long, long time it’s smart to rattle your own cage and to make yourself uneasy and insecure so that you keep the material fresh. If things are new and exciting for me, they will be new and exciting for you. By giving her New York City, I’m really saying that the world is in her lap. She can do whatever she wants, any kind of case.

But what really changed the entire complexion of it for me was when I was here last Christmas on book tour. I hung around after and I was walking about the city and what I hadn’t anticipated was that a very dominant character in the new book was going to be the economy itself.

Everywhere I went I saw the painful signs of the times and that’s described through Scarpetta’s eyes. I thought, I cannot write this new book and ignore what is happening all around us. How do these same political and economic difficulties and the uncertainty that all of us are facing affect [the characters]? Because they are not immune to it. They’re supposed to be in the same world we are.

So that added an interesting texture to The Scarpetta Factor and it gave life to a huge subplot in the book, which is Lucy.

We’ve always known that Lucy is very rich. She earned a ton of money off the computer industry going back to her teenage years, but I’ve never discussed her finances or how she got her money or how she even managed it. Then we started hearing about all the Ponzi schemes and I thought maybe she has a financial thing happen to her and this can somehow become part of the story and may even be related to what’s going on.

That became a rather accidental subplot. And that came from walking around and looking at how the world had changed and realizing I had to deal with that with my characters.

AE: She is a great character to struggle with that storyline. PC: No kidding, because she’s not going to be a good sport about it. Lucy is never a good sport about anything. She’s not going to take it sitting down. She’s angry and, as usual, it prompts her to do the very thing that she struggles with, which is to cross boundaries.

Lucy is a vigilante in her own way, which is part of what’s fun about her because I can let her do things that I’m not allowed to do. You know that this is going to promote bad behavior and she is going to have a little bit of a regression.

She was behaving so well in the last book and that can’t last forever. She is going to be prompted to become secretive again because her nature is to be secretive. She becomes secretive with her partner, Jamie Berger, and that creates a world of trouble. She is even secretive with her aunt, Kay Scarpetta, so we have a lot of problems on our hands. AE: Your characters all have rich interior struggles that thread through the investigations. When you’re writing your books, how do these two elements influence each other? PC: I really have two intricate plots going with these books. One is, of course, the cases being worked, which have the intricacies of a spider web. But I’m also doing that with the lives and relationships of five main characters. A very big part of this tapestry is who they are with each other, both good and bad, what’s happening next, who’s getting along and who isn’t, who’s having sex and who’s not, who’s angry and who’s forgiving and who isn’t.

They’ve become an extended family, which is really fun because I call it a crime soap opera – hopefully on a sophisticated level. But what happens is that when I start writing the story I have to say, Okay, what’s going on with you guys? I really don’t know until I put them together in scenes and then I notice their body language and their dialogue. I know that sounds odd to say. I let them be what they want to be.

I’ll tell you a funny story about that. In 1997, when I was finishing Point of Origin, which is the book where Benton seems to die and then we end up with a surprise many years later, in that particular book, the last night Scarpetta and Benton were together they did not have sex.

My publisher called me and said, “Benton and Kay really need to have sex because it’s the last time they’re ever going to see each other.” And I said, “They don’t want to have sex. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t make them. I already thought about it, I tried it. They would not walk across the room, they would not touch each other. There’s just something else going on there.”

I don’t make my characters do anything they don’t want and I don’t stop them from doing things we sometimes wish they wouldn’t do.

AE: That must go back to that idea that if you’re surprised the reader will be too. PC: It’s true. It’s a funny thing about creativity. Even though you think you’re making things up, it demands that you’re honest with it.

AE: You don’t want to force the evidence to fit the crime. PC: You’re right. It’s the same thing as the evidence and crime. Even though I’m making it up, I don’t show you things I know couldn’t happen. I try to keep things within certain limits of credibility.

Because if I’m lying, even if I’m clever about it, at some level, you’re going to detect it. You don’t ever want people to come out of the story and go, “Why is it right now my attention is dragging and I’m not concentrating enough?” That happens when you no longer willingly suspend your disbelief because somebody’s pulled a fast one on you.

AE: At one point in the book, Marino thinks about Scarpetta’s portrayal in the media and wonders if all the attention and hype is affecting her work negatively: “He’d seen it happen time and again, people believe their own press and quit doing real work, and then they f— up and make fools of themselves.”

You are the world’s number one bestselling crime writer, known for both your accuracy and attention to story, but do you feel more pressure to get it right in each book? To make sure you stay focused on the work. PC: I sort of don’t let the external things influence me. I have my own set of standards and I never deter from those. I suppose where I could get in trouble, and I don’t allow this, is if I got a little too smug and decided, I know this is close enough to being right and I don’t need to check it out, I’ll just look on the Internet and make sure that this particular aspect of forensic pathology is correct or law enforcement of whatever. But I still do the same thing I’ve always done.

When I finish a book I have a very small handful of experts who review the manuscript and look for mistakes. I give them a chance to let me know if I messed up. Sure enough they’ll find something. Nobody knows it as well as they do. Certainly I don’t.

It may be an error that nobody else would notice but internally it will cause problems in their department because it’s a sore spot. I’m as careful as I can be about those things because I don’t want to make errors. These are all flights of fantasy that are built from the blocks of fact that I get from my research.

AE: Your first crime novel, Postmortem, came out in 1990. You’ve talked about how there are elements about your writing process that have stayed the same, but what’s changed? PC: There are humongous changes. My writing was much more linear back then. In the olden says, the main character of the series was really forensics because I was showing people something they’d never seen before. People had not been in a morgue. They had not been in a laboratory. They had not been with crime scene investigators. No one had seen the things I saw everyday because of the research and so that was center stage.

Now my characters kind of wear that like an old pair of shoes because, yes, I’m going to show you the latest and greatest and newest, but really because of how inundated we are with forensic science and medicine and crime scene procedurals that can’t be the main character anymore.

I’d rather have the stories much more thriller, more suspenseful. And of course a huge character in this is the relationships between the characters themselves. These people have a lot of baggage with each other.

AE: This might be a question better suited for Scarpetta, but where do you imagine forensic science in the future? What major changes do you think we’re going to see? PC: I think you’re going to see that the more things change, the more they stay the same. That the technology is going to proliferate to the point where you can do things very quickly and get answers in matters of minutes or hours that used to take days or weeks.

Some of the fantasy that’s on television shows may in fact turn out to be real. You may have handheld devices on crime scenes that can give you instant answers on DNA profiles and we certainly don’t have that now. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we don’t get to that stage.

And so the technology is going to work more and more to remove the human elements from the investigation because it’s going to be all so automated, but what you’re going to find is you can’t teach these things to think. Not the way human beings think, where we have to deliberate and use deductive abilities. It’s interesting that you would ask this question because that is exactly what Scarpetta is faced with in the opening of the book. She’s working on the body of this dead woman, and every bit of technological evidence and eyewitness report makes you think that this woman was out jogging and she was still alive early in the morning and now she’s dead. But then Scarpetta is looking at what the body’s telling her and the body’s telling her a different story. It’s saying that this lady has been dead for a while.

That’s where the human element, or the Scarpetta factor, comes in and where you say, Okay, maybe both things can be true. And that’s not ever going to be replaced by handheld device. So I think ten or fifteen years from now you’re going to have human beings who may have all of this technology, but they are still going to be asking the same questions and be stumped by the same things yet again.

AE: And the advances in technology can also pose new problems. PC: I hate to say it, but the other thing that happens is bad guys get smarter too.They figure out ways to foil the process so you have to deal with the way they’re thinking as well. Do I ever think we’re going to get on top of this problem because of forensic science? Absolutely not. The smarter we get it doesn’t seem to stop a whole lot. You have to remember that forensic science and medicine are the cleanup crew.

AE: I want to shift gears here and talk about how a few years ago you were outed – PC: Let me just say this, because I think it’s really important that people understand. The quote outing was done in the mid-nineties and it sort of happened because of this FBI case that became high profile and it came out that I’d had a relationship with someone, which I did not deny.

But at the time it was just that I had never been asked. That got [put] upon me because somebody dragged me into a case that I really should not have been part of and I think they did it for attention. But before that, I just had never been asked. I never had a journalist who said, “Are you gay?” I certainly wouldn’t have lied.

It’s been much more vocal in recent years because it came out in the news that I was married. That came out because of a lawsuit where I had to sue this person who’d been stalking me for over a decade now, a cyber stalker, and part of that court case revealed that I am married to Staci.

To tell you the truth, we hadn’t even talked to our families. It was very private. We did not make a big deal about it not because we’re trying to hide something, but we’d been living together for several years and we just wanted it to be private. That’s why that came out and the press picked up on it and started asking about my marriage. I’ve always answered questions that people asked, it’s just that a lot of times they don’t ask.

AE: When this news did become public, did you have any concerns about how your fans would react? PC: No. I knew it was going to become public because my lawyer said, “I want to be able to say this in the lawsuit because this is a fact about your life,” and I said, “That’s fine.” We hadn’t hid it, but we didn’t make a big fanfare about it. It was something between the two of us.

I can’t worry about what my fans think because there are going to be some who think that it’s the coolest thing ever and there might be some who will never buy a book again. I’m sure I’ve lost as many fans as I’ve gained and maybe gained as many as I lost, but it’s impossible for me to know. I’m quite certain there would be some people who would stop buying my books if they hate all things gay and they might have stopped buying them even because of Lucy. It’s one of those things that I can’t measure. I know that my sales have been very strong and in fact they’re bigger now I think than ever, but does that mean they might not be even bigger? I don’t know.

Again, I try to be honest in every aspect of my life, even in my fiction I am telling the truth in my own way, so I really do not sit there and think, if I do this am I going to offend somebody and they won’t buy my books anymore?

But has it had an affect? I dare say it’s quite possible there are things I don’t get invited to, [laughs] and maybe there’s some things I do get invited to. People usually aren’t quite so cheeky as to say, “We’re not going to invite her to do this lecture because we don’t like gays.”

I would tell anybody in this situation that you’ve got to be true to yourself. In terms of my public personae and being honest about who and what I am, it isn’t really just about protecting me it’s about protecting humankind.

If we lie about these things, what we’re saying to people who are like us is, “You should feel shame and you should hide too.” And what we’re saying to other people is, “It’s okay to persecute us so we’re just going to hide behind a rock.” We can’t do that. It’s perpetuating something that’s downright evil.

AE: Do you ever think about these issues in your representation of Lucy as a character? PC: I absolutely do. Lucy in particular lives her life boldly. Now Jamie Berger is far more interesting in terms of her balancing act and that’s a point that I make in this book. Berger is this prominent prosecutor who is now living with Lucy and they’ve been pretty open about their relationship.

Jamie thought she would be okay with this until it started becoming an issue and people were talking about it and she realized that it wasn’t so comfortable for her. She started having people say ugly things about her on the Internet and getting harassment and her life began to change as a prominent public figure. She realized this wasn’t as easy as she thought it was and now she has some discomfort, which also throws a bit of a monkey wrench in her relationship with Lucy.

AE: What do you think about the representation of lesbian characters in other contemporary books? PC: I have to admit I’m more familiar with what I see on television and so forth. The L Word is loads of fun, but do I think that really depicts life as most of us know it? I certainly don’t.

I think that a lot of gay women actually just lead normal lives and are quiet about their relationships. You see them more just in a normal restaurant having dinner together. Or maybe I just don’t go to the right places.

Staci and I often look at each other when we’re watching shows like that and say, Where are these places? I want a coffee shop like that. Where the hell is this? It’s the same thing with Queer as Folk. I’d like to find a bar like that in Pittsburgh. Where is it?

But anything on TV is going to be much more dramatic and more exciting to watch.

AE: When you were talking about the elaborate construction of your plots, I was actually going to ask if you’d ever read anything by Sarah Waters. PC: I haven’t.

AE: You should check her out. She’s a British writer and most of her books are set in the Victorian era and they have some pretty juicy and intricate storylines. You should read Fingersmith. PC: I’ll write her name down. I’m actually going over there tomorrow on book tour so I’ll get somebody to look for one of her books for me. AE: What are you currently working on? PC: I’ve started the next Scarpetta book and I think it’s going to be really, really exciting. I’m going to be secretive about what it’s about because you’re going to find out something about Scarpetta’s past that nobody has ever known before. Something that she was involved in at some point in her life in terms of a career situation. I actually think it’s going to blow people away because this lady’s got a secret.

AE: Secrets are great. PC: I’d like to tell you that she’s a closet gay [laughing] because everybody wants her to be – and maybe she is, she does not always invite me in her bedroom so I don’t really know what she does all of the time, just for the record. I do know she is very open-minded and if she felt like it, she would help herself, I’m quite sure. But don’t get your hopes up because that’s not the secret.

AE: [Laughing] I never imagined that was the secret. PC: I’ve had people ask me for years, “Come on, tell me, I know!” Well, now, look, maybe she dabbled in college, maybe that will come out at some point, or maybe when Angelina Jolie is playing her on the big screen.

AE: There you go. PC: But she does have something from her past that she’s still involved in now that almost no one knows about. It’s a really cool thing. I think it’s going to stun people. It’s not a hobby, it’s something deadly serious. My research is taking me into some areas I’ve never gone into before so I’m excited about the prospects of this next book.

It’s going to be a big story on a big stage. And I have no idea what’s going to happen because I never know until I get into it and then I don’t usually know until it’s all over with.

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