No one can accuse best-selling author Patricia Cornwell (“Blowfly,” “Predator”) of not taking on new challenges in her decade-plus career as a writer. After winning accolades and millions of fans with her Kay Scarpetta series, she decided to begin the Andy Brazil series, which uses off-the-wall humor and strange perspectives, including that of a cat’s, in its narrative. Then she single-handedly reopened the century-old Jack-the-Ripper case, using modern DNA techniques to prove, in her opinion, the identity of one of the world’s most infamous criminals.
So when The New York Magazine came knocking, asking her to write a serial in the tradition of Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins, Cornwell saw a great opportunity.
“I thought, this is an interesting challenge,” says Cornwell, during a recent telephone interview from New York City. “If can do this it will make me a better writer.” The result was “At Risk,” Cornwell’s first new series in a decade (written episodically, it qualifies, even if she doesn’t write a second book). “If you can keep people interested 10 pages at a time, keep something moving forward, and make it move fast, then you’re honing your skills as a storyteller.”
For Cornwell, the first hurdle in tackling a Wilkie Collins-style serial was dreaming up interesting characters like Win Garano, the mixed-race detective whose second-hand Hugo Boss suits and brash exterior are an attempt to disguise his own insecurity. The character of Win came to life when Cornwell was in Boston recently to donate some Walter Sickert paintings acquired while she was working on her book about the Ripper murders to the Harvard Art Museum.
“They wanted to have lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club,” Cornwell recalls, “and I’ll never forget walking over there – along that brick sidewalk past those beautiful old buildings right there in Harvard Square with all of these privileged students hurrying by, and remembering that when I applied to Harvard Graduate School, I didn’t get in.”
For Cornwell, the memory called up old demons of insecurity. “Suddenly I was overwhelmed by feeling like such an outsider. It didn’t matter that I was walking to meet people because I was making a multimillion dollar contribution of art. I suddenly felt inferior, and sort of insecure.” She decided to transfer those feelings onto a male homicide investigator.
That was followed by the notion to give Win a gypsy/psychic grandmother, Nana. “She’s wonderful and she’s powerful in her own way,” says Cornwell. According to the author, Win’s grandmother also has roots in real life. “I actually have a friend who is very similar to that … you walk in her house and it’s full of crystals. I meet a lot of different types of people and I’m very open-minded about a lot of things. I have no doubt at all that there are people who are psychically gifted; who pick up on things and intuit things that the rest of us don’t. We’ve learned to intellectualize too much of what’s around us instead of following our instincts.”
That is a notion Cornwell obviously took to heart when deciding to write “At Risk.” Revealing a bit more of her deeply buried insecurity, Cornwell admits that, “When you do something like this, you think, ‘What if this is a flop? What if nobody wants it? What if nobody likes it because it’s not Scarpetta?'”
But even with those doubts running through her mind, Cornwell rose to the challenge of writing “At Risk,” trying her hand at a serial and creating a new set of characters, following her gut instinct in a direction she was certain would lead to better things.
“When (the writing) was over with, I thought this isn’t a bad way to do things,” says Cornwell. Because people have a very short attention span these days, and what you want to do is write something – whether the scene is 10 pages long or two pages long – that makes them feel that they just have to see what happens next.”
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelance writer from Missouri.
