Novelist, born in Miami, Florida, USA. After an unsettled childhood, she studied at Davidson College, North Carolina. Working as a police reporter, and (from 1984) in the Virginia medical examiner's office, she gained a wide range of experience which she put to use in her novels. In the 1990s she became one of the world's best-selling women novelists, producing a book each year, and known especially for the character of medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta introduced in her first novel Postmortem (1990). Later books include Body of Evidence (1991), Cause of Death (1996), Blow Fly (2003), Trace (2004), and Predator (2005). She introduced a new character, police investigator Winston Garano, in her 2006 novel At Risk. Her very first book was A Time for Remembering (1983), a biography of Ruth Bell Graham (wife of Billy Graham), with whom she was in close contact as a child.
Cornwell is widely known for writing a popular series of crime novels, featuring the fictional heroine "Dr. Kay Scarpetta", a medical examiner.Biographical information
A descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida. Cornwell says that there are numerous links between herself and the main character in her novels, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist. (Cornwell's father, Sam Daniels, was one of the leading appellate lawyers in the United States and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.)
In Body of Evidence, the second of the Kay Scarpetta novels, Scarpetta says that her career in pathology can be traced back to "the terrible crime of my father's death." Cornwell, in a interview with The Times of London, traced her own motivations in life to the psychological abuse she says she suffered from her father, who she says walked out on the family on Christmas Day in 1952. All he did was write on a legal pad 'How’s work?'"
Cornwell told The Times that her first interaction with the legal system came at the age of five, when she appeared before a grand jury to give evidence against a neighborhood security guard who "was getting started on some activity that would not have been very good if my brother hadn't ridden up on his bicycle and scared him away."
Soon afterwards, Cornwell's family moved to Montreat, North Carolina, where her mother was hospitalized for depression and the children were placed in the foster care system. Billy Graham's wife, Ruth Bell, encouraged Cornwell to write, she says. Whether it's being molested at 4 or being in foster homes, you have no control.”
Shortly after graduating from Davidson College with a B.A in English, she married one of her English professors, Charles Cornwell, who was 17 years her senior. In 1979, Cornwell started working as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer and soon began covering crime.
In the 1980s, Cornwell wrote three novels that she says were rejected before the publication, in 1991, of her first major success, Postmortem. After the success of Postmortem, Cornwell bought five houses and many cars in one year.
Cornwell has spent millions of dollars buying art, clothing and other materials, and then having forensic tests, including DNA testing, conducted in an effort to prove that the painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.
After studying the criminal brain for her 2005 book, Predator, Cornwell said she reversed her position in support of the death penalty and concluded that the mind is formed by nature and nuture acting upon each other, which does not mean that someone is chemically doomed to become a psychopathic murderer. In her interview with The Times, Cornwell used similar concepts to describe herself, saying that she was “wired differently”, in a direct reference to her struggle with bipolar disorder.
Cornwell has made several notable charitable acts, including founding the Virginia Institute for Forensic Science and Medicine, funding scholarships to the University of Tennessee's National Forensics Academy, Davidson College's Creative Writing Program, and donating her collection of Walter Sickert paintings to Harvard University.
Her writing
The Scarpetta novels include a great deal of detail on forensics. Cornwell herself worked at a crime lab in Virginia as a technical writer and computer analyst but not in any official medical or forensics capacity.
Besides the Scarpetta novels, Cornwell has written three more light-hearted police fictions featuring Andy Brazil, as well as a number of works of non-fiction.
Cornwell is the recipient of numerous prizes for crime writing, including the Edgar Award, Britain's Gold Dagger Award, and the Sherlock Award.
Controversies
Jack the Ripper
Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.
Litigation surrounding The Last Precinct
Dr. Leslie Sachs, author of The Virginia Ghost Murders (1998), claimed to see similarities between his novel and Cornwell's novel The Last Precinct. In 2000 he sent letters to Cornwell's publisher, started a page on the World Wide Web, and placed stickers on his novel in order to claim that Cornwell was committing plagiarism.
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