Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 31, 1991 TAG: 9104030045
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Mike Mayor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
She's comfortable talking about her work and her career of abrupt ups and downs, and the answers to simple questions sometimes turn into stories of their own.
She still looks more like the well-tanned tennis player she was in college than the stereotyped image of a novelist. When she talks, you can hear as much North Carolina in her accent as Virginia. She grew up in Montreat, N.C., went to Davidson College and worked for the Charlotte Observer before she wound up in Richmond as a computer analyst for the Medical Examiner's Office.
Trying to turn that experience into crime fiction, she started writing and ran into the obstacles every beginner faces. Four unpublished novels later, she had a stack of rejection slips and a severely depleted savings account. She was ready to go back to newspaper work when Scribners accepted her manuscript. So began the strange story of "Postmortem."
Initially, it was doing fairly well for a first novel, and then a wonderful thing happened: It was banned in Richmond. The owner of an influential local bookstore decided that the plot bore too strong a resemblance to a series of murders that had occurred in the area. Out of consideration for the feelings of the survivors, he said, he was not going to carry the book.
Once word got out, she was "uninvited" to local book talks and signings. A local newspaper slammed the novel in a scathing review.
Then favorable national reviews came in. On this page, Sharyn McCrumb called it "a chilling tale told in spare and articulate prose." Readers agreed, and sales went up. That led to a sizable advance for "Body of Evidence," and now the paperback rights for it have just been sold for a record price at Scribners. "The people there are smoking cigars and drinking champagne," she said and lit a cigar of her own. (It was a skinny, spicy little thing that she's using to wean herself from cigarettes.)
The third novel, tentatively titled "All That Remains," is finished, but even though Cornwell is now an established professional in the field, she still doesn't understand how it happens. "I tend to work intuitively," she said. "Writing a novel is like the investigation of a real crime; you're taking the random and trying to make it rational. But the process itself is still a mystery."
Mysterious or not, for now, Cornwell's process is a hit.
by CNB