INDIAN RIVER COUNTY —The place most often associated with forensic thriller author Patricia Cornwell is the inside of a morgue -the working “office” of her most famous creation, medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.
But the author, who came to the Vero Beach Book Center earlier this month to promote her latest Scarpetta novel, “Red Mist,” appreciates the importance of other places as well.
Including, as it happens, Vero Beach.
“I have a special connection to Vero,” the author said. “I was born in South Florida. You might think that Miami residents would vacation somewhere more distant. But we stayed at the Driftwood Inn every year – I was quite the little rubber-rafter, and I remember seeing the sunken ship in the ocean nearby.”
Her family left Florida when Cornwell was 5, and Cornwell didn’t return to Vero until adulthood.
“I would go over Vero Beach as I flew along the coast, and I recognized the Driftwood from the air. When I actually visited the town again, it was an emotional experience. There are very few places unchanged enough to allow you to revisit the early years of your childhood,” she added. “The sunken ship, the hotel, the area around it – it’s all much the same, which is part of its charm.”
After graduating from college, Cornwell became a newspaper reporter, eventually covering the police beat for the Charlotte Observer. There she became fascinated by the invisible drama that only begins after a homicide victim was removed from a crime scene.
“Nobody wanted to talk about what happened to the body,” she remembered. “I knew I wanted to write, and that was a subject that fascinated me. The body of a victim is like an archaeology site. From it, not just the person’s death but also their life can be recreated.”
A subsequent position as computer analyst for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Va., allowed Cornwell to continue the scrupulous hands-on research about forensic places and processes that remains crucial to her work today.
Her first novel, “Postmortem,” appeared in 1990 after a lengthy hunt for a publisher. Despite its pre-publication struggles, the book won the Edgar, Anthony, Creasy, and Macavity awards and the French “Prix du Roman d’Aventure” in a single year, the only novel ever to have done so.
Today, Cornwell is an international phenomenon whose books have been published in 100 countries and 36 languages.
She continues to write about Scarpetta, though she has also created two briefer fictional series and a pair of cookbooks, inspired by the love of food and cooking that is referenced at least briefly in all of Scarpetta novels.
“If I don’t have at least one cooking scene, readers complain.”
The first 10 of what are now 19 Scarpetta books take place in Richmond, where Cornwell stayed for more than a decade.
“I was really able to mine that city, and Virginia in general, for the books – and it was easy to do, because I lived there,” she said.
Upon leaving Virginia, both the author and her fictional medical examiner moved several times.
Today, both are settled in the Boston area, but Cornwell regularly pilots her own helicopter to locations that might inspire new storylines.
One of her most exotic settings, however, couldn’t be visited in person: the real, and really dangerous, London of the Victorian era.
The occasion?
Her 2003 nonfiction book “Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed.”
Applying modern forensic techniques to the famous Ripper murders (which she attributes to artist Walter Sickert), Cornwell took pains to recreate the London of the period accurately.
Asked if it was enjoyable to evoke a time and place so different from the usual world of her writing, the author laughed.
“I can’t say that book was fun,” she says, “because it was such hard work. The research was really extensive.”
Cornwell made painstaking use of source materials to craft the book’s case against Sickert, describe the murders, and evoke the lives of the poor who comprised “Jack’s” victim list.
“I bought actual period copies of the London Times from a rare book dealer. Each year was bound in a single leather-bound volume that weighed about 50 pounds. I’d be working on a sequence and find that I needed to look up the weather, the visibility, the fog.”
In contrast, she adds, a novelist has great freedom.
“When Scarpetta heads to a scene, I can choose how to make it compelling.”
“Red Mist,” the author’s latest novel, is set in Georgia, where Scarpetta travels in an attempt to understand the violent and mysterious death of a troubled former protégé.
Some of its first and starkest scenes are set at the fictional Georgia State Prison for Women.
To create this segment of the book, the author did extensive research at the Tennessee Prison for Women, though she hastens to say that unlike its sinister fictional counterpart, the real prison is very well run.
Still, “it was very bleak.”
The novel’s outdoor settings, in contrast, are pure Georgia.
“I’ve done a lot of my writing in Hilton Head, so I know the Low Country well,” Cornwell explained.
Like the prison scenes, the landscapes of the story – which Scarpetta visits in the thick of summer heat – have a deliberately oppressive, brooding quality.
“The air blowing through the open windows is thick and hot, and I smell the pungent, sulfuric odor of decomposing vegetation, of salt marshes and pluff mud….The van hesitates and surges by fits and starts around a sun-dappled bend where turkey buzzards forage on something dead,” Scarpetta says in the opening pages, adding, “I can recognize death from a distance.”
When the medical examiner visits Savannah, the settings become less isolated but only a little less ominous.
“Savannah is definitely a character in “Red Mist,” Cornwell noted.
Naturally, “Red Mist” doesn’t skimp on the postmortem scenes that have helped make Cornwell a bestseller – but they may surprise readers of its predecessor, “Port Mortuary.”
“My last book was very high-tech. Scarpetta was doing autopsies by CT scan,” the author said. “This one puts her outside her comfort zone. She’s working in situations where she doesn’t even have jurisdiction over the crime scenes, much less the cutting-edge equipment she’s used to. She has to figure out how to make it work.”
But it is changes in television, not technology, that have altered the forensic elements of the novels most.
“The Scarpetta books really launched the forensic entertainment industry,” Cornwell explained, alluding to the explosion of television shows such as “CSI.”
“There was nothing like them in 1990. Now, it’s not enough to show the latest, greatest forensic procedures in a book. They’re all on TV, along with tools and techniques that aren’t even real.”
In response, the author has focused on developing other facets of the stories.
“Characters, relationships, the psychological elements, the sense of place: in a way, the overcrowding of the techno-thriller genre has stretched me as a writer.”
Now that the author is settled in Boston, she has given her most famous character a permanent home there as well.
Scarpetta’s home and her new forensics center are located in diverse and colorful Cambridge.
“Location is so important,” Cornwell concluded. “I look forward to exploring Boston further in the books. The next Scarpetta book takes place there, and features Boston Harbor among other places.”
As always, the author’s legions of fans will be glad to follow her there.
