Two Drinks with. . . Patricia Cornwell, the Queen of Forensic Crime Thrillers

The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has sold more than 120 million books and has been asked about nearly everything: the helicopters she bought for research, the blistering 1997 Vanity Fair profile that outed her as bisexual, and the 35-year journey through Hollywood that finally brought her heroine, medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, to the screen this year. In her extraordinary new memoir, True Crime—published May 5—Cornwell reveals herself to be strikingly similar to Scarpetta: brilliant and stubborn, imperious and generous. Long after her divorce, her ex-husband Charlie, continuing as her beta reader, sometimes noted in the margins that Scarpetta was too “bitchy.” “She was too driven, too cold, too forceful, and even unlikable,” Cornwell writes of Charlie’s thoughts on Scarpetta. “His view of her was very different from mine, and at times I wondered who he was really talking about.” Scarpetta and her creator shared that complex spirit with the woman who shaped Cornwell more than perhaps anyone else: Ruth Graham, wife of the legendary evangelist Billy Graham. She was the first to recognize her talent and the one who gave her the idea—and the opportunity—for her very first book, when she was just 24 years old. So when I reached Cornwell, who will be 70 in June, in her Boston office, surrounded by the Jack the Ripper artifacts she has collected for decades, I told her I didn’t really want to talk about the books that made her a celebrity. Instead, I wanted to discuss the first one she ever wrote, undoubtedly her worst-seller: an authorized biography of Ruth Graham published in 1983. “I learned a lot from Ruth,” she told me, pausing. “I’m still learning a lot from Ruth.” This is how Cornwell met Ruth: When Cornwell was nine, her mother, in a burst of religious mania inspired by attending a Billy Graham event in Miami years earlier, burned all of her children’s clothing and dropped her kids off at the Grahams’ home in Montreat, North Carolina. She handed a note to the minister’s wife: “There’s going to be a flood, and I’m sailing away on a ship. Please raise my children in your kingdom.” Improbably, it worked.