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The bestselling crime writer Patricia Cornwell has a “dark imagination”, says Janice Turner in The Times Magazine. While you’re ordering a margarita, she’s scoping out potential shooters at the bar. When I first interviewed her in 2008, she turned up with an armed former Marine and never walked her dog without a pistol. She doesn’t do crowds – “not because of somebody coming after me, but just being in the wrong place at the wrong time” – and always makes sure she has a landline in case criminals jam her mobile. Yet this deep-rooted paranoia is entirely understandable when you consider her “gothic childhood”.

Born in Miami, she was five when her father walked out on Christmas Day. Her depressed mother retreated to her bed, leaving her and her two brothers to “scrounge for food”. While “running feral”, Cornwell was abducted by a security guard – she “remembers vividly” her little red shorts being produced in court as evidence. Her father later tried and failed to kidnap the children, after which her mother made them perform “evacuation drills” at home. At 25, she began writing her crime thrillers, which have sold 120 million copies, after a dream in which Agatha Christie told her: “You will replace me.” But the drama in her personal life continued. She was outed as gay in “spectacular Cornwell style” after a brief affair with a female FBI agent: her lover’s husband, also with the FBI, found out, strapped on a fake bomb and tried to kidnap his wife in a church. Cornwell’s life is calmer now, but the darkness remains. When asked how she’d kill someone if she had to, she replies that she’d shoot them. “But I don’t really like taking on the persona of the killer,” she says. “I think it’s dangerous. Be careful what you think about.”

🚁☠️ Cornwell always likes to “crash-test” her plots. She signed up as a volunteer cop so that she could view autopsies, and learned to ride motorbikes and fly a helicopter to write her heroine Kay Scarpetta’s “action-lesbian” niece. For her next novel, she sniffed cyanide. “I want to feel it while I’m writing it,” she says. “Experience is energising.”

True Crime: a Memoir by Patricia Cornwell is available for pre-order here.

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