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October 12, 2024 27 mins
Patricia Cornwell, legendary thriller writer and author of dozens of New York Times bestsellers, talks eloquently about UFO’s, Harriet Beecher Stowe, crime scenes, Jack the Ripper, and her most recent novel, Identity Unknown.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back to What's at Risk. I'm Mike Christian. Patricia
Cornwell has sold over one hundred and twenty million books
and authored dozens of New York Times bestsellers. She sold
her first novel, post Mortem, while working as a computer

(00:26):
analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia.
Post Mortem was the bonafide forensic thriller. It paid the
way for an explosion of entertainment featuring all things forensic
across film, television, and literature. Patricia's novels center primarily on

(00:46):
medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, along with her tech savvy niece
Lucy and fellow investigator Pete Marino. These characters have grown
into an international phenomenon, winning corn Well the Sherlock Award
for Best Detective Created by an American Author, the Gold
Dagger Award, the RBA Thriller Award, and letters for her

(01:09):
contributions to literary and artistic development. Though Cornwell now lives
in Boston, she was born in Miami and grew up
in North Carolina. After earning her degree in English from
Davidson College in nineteen seventy nine, she began working at
the Charlotte observer, taking whatever stories came her way, and
rapidly advancing from listing television programs to covering the police beat.

(01:35):
Then Cornwell moved to a job with the Office of
the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, a post she would
later bestow upon the fictional case Scarpetta. While we're honored

(01:57):
to have Patricia Cornwell, best selling thriller writer and author
of over thirty books, including Identity Unknown, her most recent novel,
which is out in November, Patricia, thanks so much for
being with us.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Oh, it is my pleasure, especially because you're my local place.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
That's it. Yes, Patricia is in Boston, so all the better.
You've got a home field advantage here today. That's right.
Maybe a good place to start, you could just tell
our listeners a little bit about your background. I think
everybody knows you anyway, but maybe just a little bit
of clarity for them.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Well, you know, a lot of people might think they
know me, but there's some interesting details. First of all,
I'm not a forensic pathologist, and a lot of people
think that, you know, because I write about one that
I am. But in fact, I started out as a journalist,
which taught me how to do everything, and most of all,
how to explore and answer questions and to learn things

(02:51):
and to figure out what it is other people, what
people do, like what does a forensic pathologist do? And
so that I ended up in a medical examiner's office
for six years as I tried to write crime novels
way back. This was in the Stone Age of the
nineteen eighties, and I couldn't get published for a while,
and it ended up working in a morgue for six

(03:12):
years full time, and that is what gave me the
impetus for creating the case Scarpetta character. And I've been
doing this kind of research and running around with the
police and all the rest of it, you know, ever since.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
So I knew that that was your inspiration for K
But what was that experience like for you personally?

Speaker 2 (03:34):
That's a very good question, because it changed my life.
I had no idea what it was going to do
to me to start seeing the things that I saw,
And to this day, I'm not the same person and
I never will be. If you've ever stared violence up
close and personal, when you've looked at in the eye,
how you can walk away and be the same is

(03:55):
beyond me. And the bodies that I would see come through.
All of them had a to tell, and you were
reminded that these are people that may be just their
body that's left, and what made them who they are
is no longer present. But that was a reality that
put me in quite a quandary, because when I wanted
to write crime novels, that's just what I'm there for.

(04:18):
And yet then I said to myself, what you must
never do is trivialize what you're seeing here. You cannot,
you have no excuse for it. So I thought, how
am I going to do this, And the only way
to do it was to take on Scarpetti's persona and
let her be the one who leads us down that trail.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah, that's a great point, and people are mesmerized by
crime novels and thrillers and things like that, but very
few people have that up close experience with dead bodies
right well.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
And I'm just as happy that not everybody has to
have that experience. I mean, not everybody needs to watch
an autopsy. And as they used to say, it's not
a spectator sport, and it's not for the faint of
heart either. But it's not just the autopsy it's the
crime scenes were always what were hardest for me, because
I would ride with the police every weekend when I

(05:09):
was working at the Morgue, because I was also a
volunteer police officer, all of this to learn, and when
I would end up on crime scenes and you saw
how people lived, and you saw how somebody got through
their window and what they did to them, and it's
all right there, undisturbed. The footprint, the emotional fingerprint, really

(05:31):
the echoes of it reverberating as you're walking through the room.
That is a very powerful experience. And to this day,
if anybody watches me when I walk around, if I
were over at your house and you were showing me
your art collection or something, I always had my hands
either behind my back or in my pockets. And the
reason why is I learned early on you don't want

(05:52):
to ever accidentally touch something because you're at a crime scene.
So to this day I have strange mannerisms because of
what I'm used to.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
That's fascinating. So I read an interesting tidbit just in
doing a little research for this interview, is that you're
a descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Is
that correct?

Speaker 2 (06:12):
That's true. I am my grandmother is I'm a direct
descendant of the Beachers. It is. I am a direct
descendant from her family. And I would hear about Harriet
Beacher Stowe when I was a little girl. My grandmother,
who's her family that's related and my father's mother, and

(06:32):
she would tell me stories because she was born in
eighteen ninety, my grandmother, and she remembered hearing about the Beachers,
and she would talk about Uncle Tom's cabin. Must have
been intrigued by all this because one of my earliest
poems that I still own. My mother unfortunately threw most
of my stuff away, so I don't have a lot
of the early things. But I wrote a poem when

(06:53):
I was nine about Abraham Lincoln being assassinated. And you
have to wonder, why would I be thinking about that.
I'm just a little nine year old living in North Carolina.
Why would I be thinking about that? But it was
very much impressed me, and her book to this day,
I still find it a very powerful book. It's written
in a very old style, as you know, but the

(07:15):
truth of what she's telling and the idea of these
people who are being sold and all the rest of
it is pretty soul crushing.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, as it should be, no question, as it should
be here exactly right. Well, at least you have you
came to writing, honestly, it's in the blood.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Well, I did, and I found a lot of similarities
between Harriet Bea Tristeau and myself. I went to see
her home in Hertford, Connecticut, and long ago someone showed
me the original copy of the archives there showed me
the original copy of Uncle Tom's cabin and it was
just as very thin manuscript. And I said, what happened

(07:51):
to the rest of it? And she said, Well, when
Harriet would get a letter someone asking for her autograph,
she would sign a page of her manuscript and send
it to them. So can you imagine. Wow, I don't know.
There was something about the way she lived in her
house and all of that that I felt familiar to me.
It was weird.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Well, changing topics a little bit and going back to
Kay's character. How you've written I think twenty seven books
that beat your Kay and Lucy and Pete and some
of the other continuing characters. How has her personality and
character changed and evolved over the years.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
Well, I think that I'm glad you asked that, and
I do think it's evolved, and probably because I have
I mean, she has to live with me, and I
have to live with her. And hopefully as one, as
years go by, you get more insights, you've become maybe
less rigid, you might become a little more creative about
how you're going to problem solve because you're building on experience.

(08:49):
And I feel that I think Scarpetta's more likable. I
think she's warmer than she used to be because she's
more comfortable being her and and maybe because I'm more
comfortable writing about her and her relationships with those around her,
so she is less traditional when I mean, you have

(09:09):
to remember when I started all this back in the
nineteen eighties, I was writing about what I saw medical
examiners actually doing. And then I began to realize, as
time goes by, well one can do more than just that.
There's just a lot of things where I wanted to
give her different experiences and more adventures. I decided she

(09:31):
was going to have an underwater crime scene, so then
I had to learn how to scuba dive because I
realized she did. She's taught me a few things and Lucy.
I decided I had to learn to fly helicopters because
I thought she should fly them. And then I had
to ride motorcycles because she would do that too, and
so does Marino. And I really think my characters were
trying to kill me. I figured it out finally, and

(09:52):
I see why, because they're sick and tired of me
putting them through all these horrible stories.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
I was going to ask you, how do you come
up with these new twists and turns of having twenty
seven books? But now I think I understand well.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
I mean, when we've realized that the author is now
worried that her own characters are trying to do her
in now you know.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
What I live with, surrounded by angry characters.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
They say, I don't want to do this, you can
leave me alone.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
So you referenced your interest in forensic science, although you
said you weren't a forensic scientist necessarily, but you do
keep up with recent innovations. How do you do that?

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Well, first of all, because I'm constantly writing, I'm constantly
doing research, and in addition to what I find on
the internet, you know, there's so many scientific publications if
you want to find what's the latest thing they're doing
with DNA or spectroscopy or whatever it might be. But
in addition to that, I go, like just last week,

(10:48):
I was I went through the FBI Academy at Quantico
because I hadn't been in a long time, and I
was hanging out with the folks there, and then while
I'm doing that, I find out what are you working on,
what are the latest technologies that you're using, or what
are your latest what are your challenges in this world
of cyber crimes, for example, of infrastructure attacks, the things

(11:09):
that we worry about that didn't really exist when I
was started all this in the in the eighties and
the heyday of the nineties and all the rest. So
you just have to keep doing it and being open
to go see things like, for example, an identity unknown.
I was interested in the whole subject of UAPs, you know,
an unidentified anomalist phenomenon are better known as UFOs. A

(11:32):
lot of that's in the news these days, and so
I thought, what if there's something to this? And if
there is, what if you had a death that it
might at first blush might look like it's related to
something like that, How would Scarpetta deal with that, How
would the military deal with it? How would everybody deal
with it? And so that's how the story gets started.
And in the process I went to see the Green

(11:54):
Bank Telescope in West Virginia. I talked to the astronomers,
and of course I've done a lot of space res search. Anyway,
I just keep learning, you know. I think it was
Michaelangelo that supposedly the last thing he said when he
was dying is I'm still learning. And I think that's
what we all should be saying. We're still learning.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
That's a life well lived where you can learn continuously.
But after all that, now you got me intrigued with
the UFO thing. So what's your conclusion. Do they exist
in a way that people fantasize them to exist? You do.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
They may not exist exactly the way people fantasize it.
But I think that we are not the highest order
of intelligence in the universe, and for that I am
supremely grateful. Especially when I watch the news at night,
I hope we're not the smartest things out there. There's
a lot of evidence of things that are cited that
there's no explanation for. I think a lot of what
we're seeing there is an explanation. For a good example,

(12:50):
there are drones out there that a lot of people
don't know about that are shaped in very weird ways,
including orbs, and so you might be seeing a drone
orb going by that's the government is doing something with,
whether it's your government or someone else or who knows who,
and that's not necessarily what you think it is. Then again,
you might see something that doesn't behave the way any

(13:13):
human made vehicle behaves unless we're talking about people somewhere
that have technical abilities that are so far surpass hours
that they almost seem to defy the laws of physics.
And I don't think that's what's happening. Unless that's the case,
we're dealing with something else. So the question is what

(13:34):
does that mean? And does that mean that we aren't
important and that something's going to take us over? Well,
let me say this first and foremost, as many years
as these things have been out there, and as superior
as their technological abilities clearly are, if they wanted to
do something bad to us, they could already done it.
I think it's more likely they may have some real

(13:57):
interest in what we're doing here because they to it somehow,
the same way we're going to start life on other planets.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, I think that's right. I think and intuitively, there's
billions of planets and stars in the universe. It's got
to be some other life someplace, right.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Statistically, it has absolutely been proven that as much as
out there, the likelihood of there being nothing but us
is not really probably plausible. And I find the whole
prospect of this incredibly exciting. I'm not afraid of it.
I find people far scary. Or just ask Scarpetits, she'd
tell you the same.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
That's right. So shifting topics here and without giving away
any secrets, tell us just a little bit about your
most recent novel, Identity Unknown, which is coming out in
the first part of October.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
It comes out October eighth. But as all of this
has been hitting the news with all the whistleblowers and everything,
and there's more of that every day, I started thinking,
when I was going to come up with another story
idea for a new Scarpetta. You know, I want to
explore this. I've already explored death and space, and one
of my Scarpetta books I have her dealing with remotely

(15:08):
with an autopsy that occurs in low Earth orbit on
an orbiting laboratory. And so I've been intrigued by space
for a long time, and I thought, what would she
do if you had a body that appears to be
dropped by a UAP, a UAP that has been spotted
on radar and other sensors that does not match the

(15:30):
signature of anything else that we have in our databases
that's flying around out there, and there's what appears to
be a crop circle around this body, and the body
appears to have radiation, you know, it's reddish. What is
she going to do? How's she going to handle that?
How's she going to handle that crime scene? How are
everybody going to handle it? And what really happened here?

(15:51):
And I will tell you right away that I'm not
going to tell you what happened, but i will tell
you there's a scientific explanation for everything she's seeing. And
getting back to the whole notion of UAPs showing up
on radar and multiple sensors, you have to remember that
just because we can't identify it doesn't mean it was
made by non humans. It could be something that has

(16:14):
a unique configuration that's not in a database that doesn't
mean it's not there, and it doesn't mean it's from
outer space. I deal with that, and I have to
say it's a wonderful romp. The person who's been killed
as somebody that Scarpetta has a past with, so we
learn a lot more about her early days when she
was with this person for a summer in Italy. He's

(16:37):
a prominent astrophysicist, this guy who's been murdered, and she
takes us to some very unusual places, including a top
secret mortuary at Langley Air Force Space where she does
the autopsy of this person under you know, in a
very very strange place that has body drawers. You know,

(16:58):
in the old days, some of the morgues had drawers,
not just a cooler. And the drawers in this place
don't look like anything she's ever seen before, and they
have strange electronic locks on them, and they're weird size,
and she wonders, what on earth has gone on here?

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Well, you definitely set the stage for all of your
fans that read your books out there. So the book's
going to be out in just a couple of weeks.
So to be so prolific and be able to create
all these amazing complex stories. You must have a very
active imagination. Where does that come from? What accounts for that?

Speaker 2 (17:33):
Well, first of all, some of it is hereditary. My mother,
my mother, was an artist, and I come from writers,
you know. On my dad's side of the family was
Harriet Beecher Stowe, inventors and writers on his side and
on my mom's side, also inventors, and she was a
painter and a poet. So I maybe get some of
my creativity from her. But the truth be told, when

(17:56):
I was a little kid, it was not a happy home,
and I was alone a lot, and I learned my
imagination was my refuge, and I would make up characters
and stories in the minute I could hold a crayon.
I was. I was writing little books and I would
illustrate them, and then i'd get a shoe lason I'd
sew them together and make a cover on it. And

(18:16):
I'd spend my rainy, my rainy weekends doing things like that.
And I learned a long time ago that if you
don't like the world you live in, maybe make up
one of your own, you know, go to go paint
something or write a story like I do. So that's
probably how I got good at that.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
To be honest, there are a lot of readers appreciate
your imagination, one hundred and twenty million of them as
a matter of fact, about your books. So your advice
to aspiring writers or authors is start writing and don't
take no for an answer. You obviously listen to your
own advice. What is your writing routine? How do stories

(18:54):
unfold for you?

Speaker 2 (18:56):
Well, the research is so important, And say I would
say that to aspiring writers too. They say, write what
you know about I say, write what you learn about.
You don't have to already know it. And sometimes what
you already know isn't what makes you curious. What makes
you curious is something else. And so if you're curious
about something, then go out and start exploring it because

(19:17):
it might have a story to tell. What I tell
you is go out and look for a story and
tell it finds you, because it will find you. And
that is my method. I go places and I get ideas.
While I'm there, I read things and get ideas from that,
and then the actual work itself, I try to focus

(19:37):
on it and keep distractions away. Even Nikola Tesla talked
about the importance of working in a vacuum. Go someplace quiet.
But all of these things are important if you want
to be a writer, and if you really love it, it
will love you back. But it doesn't mean it will
be easy.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
And I've heard many other creative people, particularly musicians, but
also other authors and people make movies say that exact
same thing is be prepared, but it just comes to
you over time. And those are special people like you
in terms of creativity. But that's great advice for aspiring.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
We actually open to it. You have to be open
to it, and not everybody is. And you can't just
want to go tell a great story so that you
can be a famous bestseller and make a lot of money.
It has to be something you feel compelled to do.
It has to be a passion that you're willing to
sacrifice a lot for and not necessarily be able to

(20:32):
control the process the way you'd like to. My characters
don't always do what I tell them to. They have
a mind of their own, and that's a frustrating day
for me when Scarpetta won't cross the room, and I've
told her fifty times, if you don't walk across that
damn room, you can't go out that door and go
in the lab and find out what I have to
tell everybody. Nope, not doing it, not in the mood.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
I love that. A couple more questions, and one that's
interesting to me is you've also all been in interesting
to me, but this one in particular. You've also authored
a definitive account of Jack the Ripper's identity, which is fascinating.
And one question before I ask you who that is
is what accounts for this enduring fascination with Jack the Ripper.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Oh, It's the most fascinating case there ever was. And
the more I've known about it, the more I've been
mind boggled by just how intricate and extensive his crime
spree was. And I can understand why he baffled everybody,
and in many ways still does today. But I got
into that because I was given a tour of Scotland

(21:37):
Yard in the spring of two thousand and one, and
this very esteemed investigator named John Greeve, probably the most
famous one over there who's now retired. He was the
one I was with, and he started telling me about
the Jack the Ripper case, and I thought, why on
earth as he called me here to talk about Jack
the Ripper, I'm not interested in Jack the Ripper. I'm
writing about modern crimes, and I'd never read anything about

(21:59):
Jack the Ripper. I figured he had a knife, you know,
process of deduction, Sherlock, that's the ripping part. Anyway, John
Grieve said. He started telling me all about and I'm
very politely listening in his office and then he says,
you tomorrow, I'd like to take you around and show
you what's left of the crime scenes. And I thought,
oh god, no, I don't want to do that. I'm
supposed to be in Ireland. And I said I can't

(22:21):
say no to someone like this. That would be disrespectful,
so I did. We went scooting around Whitechapel in the rain,
and at the end of it, I said to him,
who are the suspects? After he told me about some
of the murders, and he rattled off a few names,
and I said, based on what he said, based on nothing,
I said, well, is there any evidence left in this case?

(22:41):
And he said, well, yeah, he said, there's just the
letters that Jack the Ripper wrote, because he wrote a
lot of them, and then you know they're in the
National Archives that was then called the Public Record Office.
And I said, we know, I might like, look into
this a little bit. You've gotten me kind of curious.
I'd like to look at the letters anyway, because you
can tell a lot from letters, paper and analysis and
all the rest. And he said, well, you know, if

(23:02):
you're really going to look into this, Patricia, let me
give you a name that you really should follow up on.
He said, a guy named Walter Sickert. He was an artist.
He did a lot of murder paintings, and there's reasons
to be very suspicious about him. Well, that basically what
he did was gave me an assignment, and I started
looking into it. And every so often I would sit
down with John, and usually in Whitechapel in an Indian restaurant.

(23:24):
We'd be drinking a logger and he'd go through my
notes and we'd go over the case, and then I'd
go back and bring in the newest evidence. And long
story short, I know, I have absolutely no doubt that
Sicret wrote some of those letters. Based on the scientific
analysis that was not, of course done by me. It
was done by one of the world's foremost paper experts,

(23:46):
Peter Bauer, and it pretty conclusively showed that some of
those letters absolutely were written by Sicret. The Ripper letters
and others very well may have been. And there's artwork
on them too, which is really suspicious. I know he
did at least that much, and there's enough about him
and his life and the way he treated his wives
and the way he grew up, and there's no question

(24:08):
he was a sociopath, better put a psychopath, and I
believe he also committed the murders. And if you read
my book Ripper, The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, you
can see the evidence for yourself. And now, well the
general public ever really accept this? Probably not because I
don't really think people want that crime solved. I mean

(24:29):
it's a big business.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, no question, that's part of the enduring interest in it. Well,
but there's a one last question and comment. Besides writing,
you have a variety of outside interests like co founding
the Conservation Scientists Chair at Harvard University Art Museums, serving
as a member of Harvard affiliated McLain Hospital, and also

(24:51):
funding scholarships and literacy programs. So you are giving back
in a meaningful way. Do you want to comment on
that a lot?

Speaker 2 (24:58):
Well, that's so important. Stacy and I both do you know,
and she's a world renowned cannabis researcher at Harvard. One
of the things people used to say, and my mother
used to say, to whom much is given, much would
be required. And I have been very blessed. I've been
given a lot of my career. I never imagined that
I would make money or anything, and so I try,

(25:19):
whether it's animal rescue scholarships for kids you know who
can't afford college, or medical bills for people who are
whatever it may be. It's not necessarily something that you
wave a banner about. But I always say, take care
of the life in front of you. If everybody would
take care of the life in front of them, we

(25:40):
would not have the problems in this world we do.
You can't fix everything, but don't walk past that one
thing or that one person that needs your attention. Try
to do something about it.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
Well, that's a great way to leave our discussion here.
Patricia Cornwell, best selling thriller writer, author of the upcoming Identity,
which is coming out in October. Thank you so much
for really privileged to be able to talk with you
on our show tow You.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
The privileges is all mine. I am so grateful. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Well, that's all for this week. I'm Mike Christian, inviting
you to join us again next week on What's at Risk.
Also check out our podcast at Wbznewsradio dot iHeart dot com.
A big thank you to our producer, Ken Carberry of
Chart Productions. What's on your Mind? Send us your thoughts, comments,

(26:39):
and questions to What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
That's one word, What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
Thank you a
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