Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta books finally adapted for TV after 34 years

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PATRICIA CORNWELL has a breaking news story – filming has just started on the TV adaptation of her Kay Scarpetta books. Nicole Kidman will play the crime-solving forensic wizard, with Jamie Lee Curtis as her flighty sister Dorothy. The first season will drop on Amazon Prime next year.

Journalist turned best-selling author Cornwell, 68, is naturally thrilled. There is a but though…

“If you’d told me back when I was running around with actresses and studios that it’d take 34 years to get Scarpetta on screen, I would’ve been heart-broken, ” fast-talking Patricia writer tells me.

“It was first optioned for TV in 1989! Nobody is even sure why it’s happened now.” 

Over the years Helen Mirren, Jodie Foster, Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie were all keen to play the forensic wizard.

“I had a long chat with Helen Mirren about it in 1997, she was interested but that didn’t work – what an amazing experience, though. Who wouldn’t have wanted to work with Helen Mirren?

“Nicole Kidman was interested in Scarpetta 20 years ago, but the script wasn’t good enough. Now she’s on board and everything is aligned. They’ve just started filming; it’ll be on TV next year.”

Cornwell’s own life-story reads like a Hollywood movie. She survived a wretchedly miserable childhood to sell more than 120million books – 9m in the UK alone. 28 of her novels feature Scarpetta. Like Cornwell, the character is a gutsy, blonde, workaholic.

“People always think she looks like me,” she laughs. “Now they’ll think she looks like Nicole Kidman.

“When I was younger, I was told I looked a bit like Jodie Foster – I apologise to her for that.”

Miami-born Cornwell started out as a crime reporter at the Charlotte Observer, in North Carolina. “I wanted to write pretty feature stories and they put me on the police beat,” she says. “I’m so grateful! Journalism taught me so much. It taught me not to take no for a definitive answer. It taught me to ask questions and to answer questions.

“You don’t take anything for granted, you don’t accept everything people tell you at face value. It’s the same with Scarpetta.”

Cornwell was just finishing the 4pm-to-midnight shift on the tragic day that John Lennon was gunned down outside of the Dakota Building in Manhattan, in December 1980.

“I wasn’t going home with that going on. I found a directory with the numbers of every precinct police precinct in Manhattan.”

The first officer who answered her call had been in the crew that took Lennon to ER. “He was asked ‘Are you John Lennon?’ and his only answer was to groan. That ended up in the wire story.”

Cornwell moved to Virginia, where she spent six years working as a computer analyst in a Richmond morgue, and writing her first three crime novels – all of which were rejected.

“Agatha Christie would say they were not well-engineered. I was building something, but I didn’t know how to build it. My editor said, ‘Is this what you see in the morgue? I want to see what you see’.”

The result was her 1990 debut, Postmortem – the first bona fide forensic thriller, the first to feature Scarpetta and the first to win every major crime fiction award in a single year.

“I was overwhelmed,” she recalls. “Princess Margaret gave me my first award. I was still working at the morgue at the time. I had a fancy beaded top which I’d never done up on my own before, I had to get a stranger in the hotel corridor to do it up. I think he thought I was a hooker.

“The publisher took us to a wine bar, and I was drunk as s*** when I got there. Princess Margaret was too. She asked me ‘How long did it take you to write this?’ I didn’t realise that was where the conversation was supposed to end, so I said, ‘I understand you like horses’ and this man came to whisk her away. I’d mistaken her for Princess Anne…”

In Paris for another award, Agatha Christie’s daughter Rosalind was one of the judges. “That made me weak at the knees! Her grandson presented me with it.”

Scarpetta’s success kick-started TV’s fascination with forensic pathology with shows like CSI and Silent Witness. Cornwell’s take on the character is succinct – “She always knew she was different; she was extraordinary bright; she grew up poor. Her father died when she was young, so death was her nemesis from the get-go, she was also a champion for victims, dead and living.”

All those elements were present in Postmortem; and partially reflect Cornwell’s own life. The middle child of three, she was five when her lawyer father walked out on the family on Christmas Day, 1961. She was molested by a paedophile security guard and had to testify in front of a jury. Life “went to hell in a handbasket,” she says bluntly.

Her mother Marilyn, a chronic depressive, left the children hungry – Cornwell recalls eating raw hot-dogs from the freezer.

Marilyn became obsessed with the TV evangelist, Billy Graham and relocated the family to rural North Carolina, begging the Grahams to raise them. She ended up in a mental hospital, and the children were fostered.

Unfortunately, Cornwell’s foster mother was an abusive bully. As a teen, she lived “in a state of terror” and battled anorexia and depression.

With Scarpetta, she says, “I created a character who would have rescued me as a child, who would have saved me. And in a way, she did.”

Patricia’s latest Scarpetta thriller, Identity Unknown, revolves around a corpse, found in an abandoned theme park, which turns out to be her ex-lover, Italian astrophysicist Sal Giordano. But was he really dropped from a UFO?

“With my books, I always try to start with something that fills me with wonder,” she says. “This time it’s UAPs – unidentified, aerial phenomena.”

A meticulous researcher, Cornwell has learned to scuba dive and fly helicopters for her books; for this one, she worked with NASA and visited the world’s largest radio telescope.

“I have a very healthy respect for things we don’t understand and things we don’t know about. I believe we’re not the only the most intelligent life-form out there. Looking at the state of the world, let’s hope we’re not!

“I’ve had my own experiences; I’ve seen two UFOs. Maybe there’s some logical explanation, but what I saw defied what we know.”

Sharp-witted Cornwell is 5ft 5, with distinctive baby blue eyes, short cropped hair and an inquisitive elfin face – just like Scarpetta. She is in her second marriage, the first to Professor Charles Cornwell lasted ten years. She wed Staci Gruber, a Harvard neuroscientist in 2005.

“My wife says I can be impatient. Sometimes I don’t take time to chill. And I can be a little negative. I can’t look at anything without telling you how it will kill you. If she books an Uber, I tell her what to do if the Uber driver abducts you.”

Cornwell hates ageing. “Every time I walk past the mirror. I say, ‘Who broke into my house? Oh no, that’s me!’.”

She keeps active. “Being physically fit is important to me. And I love comedy. I don’t like to watch anything sad or violent. I’ve seen enough of that.” And she adores England. She’d live in London, she says, “if it had a subtropical climate”.

In 2001, Met detective John Grieve inspired her to investigate Jack The Ripper. Her 2002 book, Portrait Of A Killer – Case Closed, names Victorian artist Walter Sickert as the serial killer.

“I call him Jack the Rip-off – he cost me a lot of money, the lousy SOB,” she says. But, she argues, the evidence of Sickert’s guilt is compelling.

Cornwell has created other fictional crime-fighters, most recently a female physicist who solves cybercrimes, but Scarpetta is the score to beat. Her next case will involve ghosts, or at least electromagnetic energy…

“I have made mistakes in writing, like switching to the third person in some of the books,” she says. “Scarpetta’s world is too hard if you’re not seeing it through her eyes.

“I also regret relationships I could’ve handled better. We all make mistakes. You just want to make sure you don’t make the same mistake twice.”

*Identity Unknown by Patricia Cornwell is out now (Sphere, £22)