Kay Scarpetta led the trend for serial killer hunters. I love crime heroines – but she leaves me cold
- Written by Sue Turnbull, Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong
Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia, made her fictional debut in Patricia Cornwell’s first crime novel, Postmortem, published in 1990. Cornwell had been both a police reporter and a morgue assistant. And her character was inspired by a real medical examiner she worked with.
Postmortem won a slew of crime fiction awards, including an Edgar and the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure. It was a riveting read – if you surfed the questionable prose style. I applauded the arrival of a female forensic specialist.
Two years after her debut, in 1992, I saw Cornwell in Melbourne where she was promoting the third Scarpetta book, All That Remains. Blonde and blue-eyed, barely over five foot three, she was the spitting image of her protagonist, as described in the books – and just as frosty.
She had stopped over in Los Angeles on her way to Australia, and told us she was being courted by all the major film studios, who wanted to option the books – and being ardently pursued by actors, including Demi Moore, desperate to play Scarpetta. Later, Angelina Jolie would also try to land the role.
Now, more than 35 years (and millions of copies sold) since her debut, Scarpetta is finally on screen, as an Amazon Prime streaming series – and apparently Cornwell is very happy about Nicole Kidman’s central casting as the older Scarpetta.
Not the Scarpetta I imagined
Postmortem, the novel, establishes Scarpetta as a brilliant forensic specialist, hunting a serial killer she nicknames Mr Nobody.
He’s leaving a glittery residue on his victims’ bodies – and a bad smell behind him. With the aid of all the latest technology, from computerised note-taking to DNA testing (then in its infancy), Scarpetta inevitably gets her man, despite being up against a hostile male establishment.
The series is set over two time frames – 1998, which follows the plot of the original (1990) novel, and the present, drawing on elements of her 2020 novel Autopsy. Two sets of characters play younger and older versions of the Scarpetta ensemble.
Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, another serial killer story.
Ken Regan/AAP
It tapped into a burgeoning interest in the figure of the serial killer as the evil we feared the most. In 1991, Jonathan Demme’s film version of Thomas Harris’ thriller Silence of the Lambs acquainted us with Hannibal Lecter, embodied by Anthony Hopkins – who won an Oscar for his performance. On British TV, Helen Mirren starred as detective Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect.
By the turn of the millennium, the brilliant forensic examiner on the trail of the serial killer, not to mention the FBI-trained profiler, were already overworked in fiction and on screen. This was when I bailed on the Scarpetta series, after reading the truly awful Blow Fly (her 12th novel) in 2003.
With Scarpetta largely absent, this book spends a lot time in the head of “wolfman” serial killer Jean-Baptiste Chardonne, even as he squats on a toilet fantasising about biting beautiful women to death. It was slow, it was muddled, it was unremittingly dark – and Cornwell has never been that good with words. Her real strength lies in her ability to grab the reader’s shocked attention.
‘I never really warmed to Scarpetta’
To be fair, I never really warmed to Scarpetta. Cornwell routinely spends much of her time impressing the reader with Scarpetta’s mastery of all things technological, her material possessions and her prowess in the kitchen.
Relatedly, I once owned a copy of Cornwell’s 1998 cookbook, Scarpetta’s Winter Table, disguised as a novella with Christmas recipes and photographs. Its instructions on how to prepare Scarpetta’s Key Lime Pie begin: “Without fresh limes, don’t bother. Scarpetta was a hanging judge on this matter”.
Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta with Jamie Lee Curtis as her sister, Dorothy.
Amazon Prime
I’ve missed out on about 16 Scarpetta outings since Blow Fly. So I bought the latest, last year’s Sharp Force, which sees Scarpetta on the trail of a serial killer who stalks his victims as a hologram. I wanted to see if her books had improved.
Sadly, they haven’t. Take this set of awkward similes, all in one sentence:
The wind moans round the house like a horror movie, remnants of a bad dream deconstructing like clouds as I reach for my phone vibrating on the nightstand.
And then there’s sex with her husband, former FBI profiler Benton Wesley (played by Simon Baker as permanently pained in the new series) who initiates it by offering her an early Christmas present:
“Depends on what present you’re talking about.” I move closer, feeling him in firelight.
Simon Baker plays Scarpetta’s husband, former FBI profiler Benton Wesley.
Amazon Prime
Was that a liver?
There was a public outcry when Mirren’s Tennison confronted the naked, brutalised female victims in Prime Suspect in the 1990s. But in Scarpetta now, the in-your-face crime scenes and autopsies are even more confronting. Nothing is hidden from view, including the pubic hair. We watch Kidman cut into a victim’s rib cage with garden shears. We hear the snap. And was that a liver she just held up?
As Scarpetta remarks of the killer when contemplating the first mutilated body, “he went to great pains to present [his victim] to an audience”. Great pains have also been taken in this adaptation, which has Cornwell’s blessing. But does it work?
Kidman as Scarpetta does a fine job of embodying an unlikeable character, though she is largely overshadowed by Jamie Lee Curtis, chewing up the scenery (which seems to be her thing now) as her equally unlikeable older sister Dorothy. Meanwhile, the excellent younger cast takes us back to the 1990s – the era Postmortem, Scarpetta and the serial killer really belong to.
Authors: Sue Turnbull, Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong 
