More significantly for the series as a whole, Cornwell’s shift to the third person in 2003 shepherded Scarpetta’s supporting cast into the limelight. Over the next seven years, the personal trajectories of Farinelli, Marino and Wesley often proved more extreme and dramatic than that of Scarpetta herself. No one’s personal trajectory has been more extreme or dramatic than that of Lucy Farinelli, although whether she loved being the centre of attention or despised it remains open for debate. Kay Scarpetta may be the character closest to Cornwell’s heart, but Lucy is probably the character closest to Cornwell herself.
‘I have a lot of Lucy in me,’ Cornwell acknowledges. ‘She is the troublemaker, the fiery one who lives life to the fullest. She takes risks that are not in Scarpetta’s nature to take. Lucy is always a renegade.’
Our first sighting of Lucy is as a child, disappointed that her ‘Aunt Kay’ has failed to take her to Monticello because of work. Bored, the ten-year-old teaches herself to re-format Scarpetta’s computer, much to her aunt’s dismay which quickly segues into amazement when she realises the upgrade has been accomplished perfectly. ‘Any dickhead could figure it out,’ Lucy responds nonchalantly with her soon to be characteristic ‘dirty mouth’.
She may be a child in this opening scene, but all of Lucy's adult personality traits are in place. Already acquainted with her native genius, the reader learns about her ‘tantrums, her arrogant and angry outbursts.’ But it only takes a second for this superficial bravado to crack and expose the vulnerable, lonely girl cowering beneath. ‘I don’t want you to die! I don’t want you to die!’ she sobs, wrapping herself around Scarpetta for all she is worth. Lucy has been reading newspaper reports about Charlotte’s serial killer and saw an accompanying photograph of Scarpetta herself.
Cornwell and Lucy have come a long way over the past twenty- three years, and have often done so in tandem. Both share a love of flying helicopters and driving Ferraris. Both have crashed their sports cars, but thankfully not their helicopters, when under the influence. Both have earned vast sums of money (Lucy in computer software and programming) only to see their fortune dwindle after financial mismanagement. Both are highly intelligent, creative and prone to emotional volatility. Both are openly gay. ‘Someone asked me recently, “Why did you decide to make Lucy gay?” I replied, “I most certainly didn’t.” In fact, I had a big dilemma when I realised she was because I knew I would get in trouble for it.’ Cornwell recalls ‘outing’ Lucy in 1995’s The Body Farm. ‘She walked into the living room. I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid. I went, Oh my god, she is gay. I could sense from her body language that she was gay. I couldn’t tell you what her face looks like, but when I saw her walk in, I just intuited right away.’
Cornwell, who was yet to acknowledge her own sexuality in public, knew this revelation ran the risk of alienating parts of her fanbase, not to mention the neanderthal Pete Marino. ‘I actually called one of my editors and said, “Houston, we have a problem.” He replied, “You don’t do this in popular crime fiction.” Nobody gave me a really terrible time about it, but I was told to be really careful, because it might offend some of my fans.’ Cornwell herself felt she had no choice in the matter. ‘This comes back to the point about truth. I can’t make Lucy something she’s not. That was before there was anything out about me either. It was not the politically astute thing.’
Political astuteness is not a term one would associate with Pete Marino, one of Cornwell’s two leading men. Here is Scarpetta’s first impression of him as described in Postmortem: ‘He was hard to read, and I’d never decided if he was a good poker player or simply slow. He was exactly the sort of detective I avoided when given a choice — a cock of the walk and absolutely unreachable. He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his graying pate…Marino was the stuff of tough-guy flicks — a crude, crass gumshoe who probably had a foul-mouthed parrot for a pet and a coffee table littered with Hustler magazines.’ Postmortem and many of Scarpetta’s subsequent cases will both reinforce and disprove this initial assessment. Many of the good graces associated with civilised behaviour do seem absent in the sweaty, overweight detective. Nevertheless, what he lacks in refinement, he makes up for with intuition, courage and decisiveness.
This infuriating mix of smarts and vulgarity was inspired by Cornwell’s encounters with policemen from her days as a crime reporter from the early 1980s. ‘Marino was a composite of detectives I’d ridden with and spent time with going back as early as my years at The Charlotte Observer.’ Charlotte’s intensely macho police force treated the paper's first female crime reporter with disdain bordering on sexual harassment. ‘It was so adversarial that when I went into the duty office, the cops would swivel around in the chairs and turn their backs to me. They would say, “Did somebody hear something in here?” The duty captain would say, “If you want to come sit on my lap, I might tell you some stuff”.’
This sexist bullying bears comparison with Scarpetta’s early encounters with Marino. She eventually earns his respect, however uneasily, in much the same way that Cornwell tamed the sexist policemen in Charlotte: through persistence, charm, and home cooking. ‘Next thing you know, my nickname was “Scoop” because I always got all the stories nobody else did.’
The detente between Scarpetta and Marino, fragile at the best of times, degenerated first when Scarpetta became his employer, and later when she married Wesley. This provoked one the most controversial incidents in Cornwell’s oeuvre. In The Book of the Dead, a drunk, drugged and desperate Marino attempts to rape Scarpetta. At the time of publication, Cornwell explained the assault in these terms: ‘There is no question he was sexually attracted to her, and is in “love-hate” with her. She makes him feel small with her power and intellect, even though she doesn’t try to. There is a power struggle. She doesn’t return his feelings and never would. This can’t go on forever with Marino turning into a greater jerk because of his frustration with her. What he’s really doing is committing suicide for the relationship.’
Only Scarpetta, and possibly Cornwell herself, seemed able to forgive Marino: both Benton and Lucy plot revenge, although nothing comes of either plan. ‘One reason you can’t hate Marino after that act is because Scarpetta doesn’t,’ Cornwell said back in 2007. ‘She’s not capable of it. This is not a stranger, this is somebody she has known for seventeen years, and a part of her understands it.’
Admirable as these sentiments are, Scarpetta’s stoicism does beggar belief: the vicious attack seemed to be brushed under the carpet until 2012’s The Bone Bed. Today, Cornwell admits to certain regrets and describes the scene as a last-ditch attempt to reboot the character rather than a carefully considered plot device. ‘In Book of the Dead, I had to shatter Marino to start him all over again. It was either that or kill him off. He’d gotten cornered as a character and I couldn’t deal with him any more. In hindsight, I should have toned down his attack on Scarpetta and his despicable betrayal of her in general. While it says everything about her that she understands why he did what he did, his drunken violent act should not have happened.’
If Lucy is one foil for Marino’s basic instincts, the other is Benton Wesley. From Postmortem onwards, the cultured, reserved and intellectual FBI ‘suspect profiler’ has provided a counterpoint to Marino’s instinctive but crude machismo. The character was again inspired by Cornwell’s first-hand encounters with law enforcement officers. ‘I spent time with a variety of profilers at what was then called the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. I used to hang around there quite a lot in the early days of my career.’