Flesh and bone

Patricia Cornwell created her heroine, the ash-blonde forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, in 1990, with Postmortem, long before we became immune to the gruesome sights of a police morgue from watching CSI (Miami, New York, and no doubt Patna one of these days).

Angelina Jolie may soon play Scarpetta, according to the Los Angeles Times, but the screen version of the Scarpetta story will not have much to do with the books. Scarpetta would now be in her fifties, and Hollywood can’t have that, can it? Jolie will play a younger and obviously oomphier Scarpetta, with updated tech support. The idea of a woman being a forensic pathologist can’t be particularly new in a 21st-century context, but that is just a little of what will be sacrificed for the film version.

 

The gadgetry and lab science that Cornwell took so much trouble over have been eclipsed by computer-generated images from television series that cut quickly from detail to computer-generated detail without bothering to build up a compelling narrative. Pathologists on TV ask for tests and voila! The results are instantly spread out on a light table, and the team can get back to flirting among themselves. In real crime fiction (let’s not even think about real life), samples are lost, files are destroyed, lab technicians skew the results because they are pressured by higher-ups who have a dark agenda of their own.

Watch the movie if you want, then, but if you like your stories to be informed by technology rather than driven by it, pick up some of the books. There are over a dozen, more than enough for the character to be drawn in great detail as she rises from working as a police pathologist to becoming a medical examiner with jurisdiction over just about every dead body that is found (as she constantly reminds the police). She is much more hardass than her male colleagues, as would be essential for a woman protagonist in a work of crime fiction. If Jane Tennison were to meet Chief Inspector Morse, for example, we all know she would grind him to a goo with one turn of her heel.

Scarpetta is ostensibly a second-generation Italian-American who comes from Miami and cooks vegetables other than potato, but the character has redneck overtones. She has, in fact, Teutonic looks and works in Virginia, the most gun-happy state in America. When she falls asleep in front of the fire, her Browning not far away, it is not poetry she has at the ready, it is a pistol. She and her FBI lover go to bed in that romantic way American law enforcement officials have, with a handgun on each side table.

So there is no need to fear these books will be too politically correct, even though Scarpetta is anti-smoking and promotes healthy eating and diversity education for the police force, and even though she has a lesbian niece who is a computer genius. The author dedicated one of her books to Barbara Bush (the same Barbara Bush who later suggested Hurricane Katrina worked out quite well for some Blacks), and Scarpetta’s conservative biases occasionally poke through like the limbs of a hastily buried body. She seems to find the death sentence, for instance, quite acceptable.

Cornwell’s is not a hallowed body of work that has no scope for cinematic improvement. Not all of her books are gripping. Four of the Scarpetta books followed a serial killer and his doppelganger, and the criminals tediously grew much larger than the crime fighter. The reader sags. If we are to follow a protagonist novel after novel, we would like to see a more interesting mix of psychopaths. Perhaps a movie or television series will give us that. If not, at least Angelina Jolie will flesh the heroine out.

Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad