Patricia Cornwell

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and two and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is a crime writer. Her graphic stories of death, torture and violence, applauded by experts for their forensic accuracy, have made her a millionaire many times over. She had a difficult childhood, abandoned by her parents and mistreated by a foster mother. She went on to become a crime reporter on a local paper in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was there that she began to involve herself in the dreadful world that has become the subject of her work.

Presenter0:56

Her first published novel, Post Mortem, built around the tough but vulnerable female pathologist Kay Scarpetta, was hugely successful. Since then there have been ten more Scarpetta books. Although most recently she's turned her hand to non fiction, attempting to prove that the artist Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

Presenter1:15

She's fascinated by pathology. I love it, she says. But it's not the morbidity, it's the language. It's about getting the dead to speak. She is Patricia Cornwell. And they speak to you, Patricia, through their wounds, depending on how they've died, through strangulation, asphyxiation.

Patricia Cornwell1:32

How do they speak to you? Describe it. Well, they speak in many ways. They have much more of a language than your average person would ever know. They speak through their clothing. They speak through the hieroglyphics of their injuries and the evidence that's left on the bodies. And what's so important about the medical examiner's office or the morgue is this is the last place anybody goes and you want them to have a chance to say what happened to them, not only how they died, but how they lived their lives. And somebody should listen.

Presenter1:59

Uh

Patricia Cornwell1:59

Nope.

Presenter1:59

Was the first dead body you ever saw on that slab in the mall, do you remember?

Patricia Cornwell2:03

Yes, I do very vividly. It was an elderly woman, and I literally bumped into her gurney as I was coming through the door. The reason she was there is it was unattended death. So she was the natural causes, and I'm glad because I wasn't exposed to violence on the first one. But I had to teach myself to look at it through the eyes of the doctors, to be clinical, and to watch them make the dead speak and not simply look at the gore of it, or I'm not sure I would have made it then or ever.

Presenter2:30

So you learned how to distance yourself from the beginning.'Cause we should explain we're not talking about a medic here. I mean, you you read English, I think, at college, you know. So y you never, never fainted when you saw any of these things. You managed to distance yourself from the beginning.

Patricia Cornwell2:37

Can you say that?

Patricia Cornwell2:41

No, managed to distance yourself from the beginning. Well, not distance myself as much as change my perspective. It's all about perspective. For example, some people, their perspective might be how grotesque it is to see it, but I continued to look at it through the eyes of the doctors for six years. I helped with the autopsies downstairs.

Presenter3:00

They were just taking notes.

Patricia Cornwell3:01

Not always. I mean, I'd help pick buckshot out of somebody if need be, weighing the organs. You know, I put my hands on it, I'd help undress the bodies. So you've held a brain in your hands. Oh, absolutely. And a heart, whatever. But what it also taught me

Presenter3:09

You've had a break

Presenter3:10

Oh, absolutely.

Patricia Cornwell3:15

Was to have a sensitivity towards violence, towards crime, towards the victims. So it's not just. Uh

Presenter3:22

Using it gratuitously, this experience you're saying when you write, you are doing something more than that. Is that your argument?

Patricia Cornwell3:28

I am absolutely on a mission. I consider myself a crime writer who uses her pen and not a gun or not even a scalpel because the strongest, you know, the fire that burns inside of me is to do something about abuse of power against all creatures, great and small, because that is the root of all sin and the ultimate abuse of power is murder.

Patricia Cornwell3:51

Tell me about your first risk.

Presenter3:51

Code. This is what you're gonna take to your desert island to sort of soothe you, put all these terri

Patricia Cornwell3:56

Terrible, grisly thoughts out of your head. Every hundred years or so, there's someone who is born. There is no one else like him or her. They're just they rise above what is normal. And certainly that is true of Elvis. We've never seen anybody like him before or since. And every time I see him on T V, I'm just fixated on this amazing human being. And I'm really sorry that he died the way he did.

Speaker 44:18

Are you lonesome tonight?

Patricia Cornwell4:18

You long s

Speaker 44:23

Do you miss me tonight?

Speaker 44:27

Are you sorry we drifted apart?

Speaker 44:36

Does your memo strain?

Speaker 44:41

To a brighter summer day

Presenter4:46

Great stuff. Elvis with Are You Lonesome Tonight. When did you realize, Patricia Cornwell, that this stuff you were dealing in, this grisly, gruesome morgue material, was

Patricia Cornwell4:59

Was ideal for fiction writing. The very first time I went to the morgue to interview a medical examiner who fortunately was a woman. Never occurred to me a woman would be in this profession. And the minute I sat down with her, all the morbidity of it completely drifted away. She began to explain what she saw, and she talked about lasers and DNA, which was just coming into vogue at that time. And I thought, this fits in with basically solving crimes with your mind. And I said, that fits me better.

Presenter5:29

But

Patricia Cornwell5:29

They didn't make that Pathologist is Take scopeter

Presenter5:33

Top.

Patricia Cornwell5:34

No, I wrote three books where she wasn't, but pretty soon she was making a friendly takeover of of the subject matter.

Speaker 45:41

Hmm.

Patricia Cornwell5:42

And uh case got

Presenter5:42

As we say, the pathologist. Model, therefore, on the chief medical examiner in Virginia, which is where you work.

Patricia Cornwell5:47

Inspired by, not modeled on, and she is now the chief medical examiner. She wasn't then, Dr. Marcela Fierro. She makes the dead speak, and she cares about those bodies. They're human beings. And I'll tell you a quick story. We were going down the elevator one day when I was working there, and there was a man who'd been in the river for about a month in the heat of July. And the stench was so bad, it permeated the entire building. And as we were going down there, I said, You know, Marcella, sometimes I don't know how you stand this. And she said, I try to remember who they were.

Patricia Cornwell6:19

And suddenly I saw that man as a healthy father with his little boy in a little skiff on the river, and they were fishing, and for some reason he fell overboard and they didn't find him until he was in this condition. And I could see him as saying, Forgive me for the way I look and smell, but I can't help it.

Patricia Cornwell6:37

And you still touch bass.

Presenter6:38

Don't you? Quite often you still go to the morgue or you still you go to a a thing called a body farm and you've written a book called Body Farm, which I understand is a kind of FBI scientific institute where they study decomposition.

Patricia Cornwell6:48

They study decomposition. It's actually not FBI, it's for forensic anthropology. And they're the ones who study decomposition and what happens to the body after death to help determine, for one thing, time of death. They set up bodies, they put bodies in the boots of cars or underneath trees, under leaves, all sorts of things. Yes, they do. And what's amazing is before the body farm, my book came out.

Presenter7:05

All sorts of things.

Patricia Cornwell7:11

They very rarely got donations for people who wanted to contribute to this. And now they they have a list of about two hundred people who say, when I die, will you use me in your research? It's a funny, funny kind of sound.

Presenter7:23

It's to give your body to, really, isn't it?

Patricia Cornwell7:25

Yeah.

Presenter7:25

But

Patricia Cornwell7:25

It's so helpful.

Presenter7:26

Yeah, sure. So therefore, again, it's a kind of power you now wield, isn't it? It's it's a good power antithesis of powerlessness, which is what you feel you suffered a.

Patricia Cornwell7:31

It's a slit power.

Patricia Cornwell7:35

It's an appropriation of good power as opposed to an abuse of it.

Presenter7:35

It's an appropriate

Patricia Cornwell7:39

us to be more humane and in, I hope, kinder spirits.

Presenter7:43

Uh

Patricia Cornwell7:44

Uh

Presenter7:44

I want to hear about the unkinder spirits that inhabited your earlier life in a minute, but let's pause there for record number two. What's that?

Patricia Cornwell7:51

Well, walking on broken glass, I I started out on a path in life that I never knew would exist and never knew what it held for me. And it's not been without injury. It is like walking on broken glass because you can't see what I've seen and walk away without wounds.

Speaker 48:12

The wind go through me

Speaker 48:16

I'm living in a mental room

Speaker 48:20

The window slide

Speaker 48:24

But I've got something left to lose that and it feels just like I'm walking on the broken back

Presenter8:37

Annie Lennox and Walking on Broken Glass. So Powerlessness and Patricia Cornwell. It began very early on in your life, I think almost exactly exactly forty one years ago. Tell me.

Patricia Cornwell8:47

Yes, the most powerless experience I ever had, which changed me forever, was Christmas Day of 1961 when I was five, and I could hear the heavy steps of my father. And when he turned into the living room, he was holding a suitcase. And I knew immediately what was happening. And as he headed towards the door, I ran after him and I grabbed him around the leg, just like a tree frog, just wrapped around his leg. And I was screaming, Daddy, don't leave, Daddy, don't leave. And he just kind of shook me off and went out the door. And, you know, I feel in a way my psyche and my spirit went out that door with him and went on a different direction because of it. I never went home again because home was a painful place.

Presenter9:28

Well it got more painful, didn't it? Because of course your mother couldn't cope with all of this.

Patricia Cornwell9:31

Well, my mother had two serious bouts with depression at the age of nine, and then when I was in the eighth grade at 12, she was hospitalized for four months, and I had to stay in a foster home, which was like something out of Dickens, I kid you not. It was absolutely abominable. And you talk about feeling powerless. I wasn't allowed to leave the house. She took my puppy away from me, tied it up in a basement, and I could only go visit long enough to feed it and give it water and not listen to its cries.

Presenter9:59

But in the midst of all of this, I think your mother at one point left you on the doorstep of Billy Graham, the preacher, and his wife, Ruth. I mean, that i it's such a Dickinsian story, this. You would imagine that at that moment, you know, you join hands and dance round the Christmas tree and everything's going to be all right.

Patricia Cornwell10:12

But it wasn't, was it? I was nine years old, and my mother started walking us up the mountain in the snow. And her Ruth's caretaker was coming down in the Jeep to plow the the streets for the neighbors. They were, you know, very nice about that. And he stopped and gave us a ride. She said, We're going to the Grahams and they're expecting us. And he knew that wasn't true. They didn't even know us. So I'll never forget going up. I can still smell the spare tire in the back of that orange Jeep as we went up to the house and saw this house made of century-old logs with the smoke coming out of the chimneys. And Ruth came to the door, and I was exactly nine. And who would have ever thought that about 14 years later I would begin her biography? And she became the most important figure in my life.

Presenter10:52

She was a kind of fairy godmother for you in in many ways, although she didn't stop you from going to the awful foster mother.

Patricia Cornwell10:58

I was devastated when we drove away from that house and I knew I wasn't staying with her. It's like I picked her at that time and I said, someday I will come back to you because I want to be with you. And then she sort of tucked me under her wing when I was 19 and had dropped out of school and basically just wanted to die. And she picked me up and saved my life.

Patricia Cornwell11:22

Uh

Presenter11:22

Uh

Patricia Cornwell11:22

Yeah.

Presenter11:22

But number three.

Patricia Cornwell11:24

When I used to drive to her house when I was working on the biography, I was always listening to ABBA and I loved the song SOS and I just associate it so much with those long drives to her mountain. You know, she's always been the great love of my life and had a tremendous influence in terms of knowing right from wrong and telling the truth and never forgetting that if you change one person's life, you've done a mighty thing and it makes your whole life worthwhile.

Speaker 411:49

So when you're near me, darling, can't you hear me? It's okay.

Speaker 411:57

The love you gave me, nothing else can save me, it's all yes.

Speaker 412:03

Where you're gone!

Speaker 412:05

I cannot even try to go home

Speaker 412:11

And you're boss.

Speaker 412:13

Do I try fucking up?

Presenter12:16

Aber and S O S. It was always your ambition, I think, when you were quite young, when you were still at college, Patricia, to write great literature. That's what you set out to do, or something.

Patricia Cornwell12:24

Yes, when I was in college, it actually was a process of elimination. I was so rotten at so many things because I can't do math. But I loved English. It spoke to me. And I said, This is what I want to do. I'd been a writer all my life, but I'd never thought about using it for a living. And then I decided I wanted to be a novelist. I wrote a novel in college. It was absolutely dreadful. But that was what I wanted to do. And I pursued it by starting with journalism. On the Charlotte Observer. The Charlotte Observer. Of course. They didn't hire me as a journalist. I was in charge of the T V magazine. I was a clerk.

Presenter12:51

The Charlotte Observer.

Patricia Cornwell12:57

And I never watched T V, so they'd never had so many mistakes in that magazine as they had with me. But you ended up on the crime beat. I think they threw me into that'cause that was ruining their television programs, but um they did. In fact, my claim to fame was I won an investigative reporting award on prostitution, where I actually talked to prostitutes. I remember you know, I met a pimp one time in his

Speaker 413:14

Uh

Presenter13:14

Uh

Patricia Cornwell13:19

His drug layer, and he had a gun on the table. And someone should have said, What the hell are you doing in there?

Presenter13:25

Come.

Patricia Cornwell13:26

That is when the circuitry inside of me lit up.

Presenter13:29

I see. So you knew in that moment, did you? Once you got in touch with the seamy side of life, you thought, This is what I'm interested in.

Patricia Cornwell13:35

I knew it, and I don't even know why, except that

Patricia Cornwell13:38

I really related to the police, and maybe I felt this was a power I could appropriate to make life better. Because you started riding around in the squad car. They really took to you, didn't they? They did because I cared about them. It wasn't trying to use and abuse them in my stories. In fact, when I got subpoenaed to testify in court because I'd helped nail a prostitute with the cops, I was so excited. And the editor said, Don't you understand? We don't want you going to court. And I said, Well, too bad. You're crossing the line now. Yeah, this lady should go to jail for what she did.

Presenter14:04

You're crossing the line there, yeah.

Presenter14:08

But then, you know, you can see therefore where it comes from, can't you?'Cause you can learn how to write the story, you learn how to hook people in, you you understand the narrative drive, and then you've got all of this very original material in the morgue, you put it together.

Patricia Cornwell14:14

You understand?

Patricia Cornwell14:19

Well, that's right. You learn as a journalist, you go to the primary source. It's the best training I ever had.

Presenter14:25

And also that whole business of explaining things in great detail, but without patronising people. It's quite a bit of a

Patricia Cornwell14:32

It's quite a fine

Presenter14:33

Uh Yeah. Uh

Patricia Cornwell14:33

You have to have objectivity, but you've got to make it moving. You have to have the objectivity of describing some of the worst of the worst, but not leave the humanity out of it, at least for me. And I think the humanity part of it is what I got from being around the victims, you know, to walking in and seeing the dead and reading their suicide notes. And you know what really would get me is what was in their pockets. You know, where you'd see a can of brute deodorant that was in a little boy's pocket, a teenager who stood up in the back of a pickup truck just in time to get hit in the head by a bridge. And you can't help but find that poignant and just want to go home and lie down and cry.

Patricia Cornwell15:08

Next piece of music. Tell me about number four.

Patricia Cornwell15:11

I love share.

Patricia Cornwell15:13

I think she's got the most fabulous voice. I just absolutely adore her voice. And Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, it kind of describes my police beat because, boom, there I was thrown into all that. I'd been used to a very religious environment, and here I got in the thick of it. It was the change in my life of going from the good to seeing the bad that really is out there.

Speaker 415:33

To dance for the money they throw Rampart to whatever he calls Preach your little gospel

Speaker 415:42

Sell a couple bottles of Dr. Cool

Speaker 415:47

GMC, triumphant thieves. We'd hear it from the people of the town. They'd call us GMC, triumphant thieves. But every night all the men would come around and lay their money down.

Presenter16:02

Cher and gypsies, tramps and thieves. So Postmortem Patricia hit the bookshops twelve years ago, scooped five major crime awards very quickly, and you've produced more or less one a year on these Scarpetta novels since then.

Presenter16:15

It's her, isn't it, Case Gart Betty, your pathologist, your main protagonist, with whom you seem to have so much in common. She's small, determined, fast-moving. She's a good looking blonde.

Patricia Cornwell16:24

She's a good looking blonde. She looks a lot like you.

Presenter16:27

Especially in your power suit to see. I think a little more like you, actually. But she's great with bodies, she's great with guns, but she's not too good at intimacy, is she? She doesn't trust anything.

Patricia Cornwell16:28

I think a little bit

Patricia Cornwell16:38

doesn't trust and she's terrified of loss, because she lived with the dying of her father almost her entire childhood. And again that same theme, I guess, it's from me the abandonment, the loss, the grief. But Lucy, her niece

Presenter16:50

Who's the other main character really, and about whom she cares very much. There's a lot of you in there as well, isn't there?

Patricia Cornwell16:56

Well, there's a lot of me and Lucy that hopefully I'm outgrowing a little bit because she's the fighter. And when I was younger in particular, it was everything was a challenge and I'd kind of go out swinging at times when maybe I should have just been a little bit slower and more thoughtful, which is what Scarpetta is.

Presenter17:13

Now you say or have said that you put these two on the page and they talk

Patricia Cornwell17:18

Talk to each other. Sometimes to the exclusion of you. It's an odd thing. I don't write my books in many ways. The books narrate what the story is to me. And if the characters don't want to do something, they simply won't do it. Thank you.

Presenter17:34

Messenger.

Presenter17:37

That sounds very fanciful, though. Are you going to have to explain that a bit more? I mean, aren't you just saying that you've made them do something that actually isn't very good and you think you'll rewrite that bit?

Patricia Cornwell17:40

I mean aren't you?

Patricia Cornwell17:47

force something, force it. It doesn't work. I have to go with the flow. And basically what I do is I I follow the evidence and work my books like I would a crime. But the creative

Presenter17:57

I mean that's what

Patricia Cornwell17:59

Well, there's certainly you know, there definitely are parts of me that flow through my work, and that's what I think gives it the energy and hopefully the compassion that people feel. But Lucy's I mean, Lucy walked in one day onto the page, you say, and you knew she was a lesbian.

Presenter17:59

Bwah

Patricia Cornwell18:13

I had no idea. I hadn't seen her since she was about 10. And then I was faced with a crisis of, oh my gosh.

Patricia Cornwell18:21

I don't want that to happen because it might turn off some readers. It could be very controversial. And I said, you know what? You got to tell the truth.

Presenter18:27

Yeah.

Patricia Cornwell18:27

That's what she is. But when you say

Presenter18:28

I mean, who says that's what she is? Why did you feel I mean, you'd had a lesbian experience, we know this. But is that what it was that you just suddenly thought, this is a good line, this is a good story, this is a little bit cosmetic.

Patricia Cornwell18:39

This is a little bit confusing.

Presenter18:50

And he became a vict

Patricia Cornwell18:50

He became a victim.

Presenter18:51

Uh

Patricia Cornwell18:51

Timothy

Presenter18:51

We think so. Oh, we think ah.

Patricia Cornwell18:52

Because

Patricia Cornwell18:54

You may not be

Presenter18:54

He may not be he's got

Patricia Cornwell18:55

And do a j

Presenter18:55

Oh no.

Patricia Cornwell18:56

Oh no, no JR. There will be no it was all, you know, a dream. But again, you didn't want to kill her. And I've also had no idea that now it's about to take another one.

Presenter19:02

I didn't when I stood.

Patricia Cornwell19:08

You know, this is I'm always in for surprises.

Presenter19:10

But it's going to come back.

Patricia Cornwell19:11

Well, I don't want to say, but don't ever take anything for granted. These characters are full of surprises. And Scarpett is a bit lonely right now. How interesting.

Patricia Cornwell19:19

Record number five.

Patricia Cornwell19:21

I've suffered some losses from bad love affairs. I got divorced and that was, you know, very painful because when I got married, you know, I thought it would last forever. I've found that nothing necessarily lasts forever. But that, you know, that's part of life, is losing the love of people sometimes. And you have to deal with that. But I've been through my share of it.

Speaker 419:44

Desire to spare Desire some monster

Speaker 419:53

Whoa, but not I don't know myself, I'm so pressing but no chance to let me

Speaker 420:04

The more I love you

Speaker 420:09

Language is leaving.

Presenter20:13

Annie Lennox and No More I Love You'. It may be, Patricia, that we've made it sound as if your life was plain sailing after the publication of that first novel. You were thirty four years old then. Um but it hasn't been quite like that. For a start well, let's talk about the easy stuff first. I think after you started making money you went on a kind of shopping binge.

Patricia Cornwell20:32

I was

Presenter20:32

I was not Uh

Patricia Cornwell20:33

I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I mean, I'd been basically poor all my life and, you know, I was um I had to pay my way through school and the job with the morgue was very low paying. I my I was getting about what a janitor did, to be honest with you.

Patricia Cornwell20:49

I started spending all this money on clothes, and I remember buying a blaze orange suit. And I walked through this restaurant, and I said, you know, everybody's staring at me, and I don't know if I can live with everybody staring at me now that I've sort of become famous. And a friend said, Everybody's staring at you because of that weird suit you've got on. It looks like you're out hunting in the woods. Uh

Patricia Cornwell21:09

So

Presenter21:09

We're not just talking clothes here. I mean, obviously you bought property, you bought motor cars, you bought helicopters eventually.

Patricia Cornwell21:16

Pl private plane?

Presenter21:17

No, the helicopter

Patricia Cornwell21:17

No, the helicopter was when I had more sanity about this. That was many if I had been that kooky with the helicopter, I shouldn't have been in the air. But I just didn't know how to handle it. And, you know, suddenly I was just flying up to the moon and I was not equipped, and there was nobody for me to talk to. Well, who do you talk to to say, how do you handle this? There was no one, and I didn't handle it well. And at some point along the way, you wrote off one of those smart motor cars, Mercedes, I think, in Malibu. I mean, that was horrible. I shouldn't be here. That was a miracle. I didn't die. I got a call from my LA agent who said, you know, I like your screenplay you just wrote. Can we have a meeting? And I'd been drinking Bloody Marys, and you know, that's part of my misery. And I drove to this restaurant, and then I drove home, and I remember nothing except waking up in a hospital. But that, you know, that was the crash that led me to

Patricia Cornwell22:08

Trying to evaluate what has happened to me and what do I do about it, and I think it was a great thing that it happened. Was concern that alcohol was a problem part of that evaluation?

Presenter22:13

Yeah.

Patricia Cornwell22:18

Absolutely. I mean, not in terms of being an alcoholic, but it was a way I was dealing with pain and with stress. And you were worried too that you were romanic depressive like your mother, huh?

Patricia Cornwell22:27

Well, I worried about a lot of things'cause I was so depressed and I didn't understand why.

Presenter22:31

You would think that suddenly you're like

Patricia Cornwell22:34

Yeah.

Patricia Cornwell22:35

Yeah.

Presenter22:36

And I revolutionized. And here you are, guys.

Patricia Cornwell22:38

I grew up in a little town and then suddenly you see I was working with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis on this movie. I was hanging out with movie stars and I'd never even been in a limousine before. And it was like, you know, it was just beyond what I could deal with. And I just kind of got out went way out of bounds. But it taught me something. Fame is imposed by the outside and I don't have to let it become me.

Presenter23:01

Part of that, part of that becoming yourself has also involved, it seems to me, the building of certain walls, because you're very security conscious, aren't you? The best security is prevention. Why do you personally need your own bodyguards outside the door or in in terms of the money?

Patricia Cornwell23:19

I have one ellipse with me. Sure.

Presenter23:21

Sure, you have one who comes here with you.

Patricia Cornwell23:23

Oh, more than one. And uh because it it's prevention. I mean, I have had threats before. I've been stalked. It is not so much here. You guys are much more civilized than I think we are in America.

Presenter23:34

You don't think it's because you've written about so many depraved and psychotic people that you've just scared yourself to death?

Patricia Cornwell23:41

No, I haven't scared myself to death, but you're right about being influenced because what I see is real. And I don't say it can't happen to me. It can and it won't because I'm careful. Echo number six.

Patricia Cornwell23:53

Rocket Man, Elton John.

Patricia Cornwell23:55

I rocketed to success and it ended in a crash. And now I think I'm flying, as we say, in helicopter aviation. I'm flying straight and level.

Speaker 424:15

And I think it's gonna be a long, long time To Johnstone brings me round again to find

Speaker 424:32

Rocket Man

Presenter24:35

Elton John and Rocket Man. And so to The Ripper, Patricia, your latest book, non-fiction this time, in which effectively, it seems to me, you become Kay Scarpetta. You subject him, The Ripper and his wretched victims to modern forensic examination. You're convinced, it seems, that 114 years on you've solved the mystery, that Jack the Ripper was the artist Walter Sickert. Give me your single, what you feel is your single most compelling piece of evidence there.

Patricia Cornwell25:03

The most compelling and actually irrefutable piece of evidence we have right now actually happened after my book went to the press, so it's not in there. And that is I learned of a new stash of secret letters at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Peter Bauer, who's probably the foremost forensic paper scientist in the world, came to Los Angeles, went there, examined the paper, and two secret letters and two Rippard letters could only have come from 6,000 sheets of paper that were ever made. But how many people would have bought those 6,000 pieces of paper? Well, 5.6 million people in London just at that time. Statistically, 6,000 sheets of paper is a very small plus. It was a rare wire.

Presenter25:39

It was a rare constant, though, isn't it?

Patricia Cornwell25:41

No, that would that would get that definitely would indict him and send him to court. Absolutely.

Presenter25:46

Do you know what you stand accused of, which is making the evidence fit the theory? Because it's a great theory, isn't it?

Patricia Cornwell25:51

You know what? I dare somebody to take on one of these experts and accuse them of falsifying evidence. They all are expert witnesses in court. Their careers have been.

Presenter26:00

But you paid them. Again, it's what people would say.

Patricia Cornwell26:02

It's what people are saying. You spent millions of dollars on this case, hadn't you? Well, most of that was not for the scientists. Most of that was for rare books, rare documents. But you have to understand that expert witnesses like Peter Bauer, he is paid as a consultant. And anybody, I invite anybody to check the same evidence that we did because they're going to come up with the exact same thing. Evidence doesn't, you can't make that up without.

Presenter26:28

Do you think there's there's a danger that you've damaged your fictional heroine by trying to become her in reality?

Patricia Cornwell26:34

I didn't try to become her. I I'm the one that creates the investigations for her, not some invisible, nonexistent person. I'm the one who solves those crimes in my books.

Presenter26:44

Tip it won't be.

Patricia Cornwell26:44

Yeah.

Presenter26:44

Yeah.

Patricia Cornwell26:44

Fiction everybody accepts.

Presenter26:45

accepts them and enjoys them and will pay for them. But now you've moved into fact, people are really having a go at you, aren't they?

Patricia Cornwell26:49

People are really

Patricia Cornwell26:51

Well, they oh yes. But let me just say this. What people believe or don't believe after they've read it is really entirely up to them. It's like with a jury, what I am doing is simply presenting facts. Record number seven.

Patricia Cornwell27:04

Enya singing the Book of Days. You know, it's I find Enya very soothing. She relaxes me in a way that is really wonderful because there isn't much I do in life that soothes me. It just causes something to well up in me that pushes everything away.

Speaker 427:29

That hold me real.

Speaker 427:32

Joining all night on the tide

Presenter27:48

Enya singing Book of Days. You sold Scarpetta to a movie company a couple of years ago, didn't you? Who's going to play her? Joe Johnson.

Patricia Cornwell27:55

That's the big question. I don't know who's going to play her right now. Who would you want? You know, I don't know. I don't know. Of course, people always are bringing up Jody Foster, and I think mo I think most of my fans

Presenter27:58

Yeah.

Patricia Cornwell28:07

Want her to play that role, which is probably the very reason why it won't ever happen. Never, never.

Presenter28:10

The meeting was

Presenter28:14

Aha, I see.

Patricia Cornwell28:14

I see. Don't get me into that. No. What you don't want, have you got the right of veto?

Presenter28:17

What you didn't want

Patricia Cornwell28:20

Yeah, but not much. You see, this is really interesting. This is shows you a way that I've changed because I mean, we're talking eleven years now and there's been no Scarpetta movie yet. It's gone through many attempts. But I had so much control and I wouldn't have to do it.

Presenter28:33

You've stopped it.

Patricia Cornwell28:35

Well, I did. And you know, and that then I reached in a stage and and Sony came into the picture. I had nice meetings with the people. Um I thought, you know what, I don't have to stranglehold this. It will be what it will be. And if I keep on grabbing it by the neck, it's never gonna go where it can go and and I'm ready for it. In the meantime, you obviously she's still yours too.

Presenter28:52

You can go on writing about it.

Patricia Cornwell28:53

Oh, absolutely.

Presenter28:56

And I couldn't stop. You write literally.

Patricia Cornwell28:57

Oh my god.

Patricia Cornwell29:00

Locked away. Don't you describe this room to me when you're in the middle of the morning? It looks like a bomb went off in a paper factory. And there is the weirdest stuff. Experiments I do. For example, in Black Notice, you have a tattoo that you can hardly see because of decomposition. So I went to a tattoo parlor and had a turkey tattooed because it's very close to the the human skin and and then we we took it to the morgue and and did experiments let it get a little bit shall we say non-eatable

Patricia Cornwell29:29

And then we used alternate light sources to see if we could find that tattoo. But you're locked in there. You've got a button you press and all the doors go click, huh? Nobody is allowed in there unless I invite them because it's my world, it's Scarpetta's world when I'm in there and that's where I have to live and the location makes all the difference in my emotions.

Presenter29:33

But you're not

Presenter29:48

Last record.

Patricia Cornwell29:50

Pock Bell's cannon in D major, I feel I am so overwhelmed when I hear that piece of music. I associate it with many things in my life. It's sort of like the melancholy poetry that runs beneath the, you know, the surface of this world I live in. And I think that's kind of my spirit. It's very gentle, it's very moving, but it's also very powerful. I just feel that that's what I am inside.

Presenter31:18

Part of Pachebel's cannon played by the Jean-François Payard Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Jean-Francois Payard. What about that uh family of yours, Patricia, about that father who walked out on you Christmas Day forty one years ago? Did you um has he ever acknowledged your success or have?

Patricia Cornwell31:33

View.

Presenter31:33

Told him of his failure.

Patricia Cornwell31:33

Told him of his failure? You know, he he died about five years ago and he acknowledged my success, but not in a very good way. It was mostly bragging about me to other people when he'd never had anything to do with my life until I became successful. Sometimes I go to counseling like half the world, like therapy, because I never felt my father was proud of me and I always wanted him to be. So and you know, that's one reason that sometimes all this criticism deeply pains me because, you know, I want people to like me and be proud of me and it hurts, but I go on anyway.

Presenter32:05

Okay, so those are your eight records. If you could only take one of them to your desert island, which one would you take? Oh, Pac-A-Bel, hands down.

Presenter32:13

And a book. You've got the Bible, you've got the complete works of Shakespeare waiting for you. What other book would you?

Patricia Cornwell32:18

I take the oh, you already said the Bible. Um

Patricia Cornwell32:21

Thomas Malthus wrote an essay on population back in the eighteenth century, and it's it's so full of wisdom about people and human nature and basically what's gone wrong and why we have poverty. But what I love the most about that book, while that man I can see him sitting at a desk writing with his quill pen, he says, Oh, he said this is I must stop for a moment because I have a dreadful toothache.

Patricia Cornwell32:41

And suddenly he was real writing this book, and it is a treasure to me.

Patricia Cornwell32:46

And a luxury. We allow you one thing of no practical value whatsoever.

Patricia Cornwell32:51

Would it be of practical value if I said an endless supply of note books and pens? It wouldn't get me off the island, but if I couldn't write, I don't know what I would do.

Patricia Cornwell32:59

Patricia Cornwell, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your

Presenter33:01

Desert Island Discs, thank you.

Speaker 433:07

Uh

Speaker 333:10

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.