Patricia Cornwell

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Patricia Cornwell (born Patricia Carroll Daniels, 1956) is an American crime writer.

Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner, is one of her best-selling books, and the first was inspired by a sequence of dramatic murders in Richmond, Virginia, where the bulk of the tales are set.

The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later television adaptations of police work.

Cornwell has also started new investigations into the Jack the Ripper murders, indicting British artist Walter Sickert.

Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.

Early life

Cornwell, a descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, was born in Miami, Florida, second of three children to Marilyn (née Zenner) and Sam Daniels on June 9, 1956. Her father was one of the best appellate lawyers in the United States and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Cornwell traces her own motivations in life to the physical abuse she suffered from her father, who walked out on the family on Christmas Day 1961. "He was on his deathbed," she said. We knew it was the last time we'd see each other; he took 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?" says the author.

Marilyn was left with three children in tow and moved to Montobe, North Carolina, in 1961. Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of the evangelist Billy Graham, took the wayward family into the Lenore and Manfred Saunders, who had recently returned from Africa, and they raised Cornwell and her brothers, Jim and John. Marilyn Daniels, who suffered from extreme depression, was hospitalized. Cornwell's authority figure, Ruth Bell Graham, was born in Ruth Bell Graham, and it was she who discovered Cornwell's gift lay in writing and encouraged her literary pursuits. 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, the book is written in English.

Personal life

She married Charles L. Cornwell, one of her English professors who had been 17 years old, on June 14, 1980, less than two years since graduating from Davidson College in North Carolina. Professor Cornwell converted from a tenured professorship to become a preacher later in life. The two couples divorced in 1989, with Patricia keeping her married name after the divorce.

Cornwell married Staci Gruber, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, in 2006. However, she did not announce her pregnancy until 2007. Cornwell later explained that turning 50 made her understand the importance of speaking out for equal rights, as well as how Billie Jean King had helped her come to terms with openly discussing her sexuality. She works for Gruber in Massachusetts.

Cornwell has been friends with evangelist Billy Graham and his partner Ruth Bell, often serving as the family's unofficial spokesperson to the media since childhood. Ruth Bell Graham's official biography was also published. Cornwell spent a few weeks at the family's summer retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, before she became a personal friend of former President George H. W. Bush, whom she described as "Big George."

Cornwell has suffered with anorexia nervosa and depression in the past, which began in her late teens. She spoke openly about her bipolar disorder, but she denied her that she was misdiagnosed in 2015.

Cornwell crashed her Mercedes-Benz while under the influence of alcohol on January 10, 1993. She was found guilty of inebriation and was sentenced to 28 days in a rehabilitation center.

Cornwell has contributed to the Republican Party's fundraising, including George Allen, John Warner, and Orrin Hatch, since 1998. Hillary Clinton, Nicola Tsongas, Charles Robb, and Mark Warner have all endorsed particular Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Nicola Tsongas, Mark Warner and Mark Warner.

Cornwell has criticized George W. Bush's presidency, saying, "I was in favour of young George W. Bush because I loved his family." I was hoping he would be another Big George. I'm not wrong, boy. It's not a democracy so much as a theocracy, and those are not the principles that this country was founded on."

Cornwell has made several significant charitable contributions, including the support for Forensic Science and Medicine at the University of Tennessee, funding scholarships to the University of Tennessee's National Forensic Writing Program and Davidson College's Creative Writing Program (the result of which is the Patricia Cornwell Creative Writing Scholarship, which is given to one or two new students), and donating her collection of Walter Sickert paintings to Harvard University. She is a promoter of psychiatric study as a member of Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital's National Council. She has also contributed to the Crime Scene Academy and the Harvard Art Museum, along with other million-dollar contributions. She gave the Richmond City Police Department a grant. Henrico County Police Department, as well as the Henrico County Police Department, are located together. To buy bullet-proof vests for the police dogs. Cornwell is also a major contributor to the Veterans Village of San Diego, earning more than $50,000 per year.

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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.

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.

Other significant themes in the Scarpetta novels include health, individual safety and security, food, family, and the emerging sexual self-discovery of Scarpetta's niece. Often, conflicts and secret manipulations by Scarpetta's colleagues and staff are involved in the story-line and make the murder cases more complex. Although scenes from the novels take place in a variety of locations around the United States and (less commonly) internationally, they center around the city of Richmond, Virginia.

There are two remarkable style shifts in the Scarpetta novels. Starting from The Last Precinct (2000), the style changes from past tense to present tense. Starting from Blow Fly (2003), the style changes from a first person to a third person, omniscient, narrator. Events are even narrated from the viewpoint of the murderers. Before Blow Fly the events are seen through Scarpetta's eyes only, and other points of view only appear in letters that Scarpetta reads.

Cornwell shifted back to a first-person perspective in the Scarpetta novel Port Mortuary (2010).

In addition to the Scarpetta novels, Cornwell has written three pseudo-police fictions, known as the Trooper Andy Brazil/Superintendent Judy Hammer series, which are set in North Carolina, Virginia, and off the mid-Atlantic coast. Besides the older-woman/younger-man premise, the books include discomforting themes of scatology and sepsis.

Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She wrote Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, which was published in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world and among Ripperologists. Cornwell denied being obsessed with Jack the Ripper in full-page ads in two British newspapers and has said the case was "far from closed". In 2001, Cornwell was criticized for allegedly destroying one of Sickert's paintings in pursuit of the Ripper's identity. She believed the well-known painter to be responsible for the string of murders and had purchased over thirty of his paintings and argued that they closely resembled the Ripper crime scenes. Cornwell also claimed a breakthrough: a letter written by someone purporting to be the killer had the same watermark as some of Sickert's writing paper. Ripper experts noted, however, that there were hundreds of letters from different authors falsely claiming to be the killer, and the watermark in question was on a brand of stationery that was widely available.

She made a brief appearance on the police procedural drama Criminal Minds in the episode "True Genius" as herself.

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Awards

• ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award in the Biography/Autobiography category for A Time For Remembering (1985)
• Edgar Award, John Creasey Memorial Award, Anthony Award, and Macavity Award; for Postmortem (1991) (Cornwell is the only author to receive these awards in a single year)
• Prix du Roman d'Adventures for Postmortem (1992)
• Gold Dagger for Cruel and Unusual (1993)
• Sherlock Award for Best Detective for the character Kay Scarpetta (1999)
• British Book Awards' Crime Thriller of the Year for Book of the Dead (2008) (Cornwell is the first American author to receive this award.)
• RBA Prize for Crime Writing 2011 for Red Mist, the world's most lucrative crime fiction prize at €125,000.