Crime author puts light on humanity

DURHAM -- Retired UNC pathologist David Goodman thought he'd enjoy some guilty pleasures when he enrolled in Pamela Gurney's course on detective fiction at Duke University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

But, as he told crime writer Patricia Cornwell on Wednesday afternoon, "We found that these books are so much more than that."

In an hour of give-and-take with about 40 middle-age and elderly students, Cornwell talked about crime stories as ways to explore the human psyche.

"They're microcosms of society," she said. "It's a safe way for us to examine the human condition. When you go to the aquarium, you love to look at the sharks, but you don't want to see them when you're out fishing."

Cornwell, 54, grew up in Montreat, where her family was befriended by the Rev. Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth. Cornwell's first book, published in 1983, was a biography of Ruth Graham. "A Time for Remembering," was republished as "Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham."

Cornwell graduated from Davidson College and went to work covering crime for The Charlotte Observer. She said her time as a reporter made her curious about the parts of criminal investigations she never got to see.

"I wanted to know all the gory details," she said.

She moved to Richmond, Va., where she realized a dream of writing detective novels, gaining expertise by volunteering and later working in the Virginia state medical examiner's office.

She's now an award-winning, best-selling crime novelist, the author of 24 books and the capstone author for Gurney's class. She said an editor rejected three manuscripts before telling her to make forensic examiner Kay Scarpetta her main character. Around that time, serial victims of Richmond's Southside Strangler were coming through the medical examiner's office.

"I had to become vulnerable to what I was seeing every day," Cornwell said. "I scared the hell out of myself while I was writing that."

The resulting novel, "Post Mortem," made her famous.

"It comes through in your writing that you have that experience," Goodman told her.

For example, in real-life autopsy labs "these knives all came from a kitchen store," Cornwell said, far from the high-tech wizardry shown on TV. "These shears all came from a hardware store, and they cost $35 instead of $600."

The students asked Cornwell how she coped with her inside knowledge of human depravity.

"If I really had the absolute, pristine [answer], I'd probably win the Nobel Prize," she said. "I've seen so much death, I know it's not all there is."

When Goodman heard that Cornwell's Scarpetta would be the basis for a screenplay, he had one request:

"If you could get [Hollywood investigators] to stop eating in an autopsy room," he said.

"If they ever got in a real autopsy room, they wouldn't be eating," she said.