Patricia Cornwell Patrick Ecclesine/HachetteIn 1976, Patsy Daniels, an English major at Davidson College in North Carolina wrote her first book. An autobiographical novel describing a fraught childhood and adolescence, it was never published. In 1990, Patsy, now identifying as Patricia Daniels Cornwell, wrote a forensic thriller, Postmortem, introducing medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta to the reading public – and launching a crime fiction series that she claims made her the highest paid female author of the time. True Crime is the story of how this came about.Twenty-nine Scarpetta outings later, Cornwell has written a memoir. Selective in its coverage, it’s still a brick of a book. It’s not always a comfortable read. Readers will need to be very interested in the Cornwell back story; the writing is as uneven as I’ve come to expect of her fiction. “I won’t do outlines and I’m not a planner,” she warns.Review: True Crime by Patricia Cornwell (Sphere)While the first half of True Crime is a detailed account of her chaotic childhood, apparently drawn from that original autobiographical novel, Cornwell has mined her journals to account for the last 40 years. So, the second half becomes increasingly sketchy. For example:Early December 1992, I attended the New York premiere of a Few Good Men. Demi [Moore, who was in line to be cast as Scarpetta on film] took me to a party where I met Donald Trump, and we chatted about publishing and writing bestsellers.To all appearances, Cornwell is a Republican (there are photographs of her with George and Barbara Bush, taken on holiday). It would be interesting to know a bit more about what she made of Trump. But no chance! On we go to the next celebrity encounter: “I said hello to Christopher Reeve and mentioned that I missed him as Superman.”To her credit, Cornwell notes that Reeve was not much impressed by her awkward conversational overture.A knack for violenceTrue Crime opens in 1966, with a snowfall in North Carolina. While ten-year-old Patsy and her two brothers are thrilled by the prospect of building snowmen and sledding, their mother is burning their possessions in “the throes of a psychotic depressive episode, purging for the end of the world as we knew it”. Never quite in charge of her metaphors, Cornwell confides: “Literally, she was at the end of her rope”, when not a literal rope is in sight. To explain how this all came to pass, Cornwell backtracks to Christmas Day five years earlier, when her father abandoned the family in Miami to debunk with his secretary. Cornwell seems to think her father’s desertion triggered her mother’s paranoia, but it is apparent to me that both parents had a history of mental instability and their marriage was a car crash in slow motion. Not only did her mother suffer psychotic episodes, but so did her father. At one point after the breakup, he attempts to kidnap the children.Having recently attended a service held by charismatic evangelist Billy Graham in South Florida, Patsy’s grieving mother relocates her children to the town of Montreat in Northern Carolina, where Graham lives in a heavily guarded compound.Arriving at their gate, the distressed family are taken in and assisted by Graham’s wife Ruth, who shuffles the mother into psychiatric treatment and the children into care. This is disastrous for Patsy, who is subjected to cruel and unusual forms of psychological torture by their foster mother. It’s a tough read. But Cornwell doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff. On the contrary, she seems determined to make sure we know the worst of it. This includes being sexually assaulted as a child and as an adult, and her eating disorder in her first year of college. This results in her being admitted to a psychiatric institution; she discharges herself after a month. There, she experiences psychological abuse. Although Cornwell doesn’t make much of this, the treatment of both sexual assault and women’s mental health left a lot to be desired in the 20th century.Patsy relocates to Davidson College on a tennis scholarship for her sophomore year, where she is attracted to the dashing Charles Cornwell, a professor of English who is 15 years her senior. Following an ardent pursuit of the hapless Charles that reads a lot like stalking, they are married and Cornwell embarks on a career as possibly the worst cadet journalist ever on The Charlotte Observer in Virginia.Despite egregious errors writing blurbs for the newspaper’s television section and mixing up the designers at a fashion show, Cornwell is appointed to the police beat, where she gets up close and personal with the action. “As much as I hated violence,” she tells the reader, “I seemed to have a knack for writing about it.” More than halfway through the book, my interest picked up.The next Agatha Christie?Cornwell decides to write her first murder mystery in the spring of 1984. Entitled The Stick Doll Murders, the story has an African theme involving voodoo and poisons. Knowing nothing about the genre, Cornwell sets off to a secondhand bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, where she buys three paperbacks, by P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie.Cornwell dreams about meeting Christie at a book signing, where after reaching the head of the queue, Christie greets her with the words: “You will take my place.” This is one of many premonitions threaded through the book, presaging the author’s future success. At this stage, however, she still has some way to go. Patricia Cornwell dreamed of Agatha Christie anointing her: ‘you will take my place.’. Tom Grimes/AAP Doing research on poisons for The Stick Doll Murders, Cornwell meets with Richmond’s deputy chief medical examiner, Marcella Fierro, who becomes the inspiration for the minor character of Dr Kay Scarpetta in Cornwell’s first three attempts to write a crime novel. Meanwhile, Cornwell is desperate to observe an autopsy.After Fierro suggests Cornwell become a neighbourhood assistance officer for the Richmond Police department, she is finally granted her wish. While the rookie cops faint and step outside, Cornwell is galvanised by the process and is soon working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.This is by far the most interesting section of the book. Cornwell dives deeper into her research: “riding with the detectives”, attending homicides and autopsies and writing down everything she sees and hears. Inspiration for the plot of Postmortem arrives in the activities of a “real” serial killer, the Southside Strangler, operating in and around the city of Richmond. Deciding to move Scarpetta centre stage to tell the serial killer story from her point of view, Cornwell hits her crime writing stride at a moment when serial killers are the crime du jour.Clueless about fameThe last quarter of True Crime is all about what happened next, but its detail is scant. Cornwell is presented with the British Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger award by Princess Margaret. Awkwardly, it transpires, since Cornwell breaks with protocol by trying to initiate a conversation with the Princess. “I understand you like horses,” she offers, and is greeted with a death stare. She buys her first Mercedes and has a near fatal accident while driving under the influence, an experience Scarpetta’s niece Lucy later shares. She has her first romance with a woman. Later, she is outed by the press after an affair with an FBI agent she met while doing research at Quantico. She is also stalked. “I didn’t have a clue how to deal with becoming famous,” she tells us – and I believe her.Cornwell branches out, revisiting the autopsies of Princess Diana and Elvis, “solving” the mystery of Jack the Ripper, making friends in high places and observing death row executions. In 2004, while undertaking research at a psychiatric hospital in Boston, she meets the love of her life, neuroscientist Dr Stayci Gruber, to whom this book is dedicated. Nicole Kidman as Scarpetta. Amazon Prime Video The last brief section is set in Nashville, when Cornwell arrives on set to film a cameo with Nicole Kidman, who plays Scarpetta in the Amazon Prime series based on her books. (The show has divided her loyal readers, largely as a result of the casting choices.) In the first episode, Cornwell plays a judge, swearing Scarpetta in as the new medical examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Though stiff, she looks happy, as well she may: a second series is already in production. And she never reads any of her book reviews.Weighed in the balance, True Crime is a lopsided book: part misery memoir, part confessional. It is the story of a friendless child who created fictional companions and worlds of her own in order to survive and grew up to do it for a living. Scarpetta, her most successful creation, has served Patsy Daniels well.Sue Turnbull does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.