Patricia Daniels was born in Miami, Florida to Marilyn ("Pat") and Sam Daniels. Her father was an appellate attorney, her mother a secretary. The parents divorced and Marilyn and the three children (Patricia and two brothers) moved to Montreat, North Carolina, when she was seven.
She transferred from King College, Tennessee to Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. After graduating she married her former English professor Charles Cornwell, and started to work as a reporter for the Charlotte Observer in 1979. Soon she became a police reporter and in 1984 she took a job in the Virginia medical examiner's office.
For six years she worked at the morgue, first as a technical writer, then as a computer analyst. She also volunteered to be a city cop and got her first taste of community policing. She and her husband divorced in 1989.
In 1983 Patricia Cornwell wrote A Time for Remembering (1983), a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, wife of the evangelist Billy Graham. A new version: Ruth, a Portrait: The Ruth Bell Graham Story was published in 1997.
Between 1984 and 1986, Cornwell wrote three novels based on her crime desk experience, but all were rejected. Disheartened, she wrote to Sara Ann Freed, an editor at Mysterious Press, the one publishing house that had softened its rejection with encouragement. Freed told her to dump the male detective who was then her central character.
She suggested expanding Scarpetta, who in Cornwell's early works played only a minor role. And so in 1990 Patricia Cornwell got her first novel published, Postmortem. Her Dr. Kay Scarpetta mystery series started with the novel Postmortem, was the first novel to win the Edgar, Creasy, Anthony and Macavity awards in a single year.
Eleven subsequent Scarpetta novels became international bestsellers, together with Food to Die For and Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper- Case Closed.
Several of her books are loosely based on real crimes in the Virginia area, such as the colonial parkway murders and the southside strangler. She is part of a team of which used modern-day DNA testing on Jack the Ripper's letters to determine (with 99% probability) that the serial killer was the artist Walter Sickert (Vanity Fair, December 2002, p. 342).
In 1996 the Putnam Berkley Group (with Phyllis Grann as CEO) managed to steal Patricia Cornwell away from Scribner, partly because she was unhappy about Scribner's timing of the release of The Body Farm. It clashed with Putnam's release of Clancy's Debt of Honor and thus probably prevented Patricia Cornwell from being first on the New York Times best-seller list. Cause of Death was published by Putnam in July 1996.
The first non-Scarpetta mystery Hornet's Nest came out in January 1997. Writers like Audre Lourde, Rita Mae Brown and Patricia Cornwell have been very successful in publishing works that deal openly and positively with lesbian issues.
Patricia Cornwell now splits her time between Richmond, Virginia and Los Angeles. She has kept her link to Davidson College and sponsors scholarships to Davidson students with exceptional abilities in creative writing. In June 1996 her name came up in the wake of a bizarre real-life drama.
An ex-FBI agent, Eugene Bennett, had repeatedly claimed that his ex-wife was a lesbian and that she had an affair with Patricia Cornwell in 1992 when his wife worked as an instructor and hostage negotiator at FBI's Quantico facilities.
"With six Penguin Putnam best-sellers and 15 books to her credit, the frankly gorgeous lesbian novelist is one of the mystery market's most explosive talents ever."
(Advocate, 09/28/99, p. 97)
