The Write Role . . . : . . . or an Ex-Crime Reporter Finds Success in Gritty Crime Fiction

Men, by tradition, write crime fiction out of their own life’s work. Dashiell Hammett had been a private eye; Erle Stanley Gardner of Perry Mason fame had practiced law; Joseph Wambaugh has turned his police years into gold. But until recently, women have had to invent murder and mayhem entirely out of their sometimes alarming imaginations.

That is changing.

Because she has lived on the turf, Patricia Daniels Cornwell writes with grisly authenticity about the sights, sounds and smells of the morgue and the intricacies of police procedures.

The police beat at the Charlotte Observer gave Patsy Cornwell, 36, her introduction to the world that she now re-creates through her books. Later, in Richmond, Va.--which remains her home--she became a volunteer policewoman while working in the medical examiner’s office.

Always intense, Cornwell took notes on her daily visits to the morgue. She watched the working style of her boss, Dr. Marcella Fiero, the city’s medical examiner until recently. And thus was born the fictional Dr. Kay Scarpetta, lawyer, doctor and chief medical examiner extraordinaire, whose talents are again on display in “All That Remains,” Cornwell’s newly published third novel.

Scarpetta has become wildly popular--and even the author seems surprised.

“I just sit back sometimes and think, ‘What in God’s name is going on here?’ ” Cornwell said during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “I feel as if Scarpetta was just looking for a vehicle to be let loose on the world--and I seemed the most likely sucker, so she took me over.”

The takeover has been swift: The first of the Scarpetta novels, “Postmortem,” was published only two years ago, sold a modest 10,000 copies in hardcover and is now a hard-to-find collector’s item. It won an unprecedented five international awards. There have been several paperback printings.

The second novel, last year’s “Body of Evidence,” did about 25,000 in hardcover and, along with the paperback version, has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. “All That Remains” will have a 100,000-copy hardcover first printing. Paperback rights have not yet been sold.

Along the way to best-selling authorship, Cornwell has become like Scarpetta herself. She has begun to spend much of her time at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., where she checks out weapons at the firing range and audits classes on surveillance and interrogation. And she has become a passionate advocate of the bureau, which she calls “one of the most exciting forces around.”

So when Robert K. Ressler, a retired FBI criminologist, wrote a book criticizing his former employer, Cornwell took issue publicly. The book, “Whoever Fights Monsters,” focuses on the bureau’s behavioral sciences unit, which pioneered the profiling of serial killers and figured in the plot of the film “Silence of the Lambs.”

St. Martin’s Press had signed Cornwell to work with Ressler on the “Monsters” book in 1990. But she pulled out of the project, she says, when she found that Ressler intended to use material from ostensibly confidential interviews with serial killers.

“She likes to write about the real gore of homicides,” Ressler told the Washington Post. “That’s the way she wanted to approach my book. I told her I had no intention of doing that.”

Cornwell may stir up more controversy by protesting the title of the forthcoming film “Body of Evidence,” which stars Madonna and is unrelated to the book of the same name. (Titles cannot be protected under law.)

Her attorneys are writing letters of protest, she says, “because it’s caused me a major problem. I think Madonna is a very talented person, and I enjoy her music. But what she represents and what I represent are at opposite ends of the spectrum.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the Scarpetta novels is Cornwell’s first published book, “A Time for Remembering,” a biography of Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, who has been a friend since Cornwell’s childhood.

As a 9-year-old, Cornwell met Ruth Graham after Cornwell’s mother, who was suffering from emotional problems, asked Graham to care for the Cornwell children. The family was living near the Grahams in Montreat, N.C., a Presbyterian retreat where Patsy’s mother had moved after divorcing her husband, Miami attorney Sam Daniels.

Graham placed the children with a local family just back from mission work in the Congo while Cornwell’s mother sought treatment.

“I never knew when my mother was coming home. There was never anything you could count on,” Cornwell says, recalling her strict upbringing with the foster family. “What I was not in touch with at an age like that is how angry you are. You feel a sadness and an anxiety which drives you. Looking back, I know that the root of the anxiety was really rage, because when you’re abandoned and you feel powerless, you’re angry because you’re frustrated.”

She took refuge in an imaginary friend called Mr. Owl, who owed more to Ian Fleming than to Beatrix Potter. He was a kind of master spy who gave her assignments, like checking which way the weather vanes were pointing, “because they were sending messages.”

“I was either very imaginative or a sick little kid,” she says.

Later, she found an outlet for her frustrations in tennis, playing with fierce competitiveness and giving Bible tracts to the losers. Eventually, she won a tennis scholarship to King College, a small Bible school in Bristol, Tenn.

But in a matter of weeks, her life began to fall apart. She made no friends, started losing matches to 12-year-olds and became bulimic. (“I’m sure I just wanted to stop the merry-go-round so I could get off,” she says.) Her weight dropped to 89 pounds--30 less than she weighs now--and she spent two months in a mental hospital. But she checked herself out “because I was going to be crazy if I stayed much longer.”

Back in Montreat, she taught tennis and won a scholarship to Davidson, where she discovered serious reading and writing. After graduation, she landed at the Observer, where her hustle won her a promotion to the police beat--a dubious gift because the paper and the department were feuding.

Her reception by the police, she recalls, was “a brutal awakening,” but she eventually overcame the hostility by bringing in buckets of fried chicken and asking to ride along in the cruisers at night.

In her quest for stories, she climbed a roof in search of a sniper, tramped through underbrush during a sweep for armed prison escapees and interviewed streetwise hookers and pimps.

“There were things I did then that I would never do now, because they were too dangerous,” she says. “In those days, I thought I would live forever. Now I know I won’t.”

As her journalistic career flourished, she married Charles Cornwell, who had been one of her professors at Davidson, and they moved to Richmond because he had decided to enter the seminary. The couple later divorced.

Unemployed, Cornwell decided to do the Graham biography; but it proved to be an ordeal because of opposition from the Graham organization and Ruth Graham’s fears for her privacy. At one point, Graham’s New York lawyer ordered Cornwell to cease and desist.

“It was like a guppy meets Jaws,” Cornwell remembers. But because Graham had by then agreed to cooperate, she refused to back off. Still, endless revisions were needed to get everyone’s approval.

The two women wound up estranged for eight years until, Cornwell says, Graham sent a car for her one day and thanked her “for being so good to my family.”

“She chides me about all the profanity in my books,” Cornwell says. “She told me, ‘Dear Patsy, my guess is that if you cut out the profanity, your books would sell like hot cakes.’ I said, kiddingly, ‘They sell like hot cakes now.’ But then I said, ‘I have an idea. You give a statement on the next one saying, “This is trash--Ruth Graham,” and it will really sell like hot cakes.’ We can tease now about things like that.”

Unemployed in Richmond again, Cornwell then decided to try a novel. Although she had never read mysteries, she says, she chose crime fiction, drawn from her adventurous crime-beat days and her work at the morgue. She wrote three samples, all quickly rejected.

“I was at the point of absolute despair. Had no agent. Had no publisher. I was working 40 hours a week as a computer programmer in the morgue, and I really did think I’d ruined my life,” she says.

Her father, with whom she was then on close terms, remembers that at the point when she felt buried in rejection slips, he sent her what he called his magic pen.

“I told her, ‘You can only write important stuff with it. Never give up. You can do it. You’ve got it in your genes.’ Three months later,” Daniels notes, “things turned for her.”

Cornwell called Sara Ann Freed, who had rejected the novels at Mysterious Press, and sought advice. She got it: Drop the male protagonist, whom Freed found a dull jerk; make Scarpetta the main character and write about what Cornwell knew firsthand, dropping the exotic poisons and country estates that seemed to arise out of nowhere.

Scribner’s took the rewritten “Postmortem” in a matter of weeks.

For Cornwell, it was a heady feeling of power after a life of feeling largely powerless. Now, there are designer clothes, a Mercedes, an entourage, a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel when she’s in town.

“Who can complain?” she asks rhetorically. “There was some reason it was all meant to be. Without it, I couldn’t be creating what I’m creating now.

“It’s all made it very easy to slip in and out of the characters I create. I was always changing form to fit in wherever I was. I was like water: I filled the shape I was in so I wouldn’t spill over and cause a problem. Now I know who I am.”

Living well may indeed be the best revenge--and in Cornwell’s case, living well also works nicely, thank you, as compensation for the hard times.