Patricia Cornwell talks Scarpetta finally making it to the screen and her surprise cameo: "I was so overwhelmed"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Had I known it would have taken 37 years – and the sheer willpower of Jamie Lee Curtis – to bring Kay Scarpetta to the screen, I’d have been very disheartened. I sold my first Scarpetta book, Postmortem, while I was working as a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia and it was first optioned as a movie in 1989, right before it was published. Ever since then, it has been in and out of options.

I asked Jodie Foster if she’d play Scarpetta not long after The Silence of the Lambs came out in 1991. She looked at me and said, “Don’t you see why that would be a really bad idea?” I didn’t; I thought it was the best idea ever. But it didn’t go anywhere – she wasn’t interested in that kind of role back then. Around 1997, I spent a few days with Helen Mirren in New York. I will never get over the privilege of hanging out with such an amazing, unassuming and lovely woman. The studio execs were worried about Prime Suspect being so high profile… anyway, nothing ever came of it.

Demi Moore was attached for a while. I talked to Susan Sarandon. Angelina Jolie was attached to Scarpetta for the better part of eight years, but it has always fallen apart at the writing stage; no one seemed to understand her job as a medical examiner and so the script never worked.

It also didn’t happen because Scarpetta isn’t a man. In the early days of the series – before my books sold over 120 million copies in 36 languages – a lot of people had a hard time with her being a woman. One bookseller told me that he couldn’t handle the idea of a woman dealing with the grim stuff that Scarpetta deals with. He reread Postmortem and changed all the pronouns to “he”, but that didn’t work, either.

Scarpetta being a woman is what makes the book series unique, as opposed to it being a different version of Quincy. But the fact remains that if Scarpetta had been a man, and someone like Tom Cruise had played him, he’d have been a household name a long time ago. I suspect that TV series would have been very successful.

Having said that, I am thrilled that Jamie Lee Curtis is championing Scarpetta and we now have two seasons commissioned. She stepped in four years ago when she moved into producing and she didn’t realise Scarpetta was available. She took it on and, because of who she is, has been able to attract huge talent, including Nicole Kidman.

In fact, Nicole circled this project long ago, but once again it unfortunately fell apart at the script stage. So now we have the talented Liz Sarnoff as showrunner [Deadwood; Barry], Nicole Kidman as my heroic protagonist Scarpetta, Jamie Lee Curtis as her outrageous sister Dorothy and Bobby Cannavale as Pete Marino, who works alongside Kay. I’ve always loved Bobby, cute as he is, and all bets are off about whether Marino and Scarpetta will have an affair. Ariana DeBose is stellar as Lucy and who doesn’t love the idea of Simon Baker as Benton?

Before going on set [look out for Cornwell’s cameo in the first episode], I warned Jamie that I would most likely turn into a little puddle on the sidewalk. I was so overwhelmed. I don’t actually watch many crime shows, apart from Only Murders in the Building, because I don’t like to be reminded of what I do for a living when I’m watching TV and trying to relax.

Following my early failures – Postmortem was rejected by almost every major publishing house in New York before Scribner took it on for $6,000 – I learnt not to have high expectations, so seeing Nicole Kidman play Scarpetta on TV is magnificent and absolutely worth the wait.

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All episodes of Scarpetta are available from Wednesday 11 March on Amazon Prime Video.

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