DALLAS -- As far as Patricia Cornwell is concerned, she doesn't write mysteries. Instead, she's an author/humanist on a mission.
"I'm pretty adamant that I'm not a mystery writer," Cornwell said during a brief Dallas stop on a tour promoting her latest best seller, "Black Notice." "It's not right that, in the most violent country in the Free World, we trivialize books about death by calling them 'mysteries.' It's a mission to me -- I am a crime fighter using a pen."Crime fighter or writer, Cornwell is dominating what the publishing industry will continue to term "the mystery market." Since "Postmortem," her first novel featuring Richmond, Va., chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, was published in 1990, Cornwell has penned a series of No. 1 best sellers that often star Scarpetta. They also include minutely detailed descriptions of autopsies and vivid accounts of the devastating emotional impact on family and friends of murder victims.
Along the way, the 43-year-old Cornwell has become a celebrity in her own right, with her professional background -- she worked for the Richmond Medical Examiner's office before writing and selling her first Scarpetta novel -- as familiar to readers as Scarpetta's fictional career.
In fact, Cornwell and Scarpetta can't be separated. Cornwell's explanation of how she, practically alone among current so-called mystery writers, is qualified to describe murders, eerily echoes a descriptive passage from any Scarpetta novel.
"You can't see what I've seen in morgues and call my books mysteries," Cornwell insists. "I worked in a morgue, I scribed during the autopsies, took notes, and sometimes if it was a hectic day I'd be there in gown and gloves and have my hands inside a body. I remember the first time I did, how cold the blood was because the body had been refrigerated. That's as real as death gets. I wish more writers kept me company, understood what I understand. They owe it to society to take death seriously. I would never trivialize death and violence. Other authors just don't know."
In person, Cornwell is surprisingly small but with hints of tensile-steel-wire toughness. Her eyes, blue and burning, are the writer's most memorable feature. In an emergency, she would expect to be in charge.
"Black Notice" is already a best seller in its first week after publication, so Cornwell feels little obligation to tout the book. Instead, she wants to reiterate her dedication, even obsession, with proper research for every book she has written.
"When they read my books, readers are learning, whether they want to or not," Cornwell says. "I'm not a rocket scientist, but I'll go to the trouble of finding out every detail so my books have it all right. I will go to wherever I need to and look and smell and feel."
That dedication recently brought Cornwell to Fort Worth, a city she says she enjoys.
"Bell Helicopter's training facility is in Fort Worth, so I went there in June and July," says Cornwell, whose previous research efforts included learning to scuba dive. "Bell's big new (helicopter) is the 407, one I now own, by the way, and I came down and took classes, and one of their instructors also came to Richmond, where I live, for two weeks. The reason I chose them over any other helicopter manufacturer was, Bell teaches you how to stay alive. Helicopters themselves are not dangerous, but sometimes the people who fly them are."
The upshot is that Cornwell now flies her own helicopter (one a Bell spokesman says sells for "the generic price of $1.2 million"), and Fort Worth is likely to be included in a future Scarpetta novel.
"I've gotten rather attached to Fort Worth, and it's crossed my mind I might use it as a setting," she says, grinning. "Scarpetta may have to come there if Lucy (her fictional niece) was involved at Bell in some way."
Cornwell also knows she must deal with heightened fan expectations for each new Scarpetta book.
"My ambition is that each book must be better than the last one; that's non-negotiable. I'm so popular now that if I ever fall, I'll fall really hard. I know that. But I'll never give people tired books -- I just don't see that happening.