Patricia Cornwell, novelist: Imagination saved me

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Interview (BBC World Service)
Episode: Patricia Cornwell, novelist: Imagination saved me
Date: June 23, 2026
Host: James Kamarasamy
Guest: Patricia Cornwell

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Patricia Cornwell—one of the world’s bestselling crime writers, known for her Kay Scarpetta series. Cornwell reflects candidly on her traumatic and turbulent childhood, her escape into imagination, brushes with fame and royalty, and the obstacles she faced—personally and professionally—on the way to literary stardom. The conversation explores how personal adversity can foster resilience and creativity and how Cornwell’s harrowing early experiences directly influenced her writing and worldview.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Childhood Trauma and Its Impact on Writing

• Personal Victimization and Perspective
  • Cornwell reveals she was a victim of molestation at the age of five, which profoundly shaped her perception of life and crime.
  • “A lot of people wouldn't imagine that I myself was a victim of crime at the age of five... I still remember because of being molested by an area security guard.” (Patricia Cornwell, 02:47)
• Journaling as Therapy
  • She started keeping detailed journals as a teenager, which became both therapeutic and the groundwork for her literary career:
    • “I wrote an autobiographical work when I was in college... a 300 page manuscript because of the details in it that I wouldn’t necessarily remember today about my early years.” (02:47)

The Role of Imagination as Survival

• Escaping Hardship
  • Cornwell credits her imagination for helping her endure instability and trauma, developing storytelling as a coping mechanism.
    • “I escaped in my imagination. That is what I did from the earliest time that I can remember... When the world is too difficult, I would just make up one of my own and I would spend my time there.” (Patricia Cornwell, 06:24)
• Origins of Dark Stories
  • By age nine, she was telling scary stories to neighborhood children, who both feared and craved them.
    • “By the age of nine, I was telling scary stories that made the neighborhood children cry and run home.” (James Kamarasamy, 07:08)
    • “I remember the first time that happened, and I felt mortified, like I'd done something very wrong. But then the kids would come back and they wanted more.” (Patricia Cornwell, 07:15)

Premonitions, Dreams, and Writerly Destiny

• Childhood Visions of Success

  • A notable narrative is Cornwell’s childhood premonition:
    • “I looked at [the bookstore] and suddenly the window was filled by books that were. By me.” (Patricia Cornwell, 07:47)

• Dream of Agatha Christie

  • Cornwell shares an especially memorable dream where Agatha Christie tells her:
    • “You will take my place.” (Patricia Cornwell, 08:51)
  • She is conscious not to overstate its meaning, maintaining humility.

• Dream of Princess Diana

  • Recounts a dream involving Princess Diana while investigating her death, furthering the motif of uncanny experiences guiding her life and work.
    • “She was sitting there at a table all by herself… She said, ‘You can't go where I'm going.’ And then she was gone.” (Patricia Cornwell, 12:35)

Selectivity in Memoir-Writing

• Boundaries and Sensitivity
  • Cornwell discusses being thoughtful about which personal and professional stories to include in her memoir, omitting details that could traumatize others or violate privacy.
    • “There are horrors that I've seen that I don't share with anybody. I will never write about them, I won't talk about them, because I don't need to have somebody traumatized the way I was when I had to witness certain things.” (Patricia Cornwell, 11:21)

The Difficult Road to Publication

• Years of Rejection
  • Her first novel, Postmortem, endured multiple rejections before its eventual success.
    • “I wrote one and nobody wanted it. I wrote two, another one, nobody wanted it. I wrote a third. Nobody wanted it. And by now I'd been in the medical examiner's office four years and I was a full time employee.” (Patricia Cornwell, 16:12)
  • The UK played a pivotal role in her breakthrough, awarding her a major prize and presenting her to royalty.

Encounters with Royalty and Fame

• Meeting Princess Margaret
  • A humorous anecdote details being presented to Princess Margaret and not knowing proper etiquette—over-chatting and being gently removed.
    • “They didn't bother to mention that you don't chat with royalty. You don't lay on the Southern charm and say, well, now, how are you today? ... That's what I asked her, and that's when I got escorted away.” (Patricia Cornwell, 17:55)

Influence of Ruth Graham—the Surrogate Mother

• Life-Changing Mentorship
  • Ruth Graham (wife of Billy Graham) proved pivotal, supporting Cornwell through illness and encouraging her early literary efforts.
    • “Ruth took me under her wing and encouraged me to write, gave me a journal and wanted to read everything that I was writing. And she changed my life.” (Patricia Cornwell, 20:45)
  • Authored Graham’s biography as her first major commission, despite family misgivings and her own lack of experience.

Investigative Journalism to Crime Fiction

• Blurring Professions
  • Early work as a crime reporter fueled her interest in unsolved cases and forensics, leading to her work at a medical examiner’s office and deep immersion in police procedure.
    • “I wanted to make a difference. And so later on, when I became a volunteer police officer ... I loved being a volunteer, volunteer cop. I was just sorry I couldn't really arrest anybody.” (Patricia Cornwell, 22:53)

Life Under Threat: Fame and Security

• Impact of Fame
  • Intensive public scrutiny and the emergence of stalkers forced Cornwell to adopt robust security measures, an aspect she links to both childhood vulnerability and her rare degree of fame.
    • “I started having trouble with stalkers... I’ve always was a big believer in having security because this was not your average author experience. It was so huge in the 90s in particular, there wasn't anything else like it out there. In fact, really, it was unrivaled in terms of the popularity until guess who came along... J.K. Rowling.” (Patricia Cornwell, 24:33)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Victimhood and Resilience:

  • “Sometimes the things that seem so bad about what's happened to us may end up being your greatest gift. If you can turn it into something that matters or if it makes you stronger, more resilient.” (Patricia Cornwell, 05:05)

• On Her First Book’s Rejections:

  • “There was nothing else for me to do. I became their computer programmer. And then I wrote Postmortem and about almost every major house in New York rejected that as well, until finally Scribner took it on by a wing and a prayer.” (Patricia Cornwell, 16:12)

• On Security and Fame:

  • “I had to have burglar alarms and try to keep if possible be in a gated community because people drive to my house and park across the street and leave things on my doorstep... I had almost someone breaking in on Christmas morning.” (Patricia Cornwell, 24:33)

• On Mentorship:

  • “Ruth took me under her wing and encouraged me to write, gave me a journal and wanted to read everything that I was writing. And she changed my life.” (Patricia Cornwell, 20:45)

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Key Timestamps

• 02:47 — Patricia on childhood trauma and journaling as survival
• 05:05 — On self-blame, victimhood, and resilience
• 06:24 — Imagination as an essential coping strategy
• 07:47 — Premonition of seeing her own books for sale, and the impact of dreams
• 08:51 — Dream of Agatha Christie predicting her literary destiny
• 11:21 — Ethics and selectivity in writing memoirs
• 16:12 — Early career: repeated rejections, medical examiner’s office, and crucial breakthroughs
• 17:55 — Meeting Princess Margaret and humorous cultural misunderstandings
• 20:45 — Ruth Graham’s influence and mentorship
• 22:53 — Transition from journalism/policing to fiction; desire to make a difference
• 24:33 — Navigating security threats and public scrutiny as a prominent woman writer

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Tone and Language

Throughout the episode, Cornwell is frank, down-to-earth, and sometimes self-deprecating, blending gravity in recounting her traumas with Southern wit and occasional wry humor (especially on matters of British etiquette and brushes with fame). The overarching theme is the alchemy of pain, turning adversity and dark experiences into creative force.

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For Listeners New to Patricia Cornwell

This episode offers an honest, inspiring account of how imagination and persistence—alongside crucial mentorship—enabled Cornwell not only to survive but thrive, overcoming daunting setbacks from childhood into adulthood, and ultimately helping to reshape crime fiction for a global audience.

Transcript

[James Kamarasamy]

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[James Kamarasamy]

Hello, I'm James Kamarasamy and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC people shaping our world from all over the world.

[Podcast Advertiser]

I want to get freedom.

[James Kamarasamy]

I like that.

[Podcast Advertiser]

Freedom.

[Patricia Cornwell]

A gender equal world would be a better world for men too. We need to cease fire. We need healing. We need trusts. These companies don't really. They don't care what governments do.

[James Kamarasamy]

This is a war. The first thing that we want is the war to end. For this episode I speak to Patricia Cornwell, one of the world's best selling crime writers whose books have sold more than 120 million copies worldwide. She reflects on a childhood marked by trauma, instability and family mental illness. Patricia tells me how those experiences shaped her life and her writing and how the events of her childhood would later influence the stories that made her famous.

[Patricia Cornwell]

A lot of people because I've written about crime and I have all these tough characters and Scarpetta's such a hero and all the rest of it. A lot of people wouldn't imagine that I myself was a victim of crime at the age of five and, you know, even had a grand jury proceeding and everything that I still remember because of being molested by an area security guard. So I had a lot of things start very young with me that caused me to have a different perspective on life, I think, than a lot of people would have. And fortunately, I've kept, you know, I kept a lot of journals. I wrote an autobiographical work when I was in college, you know, like a 300 page manuscript because of the details in it that I wouldn't necessarily remember today about my early years.

[James Kamarasamy]

Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Patricia Cornwell.

[Patricia Cornwell]

A lot of the stories that I tell, they're painful and they're. They're not necessarily something that you easily share with people. It was therapy for me. This was how I vented, how I dealt with a lot of these traumas. It was, let me think, 1976, I was 19 years old and I just gotten out of that psychiatric hospital where I was being treated for a terrible eating disorder that was only worse after I got out, not better. And my, my surrogate mother, Ruth Graham, that's Billy Graham's wife, she really tucked me under her wing at that point when I was 19. And she said, I want you to write your story. You have quite a story and I believe you're talented and I want you to write it. And she gave me a journal. And next thing you know, I was typing up this manuscript that I worked on all through college. But for example, that it was also a way for me dealing with. I mean, I couldn't believe that I had to be hospitalized for two months and was down to 89 pounds. And this is somebody who had been a tournament tennis player. And I thought, what is. You know, it was literally, I think I was trying to kill myself back then.

[James Kamarasamy]

Well, I did. Well, you, I mean, you had such a traumatic, as you've said, early life. I mean, you mentioned that case when you were molested. I mean, as you said, you had to, I think, see the red pair of shorts that you were wearing passed around in court. Yeah, the table.

[Patricia Cornwell]

But of course, I remember being humiliated by that. Even then at the age of five, I was embarrassed. And, and this goes to show you that victims, we really do. When you're victimized, you blame yourself, and it's not right that we do that. But imagine me blaming myself at age 5 because I thought, well, I should have gotten away from him. I should have run home quicker, or I shouldn't have been talking to him because he was the neighborhood patrolman and he'd stop his car and I was running wild because my mother was depressed and never leaving the bedroom and my dad was gone. And it's. It's a wonder I didn't end up murdered, really, truth be told. But all of this was paving the road for me to do what I do in life. And I will tell people, and I hope that they will read this memoir and get encouragement from it, where sometimes the things that seem so bad about what's happened to us may end up being your greatest gift. If you can turn it into something that matters or if it makes you stronger, more resilient.

[James Kamarasamy]

Yes. I mean, the traumas for people that don't know. I mean, your mother, she was institutionalized, wasn't she? A couple of times. She burnt all your brother's clothing. At some point, your father left you on the family on Christmas Day. I mean, a lot to take in for a young girl. I mean, at that point. How are you coping with all that?

[Patricia Cornwell]

Well, I escaped in my imagination. That is what I did from the earliest time that I can remember. I was writing stories and drawing pictures and escaping into my imagination. And I learned early on, when the world is too difficult, I would just make up one of my own and I would spend my time there. And that gift or that talent or that ability to do that and stay like Alice, going through the looking glass and going to an imagined place, that was a power that I developed out of survival instinct. But it's also made it possible for me to spend so much of time alone writing books. You can't be an author, I don't think, if you're not able to spend a lot of time alone.

[James Kamarasamy]

And they were particular stories, I think you said, by the age of nine, I was telling scary stories that made the neighborhood children cry and run home.

[Patricia Cornwell]

I know. I remember the first time that happened, and I felt mortified, like I'd done something very wrong. But then the kids would come back and they wanted more. And then I said, okay, you want to go running home crying again? Come right on up here, I'll do it.

[James Kamarasamy]

And I'm fascinated by some of the. You talk quite a lot about premonitions and dreams that you've had. I think you're aged, what, 11 or so that you had a premonition. You were driving past a bookstore and you saw just dozens of your Own books in the window.

[Patricia Cornwell]

That was weird. It was really weird. And I almost didn't want to tell that story because it sounds so kooky. But I still remember it to this day. And I was probably 11 or 12, as you said, and I was with my mom. And we were walking through. There was a shopping center in Asheville, and sometimes we would walk through it. Just a window shop. I mean, mom couldn't really afford to buy much of anything, but we would enjoy browsing. And on this particular day, we were walking past and there was a bookstore. And I looked at it, and suddenly the window was filled by books that were. By me. I don't know. I mean. And I wasn't even thinking of being a writer at that stage. I wanted to be a tennis player. And so I thought, what in the world is that? And I didn't even tell my mother because I thought she would think I was weird. But that. And then, of course, roll ahead. Many, many, many years later, I would be back in Asheville doing book signings. And yes, indeed, bookstores were filled with my books.

[James Kamarasamy]

Well, you also had a dream that Agatha Christie came to you and said, you will take my place.

[Patricia Cornwell]

Yeah, well, we know that that didn't happen, that I took her place. But I did have the dream. I think Agatha felt horribly sorry for me and was trying to make me, you know, not feel so down on myself. But that. That is true. What happened? This was probably 1984. I had finished the Ruth Graham biography. I was. I was starting in the morgue, the medical examiner's office, doing research, trying to wr first murder mystery. And I just couldn't figure. I couldn't seem to figure out how to tell the story. And I was really in despair. I thought, I'm not going to be able to do this at night. I was asleep. And I bet some people can relate to this. I was having a dream, and I couldn't open my eyes, but yet I was conscious while I was dreaming. And I was lying in bed. And I was waiting in this long line in this dream. And I thought, what am I doing in this line? I don't wait in line. I hate lines. And then I realized the line was approaching a table and Agatha Christie was doing a book signing. And I thought, well, this is weird, because I knew in my dream she wasn't alive anymore. So I finally got up to the table and I said, it's quite an honor. And she was signing a book. And she said, you will take my place. And I said, excuse me. And she looked up at me and she said, you will take my place. And, poof, she was gone and the dream was gone. And I woke up and I thought, okay, now that is really odd.

[Podcast Advertiser]

And.

[Patricia Cornwell]

And the thing that's even stranger about it is I had a lot of Agatha Christie overlaps. I mean, when. When postmortem came out and I went to Paris to get the book award they presented for it over there, when I walked in the publisher's lobby, all the showcases were filled with postmortem and Agatha Christie. And then when I won the gold dagger in the uk, one of the judges was Agatha Christie's daughter, and the presenter, the person who presented the award, was the grandson. So I don't know what that means. And I've hesitated. Tell the story over the years in other interviews, because it sounds very presumptuous. And I'm very quick to say, we all know that nobody's going to take Agatha Christie's place. Not me, not Anyone, not even J.K. rowling with as many books as she's sold. I mean, Agatha is in a category all by herself, but maybe that was the universe trying to tell me not to give up.

[James Kamarasamy]

It's interesting you raise that point about previously, just not talking about it. How did you go about choosing which parts of your very eventful life to include and which to leave out?

[Patricia Cornwell]

Well, there's some things I would leave out because it's just not appropriate to tell. It's not fair to the person. It. You know, everybody. You have things with people in life, but it doesn't necessarily represent the whole of who they are. And you have to pick and choose what you decide to make public if you're doing something like this. But the other thing is, there are things that, in my research and in my years of working at the medical examiner's office, to be honest with you, there are horrors that I've seen that I don't share with anybody. I will never write about them, I won't talk about them, because I don't need to have somebody traumatized the way I was when I had to witness certain things about violence, particularly when you see recordings and things of people who are alive when terrible things are being done to them. But for the most part, I mean, I've shared a lot of things in this memoir that I have never talked about to the media, like the Agatha dream, because it sounds strange, but at the same time, it really did happen. I did have that dream. I also had the weird dream of Princess Diana when I was doing the primetime television special on her death.

[James Kamarasamy]

She was in the corner of a cafe one, wasn't she?

[Patricia Cornwell]

Yes, she was sitting there at a table all by herself and it was in the uk. This is in my dream and I walked in to get a coffee or something and I saw her sitting over there and she seemed unbelievably distressed and finally she got up to leave and then weirdly there was an elevator in the middle of the room and I said, are you okay? Is there anything I can do for you? Would you like me to go with you? And she said, you can't go where I'm going. And then she was gone. Now, I don't know what that meant, but that was right when I was doing this special. And so, you know, I don't know the meaning of all these things, but I'm going to share them with people because I'm not the only one who's had experiences like this.

[James Kamarasamy]

You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service with me, James Kamarasamy.

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in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Like those five dollar roses at a gas station? Or a second hand piece of technology that breaks in the first ten minutes? Marketers know that feeling. We optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not so great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for bullspend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest roas of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title and more. So cut the bullspend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com Broadcast that's LinkedIn.com Broadcast Terms and Conditions apply.

[James Kamarasamy]

As Patricia Cornwell's memoir makes clear, her life has had a rather dramatic, you might say novelistic arc. And that helps to explain why I had to do the interview remotely rather than face to face as we'd originally planned. She has a history of threats and stalkers thanks to her public profile and her close collaboration with law enforcement agencies as part of her research. And that has made her acutely aware of her own safety. She has long employed a team of security guards. And so when the UK authorities raised the country's terror threat level to severe, just days before she was due to fly to London, her team advised her against traveling. For me, it was a last minute plot twist. For her, it was probably par for the course. Okay, let's return now to my conversation with Patricia Cornwell. You mentioned Post Mortem, your first novel. It took you some time to get that published, didn't it? I mean, people looking at your career now and the amazing success and the number of books you've sold, I think might be quite surprised to know it took you quite some time to get that published. And you detail that in a lot of detail in the memoir.

[Patricia Cornwell]

Well, that's right, because when I left journalism and then I did the biography of Ruth Graham, my neighbor and surrogate mother, then I decided to try to write crime novels, which took me to the medical examiner's office where I really thought I would be in and out of there for like one month doing research. And then I'd write a murder mystery that people wanted to read. Well, that didn't happen. I wrote one and nobody wanted it. I wrote two, another one, nobody wanted it. I wrote a third. Nobody wanted it. And by now I'd been in the medical examiner's office four years and I was a full time employee. There was nothing else for me to do. I became their computer programmer. And then I wrote postmortem and about almost every major house in New York rejected that as well, until finally Scribner took it on by a wing and a prayer for the big, you know, first printing of 6,000 copies and I got paid $6,000 for it. And then the first book review that came out about it was horrible. And then it got banned from Richmond by Richmond Bookstore because of being too graphic. So I thought, well, this is starting off with a bang. You know, your career's not looking too good. You might end up working the morgue the rest of your life the way things are going. And then it, you know, like I said, it got published. But the big thing that was A game changer was really thanks to the. To Great Britain, because when I was presented the best first crime novel award by the Crime Writers association and it was presented by Princess Margaret, that was a huge. That was a huge game changer for me.

[James Kamarasamy]

It's quite amusing, the section when you write about that and making small talk with her and realizing perhaps you've said a bit too much and it's quite a. Must have been quite, quite a moment for you.

[Patricia Cornwell]

Oh, my goodness. If there was a stage hook, it would have come out. I, I had no, I never. You listen. I had to learn how to curtsy. I didn't know anything about meeting royalty. I was, you know, and so I, I had to learn to curtsy. But the people who taught me to curtsy in this shop where I bought my little fancy outfit that I couldn't zip up by myself once I got there, they. They didn't. They didn't bother to mention that you don't chat with royalty. You don't. You don't lay on the Southern charm and say, well, now, how are you today? And how are things in your family? And are you still riding horses? That's what I asked her, and that's when I got escorted away.

[James Kamarasamy]

But of course, there are different sorts of royalty. And you've talked about your surrogate mother, as you've called her, Ruth Graham and the wife of Billy Graham, a name that listeners will have definitely heard of, the very famous evangelist. And I mean, it's quite a story of how you came to. To know her. This is, you know, because of your mother and her illness, wasn't it?

[Patricia Cornwell]

Well, that is. I mean, if you put this in a novel, it would sound contrived, but what happened is when I was about 5, or I think I was 4, on the verge of turning 5, and my mother went to a Billy Graham crusade in Miami, Florida, where we lived then. And she became saved and very deeply spiritual, and she almost idolized Billy Graham. And when she decided to get away from my father, she was afraid for us. And after I'd been molested and she was. She didn't want us living down there anymore. She decided to move us to the same little teeny, tiny town where Billy Graham and his family lived in North Carolina. She literally put us in the car and drove us there, having no place to stay. Nobody was expecting us. And then about two years later, after we had been living there for a little while, when she had her first major psychotic break and burned all our clothes in the fireplace and was doing all Sorts of very bizarre things. She started walking us up the road in the snow. And the Grahams lived on top of the mountain, and their caretaker saw that we were in distress and something weird was going on, and he drove us up there. And the Grahams did not know us from. I mean, they'd never heard of us. My mother was a stranger, and she tried to give her three children to them. That's my first introduction to Ruth Graham when I was nine, is my mother. I was walking in through her front door and sitting in her living room before this huge fire in the fireplace, and my mother handing her a note and asking the Grahams to raise her three children in their kingdom because she was going to sail away, there was going to be a big flood or something. But that began my relationship. I mean, I didn't really see much. I didn't become friendly with Ruth till I was a little older, but.

[James Kamarasamy]

Until you wrote. You wrote a biography.

[Patricia Cornwell]

Right. But first, she really befriended me when I was 19, and I dropped out of college with an eating disorder. And Ruth took me under her wing and encouraged me to write, gave me a journal and wanted to read everything that I was writing. And she changed my life.

[James Kamarasamy]

It's interesting you wrote the biography. Clearly, there was a lot of concern in the family about her biography being written. And you don't think she ever actually read it?

[Patricia Cornwell]

I don't think she did. And she absolutely didn't want it written when I talked her into it. I think this was Ruth's gift to me. She gave me an opportunity to write a book and get started. And look, I mean, it got published by Harper and Row, which is like HarperCollins today. I was paid $40,000 advance, and in 1981, that was a lot of money for me anyway. And she gave me an opportunity to. But the truth is, I'd never written a book before, and my claim to fame was investigative journalism on a police beat. That doesn't exactly qualify you for writing about Ruth Graham. And so her family was extremely concerned about her letting me do this. And I don't blame them. I mean, her son Franklin and I were sort of like brother and sister. And we laugh about it because he goes, well, you weren't exactly qualified to do that at that stage in life when you were in your early 20s and all the rest. And I said, no, I wasn't. I agree. If someone tried to do that to me, we'd have lawyers calling their phone off the hook, telling them to stop.

[James Kamarasamy]

And his brother was your first crush,

[Patricia Cornwell]

I think oh, well, the both of the Graham sons. Oh my goodness. I had, yes. They were the best looking things you ever saw. And I don't know any girl that didn't have a crush on Ned and Franklin.

[James Kamarasamy]

I want to turn to, to the journalism because as you say, you know, your daily writing was on the crime beat and that's what really got you into, into, you know, the research. But at heart, you say you wanted the crimes to be solved. I mean, you were. You're sort of a hybrid, aren't you, of journalists, cop and writer?

[Patricia Cornwell]

I think that's true. Maybe I'm just a frustrated everything that could be the answer. But yes, I remember one of the earliest things on the police beat. There was a little girl who had vanished. She was out doing something, this little girl, I think she's like five or six, and she disappeared. And later they found her. She'd been murdered. Her body was dumped on this lakeshore. I would go there when I wasn't busy on my beat and I would just go stand on that lakeshore. I drive the staff car there and I would look around taking in every detail. And I thought there must be something this person left that will help us figure out who did this horrible thing. And I got really immersed in that case. I would visit the little girl's family and the mobile home they lived in. And I even had Ruth Graham write a letter of condolence to try to make the mother feel better. I did everything I could and I was so upset that the police couldn't solve it. I mean, eventually I think they did many years later, but I had an investment in the cases. That was not really normal. It wasn't just me wanting to tell what I thought was a great newspaper story, but I wanted to make a difference. And so later on, when I became a volunteer police officer, when I started doing research in Richmond and went to the ME's office and all the rest, I loved being a volunteer, volunteer cop. I was just sorry I couldn't really arrest anybody.

[James Kamarasamy]

You've been mixing with the great and the good for many, many years, but you're still a very. I mean, you're a private person. You take a great deal of care about your security, don't you? I mean, is that, is that something that has come from your, your childhood? Just from, you know, being famous and feeling more threatened? What is it?

[Patricia Cornwell]

I started having trouble with stalkers or, you know, it's the world we live in. And I've just always was a big believer in having security because this was not your average author experience. It was so huge in the 90s in particular, there wasn't anything else like it out there. In fact, really, it was unrivaled in terms of the popularity until guess who came along. Her name is J.K. rowling. And I bet you know who that is. Up until that point I was like probably the biggest selling female author in the world until Harry Potter appeared on the horizon. And so but that's why I started doing the security. And then of course there were many other reasons. Stalkers. Like I said, I had people. I had to have burglar alarms and try to keep if possible be in a gated community because people drive to my house and park across the street and leave things on my doorstep. I had people, you know, I had almost someone breaking in on Christmas morning. So I've always been security minded. And these days you especially have to be.

[James Kamarasamy]

Thank you for listening to the interview. You'll find more in depth conversations on the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, conversations with artist Tracey Emin and former Australian Prime Minister Julie Julia Gillard and many others. Until the next time. Bye for now.

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