TRUE CRIME

The life of a hugely popular crime novelist has been full of outsized violations and blessings.

With her blockbuster series featuring forensic medical examiner Kay Scarpetta finally making its way to the screen this spring in a series starring Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis, Cornwell’s 43rd book tells the story behind it all. In an opening scene, Patsy’s mother, Miami-born Vivien Leigh-lookalike Marilyn Daniels, inexplicably burns all of her three young children’s clothing. Memoir mavens will recall a nearly identical moment in Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995) and rightly suspect that another beautiful, deeply disturbed Southern mother is about to imprint her particular flavor of crazy on the formation of a literary mind. “She was always anticipating what might injure or kill us. Fires and carbon monoxide, floods, hurricanes, murderers, sexual predators, drug addicts.” Surely there would be no Patricia Cornwell without that. After chaotic early years with Patsy’s father in Florida, Marilyn bolted with the kids to Montreat, North Carolina, home of evangelist Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth, complete strangers with whom she seemed to consider leaving them. Amazingly, Ruth Graham reacted to this by finding a foster situation for the children and becoming a lifelong second mother to Patsy. Both Patsy’s early childhood and her years as a reporter were marked by incidents of sexual assault. The latter, a rape by a source, is flagged as fundamental to the disintegration of her marriage to Charlie Cornwell, a professor whom she fell in love with as an undergrad at Davidson College. Her interest in crime led her to pivot from journalism to a job with the chief medical examiner of Virginia, where she met the woman who would become the inspiration for her flagship character. Cornwell was surprised to realize after her first marriage broke up that she was bisexual; she has been married to her current partner, Staci Gruber, for over 20 years. There are plenty of boldface names in this excellent account of hard-won success, with candor about the failures as well as the wins. “I’d gone from nobody wanting what I wrote to being one of the best in the world as a crime novelist.”

This literary memoir is as good as it gets, with more action and drama than many novels.