Patricia Cornwell
speaker
744 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 30 Jun
Patricia Cornwell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Book Review · Patricia Cornwell on Her Dark Childhood and Best-Selling Novels · 8 May 2026
podcast
And that wasn't necessarily a good thing because the newspaper didn't want me solving crimes.
They just wanted me writing good stories about them.
But it was that changed me.
If I had not been a journalist, I would not be who I am today.
I never could have done these books.
I had a journalistic – I learned how to be a journalist when I got the job at the Charlotte Observer writing all kinds of stuff, desk crime but other things too, general assignment, obituaries that I would get wrong and have the wrong person dead, that kind of thing.
But if I hadn't done all that, I wouldn't have a journalistic approach to my research.
And that is the hallmark of Scarpetta.
It's almost like journalism that you turn into a novel because I research things as if they're real, but I weave them into a story.
I never looked at the world the same way after I started seeing the kinds of stuff that really happens out there.
Well, first, let me just say my arrival at the morgue and my ending up working there was never planned.
And a lot of people think that I started out working in a medical examiner's office.
And the truth is I went there to do research because I wrote the biography of Ruth Graham after I left journalism.
And when that was done in 1983, I said, well, now what am I going to do with myself?
What do I do for a living?
And I didn't really want to go back to journalism.
And I thought, you know, I'll write books about crime.
The only thing I didn't really know anything about was what happened to the body when it left a crime scene, because I'd never talked to a medical examiner, and the one in Charlotte would never get on the phone.
So I had an appointment to go down there, and that was my first encounter with Dr. Marcela Fierro, who was one of like 10 female forensic pathologists in the country, and quite frankly, just legendary.
She's so... It was so good at what she does.
Showing 421–440 of 744 · page 22 of 38
← Previous
Next →