The bestselling author’s gutsy female pathologist Kay Scarpetta is finally arriving on screen in a starry new drama. If she were a man, would it have happened years ago? Patricia Cornwell is describing chucking someone out of her helicopter. It was necessary research for her latest novel, in which a character is thrown out of a mysterious flying object and found splattered in an abandoned theme park.
“We made a figure out of ballistic gelatin, which is like jelly but really thick and hard,” she says. “We put Jelly Man, as I call him, on the skid, and then when it’s time, boop, he goes overboard to simulate, for example, someone who’s skydiving and their chute doesn’t open. Is this a suicide, a homicide, an accident? What are the crime scene investigators going to find?” To make the experiment more realistic, Cornwell even bought animal innards from the supermarket to stuff Jelly Man with organs.
The phenomenally popular author – she has sold more than 120 million books worldwide in 36 languages, and earned multimillions – has always been meticulous about research. At the beginning of her career, determined to become an author, Cornwell spent six years working as an assistant in a mortuary in Virginia before Postmortem , her first novel focused on the forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta, was published in 1990. Since then she has learnt to scuba dive, fly helicopters and, on one occasion, got a supermarket turkey tattooed to analyse the effects on the skin.