Patricia Cornwell (born June 9, 1956) is the author of a popular series of crime novels featuring the fictional heroine "Dr. Kay Scarpetta", who is a medical examiner for a Virginia police department.
Biographical information
She was born Patricia Daniels in Miami, Florida. Her ex-husband is Charles Cornwell. She is a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Cornwell, a multi-millionaire, has made several notable charitable acts, including funding scholarships to the University of Tennessee's National Forensics Academy and donating her collection of Walter Sickert paintings to Harvard University.
Her writing
The Scarpetta novels include a great deal of detail on forensics. The solution to the mystery usually is found in the forensic investigation of the murder victim's corpse, although Scarpetta does considerably more field investigation and confrontation with suspects than real-life medical examiners. The novels are considered to have influenced the development of popular TV series on forensics, both fictional, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and documentaries, such as Cold Case Squad .
Procedural details are part of the allure of her novels. 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. Her attempts to portray herself as an expert in those fields have caused some bad feelings from those who have actual training and licensing, including Kathy Reichs, who is both a board-certified forensic anthropologist and a crime novelist.
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. She published Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world, where Sickert's work is admired, and also among Ripperologists, who criticize her methods and conclusions. See Portrait of a Killer for further information.
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 forthcoming 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. Cornwell successfully obtained a preliminary injunction against Sachs. The court ruled that his claims were baseless, and he was prevented from placing the stickers on his book. The court also required that booksellers remove the stickers that were already there and shut his website down for false advertsising. [1].
Sachs decided to go abroad where he was unaffected by the injunction. He continues to charge that Cornwell plagiarized his work and used her influence to subvert justice.
List of works
External links
