Patricia Cornwell

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2002

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Patricia Daniels was born in 1956 in Miami, Florida. After her parents divorced she moved with her mother and two brothers to Montreat, North Carolina. Her mother suffered from depression and sought help from the Reverend Billy Graham. The reverend's wife, Ruth Bell Graham, became Patricia's friend and mentor and encouraged her to write. She particularly loved telling ghost stories, and would scare the children in her neighbourhood at Halloween. Patricia majored in English at Davidson, a private liberal arts college in North Carolina and married one of her professors, Charles Cornwell. The marriage lasted 10 years, by which time Patricia had progressed from a summer job compiling TV listings for The Charlotte Observer to crime reporter to a job at the medical examiner's office in Virginia. It was all good research for her crime novels, but her first published book in 1983 was A Time for Remembering, a biography of Ruth Bell Graham. Patricia had had three thrillers rejected by publishers so she tried again, this time changing a minor character, Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for Virginia, into her main protagonist for the book Postmortem. Postmortem was initially rejected by seven major publishing houses and finally accepted at the very end of 1988. It was a huge success and made her the only author ever to win all four major mystery awards in a single year on both sides of the Atlantic - The Edgar, The John Creasey, The Antony and the MacAvity. Thirteen novels later, she is still producing best sellers and has most recently published a book investigating Jack the Ripper. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: The Pachelbel Canon by Johann Pachelbel Book: Essay on population by Thomas Malthus Luxury: An endless supply of notebooks and pens

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons
0:06.0	We've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in
0:10.6	2002 and the presenter was Sue Lolley
0:13.2	My cast away this week is a crime writer. Her graphic stories of death, torture and violence
0:34.5	applauded by experts for their forensic accuracy have made her a millionaire many times over.
0:40.3	She had a difficult childhood abandoned by her parents and mistreated by a foster mother.
0:45.2	She went on to become a crime reporter on a local paper in Charlotte, North Carolina.
0:50.3	It was there that she began to involve herself in the dreadful world that has become the subject of her work.
0:56.8	Her first published novel, Postmortem, built around the tough but vulnerable female pathologist
1:02.2	K. Scarpetta was hugely successful. Since then, there have been ten more Scarpetta books.
1:08.3	Although most recently she's turned her hand to nonfiction attempting to prove that the artist
1:12.8	Walter Sikert was Jack the Ripper. She's fascinated by pathology. I love it, she says, but it's not
1:19.2	the morbidity. It's the language. It's about getting the dead to speak. She is Patricia Cornwell
1:25.4	and they speak to you Patricia through their wounds depending on how they've died through
1:29.8	strangulation, asphyxiation. How do they speak to you describe it? Well, they speak in many ways.
1:35.0	They have much more of a language than your average person would ever know. They speak through
1:39.0	their clothing. They speak through the hieroglyphics of their injuries and the evidence that's left on
1:43.9	the bodies. And what's so important about the medical examiner's office or the morgue is this
1:49.7	is the last place anybody goes and you want them to have a chance to say what happened to them not
1:55.1	only how they died but how they lived their lives and somebody should listen. What was the first dead
2:01.0	body you ever saw on that slab in the morgue? Do you remember? Yes, I do very vividly. It was an
2:05.4	elderly woman and I literally bumped into her gurney as I was coming through the door. The reason
	...

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