Cornwell’s Coroner Novelist Patricia Cornwell Wraps Drama And Romance Into Stories About A Sleuthing Medical Examiner

Ten years ago, a morgue assistant named Patricia Cornwell tried to sell New York publishers a crime novel whose hero was a male police detective.

But an editor found her protagonist flat and uninteresting and suggested the young writer further develop a minor but intriguing character, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the cool-headed Virginia chief medical examiner.

Six books later, her novels about Scarpetta have made Cornwell a best-selling author with a worldwide following. Her books have even made the Virginia chief medical examiner’s office something of a tourist attraction.

In her latest book, “From Potter’s Field” (Scribner, $24), the sleuthing coroner continues to do her thing - dissecting corpses, consulting for the FBI and managing her complicated love life. Kay Scarpetta’s dalliance in the two most recent books with a married FBI agent have left some readers aghast.

Cornwell, who speaks of Scarpetta like an intimate friend, says she doesn’t approve of the affair either. But she defends her brilliant, stylish heroine as a lonely career woman in need of a lover who understands her.

“I just think she’s fabulous,” Cornwell, 39, says of Scarpetta, who like herself is a divorced Miami native who is fascinated by death. “She’s an idealized version of what I’d like to be.”

Cornwell has blazed a path in the genre of forensic thrillers. She presents vivid details of death gleaned from the six years she worked as a computer analyst in the chief medical examiner’s office in Virginia.

“From Potter’s Field,” released Aug. 2, has shot to the top of best-seller lists. In the book, Scarpetta pursues an escaped serial killer who taunts Scarpetta in return.

Cornwell is writing a screenplay based on the book, which would be her first novel to be made into a movie. An earlier film project featuring actress Demi Moore as Scarpetta fell through.

“I would love to see a woman like this come to the screen,” Cornwell says of her heroine. “There hasn’t been anyone like this before.”

Cornwell is the daughter of a Miami appellate lawyer. Her parents divorced when she was a child and she and her mother and brothers moved from Florida to the North Carolina mountains near Asheville, where she excelled in sports and academics. She later attended Davidson College in North Carolina. Her marriage to a minister in 1981 fell apart several years later after they moved to Richmond.

A former crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer, Cornwell published her first book, “A Time for Remembering,” a biography of Ruth Graham, wife of the Rev. Billy Graham, in 1983. The Grahams are family friends.

After she left journalism, Cornwell realized she wanted to write crime fiction. To get realistic detail, she became a police volunteer and got a job at the morgue. She has witnessed hundreds of autopsies.

“I was delighted to do it,” she said. “This is Scarpetta’s world. How can I dare to describe it if I don’t experience it?”

Cornwell speaks with relish about forensic pathology and crime scenes. She explains enthusiastically how she came up with the idea to put an image of her own blood on the cover of “From Potter’s Field.”

But she says she only goes as far as she needs to with grisly details to retain authenticity.

“I’m not saying there’s a serial killer on every block, but I’m showing you what can really happen,” she says. Her first thriller, “Postmortem” in 1990, was inspired by Richmond’s “Southside Strangler,” a man put to death last year in Virginia for four rape-murders.

She believes readers buy her books because they are fascinated by crime and like seeing justice delivered, which often doesn’t happen in real life.

The author continues to meticulously research material for her books. Chances are if Scarpetta does something, her creator has done it first.

In Cornwell’s seventh book, “Cause of Death,” which is due out next year, Scarpetta probes the mysterious diving death of a fictitious Associated Press reporter. Cornwell says she took up scuba diving so she could make the underwater scenes more realistic.

These days, Cornwell divides her time among Richmond, Los Angeles and London. But Virginia continues to be Scarpetta’s base.

“It’s fun to have a protagonist who is not of this cloth,” she said of Scarpetta, who comes from a Roman Catholic, Italian family and often clashes with conservative Richmond.

Cornwell has become something of a character herself. She’s immersed herself in state political campaigns and once was photographed for People magazine opening a refrigerator door with a revolver strapped to her waist.

She has toned down her pistol-packing image, but says she has been stalked in the past and is prepared to deal with fans who get too exuberant.

“It’s not like I walk around with a shotgun wherever I go, but I’m definitely not passive,” she says.

Neither is gun-toting Scarpetta, who has been known to blow away a villain or two.

If Cornwell is trying to lead a quieter existence these days, her character’s life is just speeding up. Cornwell says she has no plans to stop the Scarpetta series and is working on books set in France and other new locales.

Scarpetta “is so much fun to think about,” Cornwell said. “She makes my life so much more interesting.”