Transcript of Forensics, Fiction, and the Fine Line Between Them: A Sit Down with Patricia Cornwell

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I'm Ash. And I'm Elaina.

And this is a very special episode of Malved.

We got so excited during this interview that we forgot to ask our guests to do the and I am because it was Patricia Cornwell. What the fuck? I am. So this interview was wild.

It was so cool.

I was floating above us all during this.

I wish that you guys... We do have some video from it. We do. So I think we'll be able to post some stuff. Elaina was literally I was beaming. Floating.

Yeah, I was beaming.

Elaina has always been a huge fan of Patricia Cornwell. So it was really cool. I just wanted to sit back and watch it for the most part. I was like, I had a couple of questions in there that I ended up leading on our shared doc and just highlighted and was like, go to this one.

Just keep going. I'm like, you got this. It's true. I've been a fan of Patricia Cornwell. I mean, in case you don't know Patricia Cornwell, you got to get on it because she's fucking amazing. Yeah, honey, what are you doing? She's sold over 120 million books, which is- Damn. Insane. She's an author of nearly 50 books, and a lot of people know her for the Scarpetta series. There's almost 30 books in that one. Wow. It's An amazing series. It follows a medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, who's just... She was my hero growing up. I wanted to be Kay Scarpetta. You're the end of R. Honestly, that was the dream. I fucking love her. She does like, thriller, but it's really science-based. And it's got like a little... Some of her books have some horror elements in there. Like, she's really good at balancing it all. She even in one of them, she goes to the actual Body Farm in the book, and she went to the Body Farm.

It's so funny. It's called the Body Farm, by the way. I remember you telling me about that. Yeah.

And I was like, because I was fascinated by the Body Farm. So when that came out, I was like, let's go, girls. But she's amazing. I have been reading her book since I was 13 or 14. I mean, I started, I think her first book maybe came out in 1990. Wow. I think, which I didn't read it at that point because I was five. But I was reading it 10 years later, for sure, eight years later. And I've read every single one of them, I think, up to the last. I think I've missed the last three. I have to catch up on them. But John buys me any Any time a new book comes out by Patricia Cornwell, he knows he's going to run out and grab it and get it for me. I have a whole... I mean, I have almost an entire book shelf dedicated purely to Patricia Cornwell.

I can attest for that. She's my girl. I remember when I was doing, I did a paper on Jack the Ripper in like, freshman year, and you gave me Portrait of a Killer Tomorrow. And that's a great book.

Yes. It's so good because when she gets into something, she fucking gets into it.

Super informative.

And I always loved that about her, too. I always felt like super kindred that way because she seems like someone who just wants there. And she is. She confirmed that for us in the interview. She is that person that just when she gets hyper-focused on something, she's just going to go- Learned everything about it. Down the hole. She was so much fun.

You guys are for sure, kindred. There was a connection there. I love it. I said, I love watching this.

I love it. It was great. We became best friends. You did. During the This interview, we're besties for life, me and Patricia.

Yeah, in about five seconds, you'll hear us both get invited to our home. Hell, yeah.

I intend to do it. Patricia, get ready. See you there, brother. This interview was awesome. We hope you guys love It was really interesting. She's a fascinating lady and just another fucking amazing author that I got to talk to because of you guys.

Hell, yeah. So without further ado, enjoy Patricia Cornwell.

So Patricia, Thank you so much for coming on Morbid. This is massive for me. I'm freaking out inside. So Patricia, you worked for the office of the Chief Medical Examiner for six years in Richmond. In your early career in the Medical Examiner's office, what What shaped the creation of K Scarpetta during those years?

Well, let me tell you a little morbid secret. I love that. People think that I happened to be working in the medical examiner's office, or shall we just say the morgue, and that out of that, I got ideas for writing books. That's not at all what happened. When I graduated from college, back in the Stone Age, and I was an English major, and I knew the only thing I seemed to do halfway decently was writing. I managed to get a menial job at the newspaper, the Charlotte Observer. I worked my way up to being a reporter, and they put me on the police beat. And so that was my first introduction to crime, going to homicide scenes and doing this stuff. Then at that time, I was married to my former English professor, and he wanted to move to Richmond, Virginia to go to seminary. I had to leave my journalism job. I won't go into all the boring details, but suffice it to say that at one point I thought to myself, What am I going to do with my life? I knew I was interested in crime, and I wanted to write books, so I thought I'd put the two together.

But the one thing I didn't know about is what happens to the body when they whisk it away from the crime scene. I knew it went to a morgue somewhere. I knew there were forensic pathologists who looked at the body. But this was back in the 1980s. Back in those days, that information wasn't readily available. In Richmond, I got an appointment to go to the medical examiner's office, and that's where I met Dr. Marcella Fiero, who was one of the first, I think, five women forensic pathologists in the country. Wow, that's awesome. How lucky was I? I didn't even know there were women medical examiners, and this is the one I meet. She gave me a tour of the autopsy suite, the three stainless steel tables that are attached to the floor, and the huge cooler that she opened, and the filthy smelling, dead smelling condensation rolls out like a horror movie. And you see body bags in there. And so that was my first taste of all this. And I went back to do more research. And finally, I tell everybody this, if you want to find out things, make yourself useful. So I said, what can we do to be helpful here?

I started doing technical writing, and then they became computerized, and I ended up taking over their computer system. But I'd go in the morgue every morning, and I would watch the autopsies, and I would take the notes for the doctors, or I'd hang up bloody clothing. I'd put organs in scales and write down the weights. I was the pill counter. When your prescription drugs came in, I'm the dummy who just gets to, one, two, three. I'm afraid he might have taken a little bit too much of his Fentanyl. I know it's not funny, but it was all to write murder mysteries. That's why I wanted to learn this. I just was so fascinated. All the forensic labs were upstairs, and so I could go up to toxicology or fingerprints or back in the day, serology, what's now DNA. And that is why my books have so much of that detail, because I had a six-year full-time education in it and then I continue to learn it ever since. So my medical examiner experience is that I really ended up there six years because every book I wrote was nobody wanted. I wrote Postmortem was the fourth attempt.

That's wild to me.

By then, I thought it was going to be my postmortem because I was very dejected and unbelievably... At that age, when you're in your 20s, it's such a hard time because you're trying to figure out who you are, what you're here for. Tell me about it. What you're here for. Do we have a purpose? And when I kept failing at what I thought was my only purpose, which is to write, it was a very dark time. But I will I know all of those, everyone who listens to this who gets discouraged, the thing about it is, if I'd gotten my way in my first murder mystery, been published, number one, it would have ruined my career because it was really not good. And two, I would have I knew enough and I didn't need to be at the medical examiner's office anymore. I needed to be there a long time to walk around in scarped as shoes.

All right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

I love that. That's wild. I still can't believe that you had trouble getting published at first.

I wrote... It was a book a year. The first year I was there, it was one book called The Stick Doll Murders. And then the second one was murder in the Lost Hundred. Oh, that sounds spooky. And then the third one was called The Queen's Pawn. No, No, no, no. And then an editor said to me, I finally called up the same editor who rejected me three times. You're not supposed to do that, by the way. And I said, I know I'm not supposed to call you on the phone. I said, But should I quit?

Oh, my God.

She said, No, I don't think you should quit. But I said, Well, what am I doing wrong? And she said, Well, you work in a medical examiner's office, don't you? And I said, Yes, I do now. And she said, Well, the stuff that you're writing about, is that what you see every day? And I said, I never see any of what I write about. I mean, because I'm writing about buried treasure and archeology digs that go wrong. It was like Agatha Christie meets autopsies, and it didn't work. It was a hybrid. And she said, And also your best character is this woman, medical examiner named Dr. Scarpetta. She was a minor character in the first three books. And she He said, Why don't you write it from her point of view? I'd like to know what she thinks. I thought, Oh, my God, I don't know if I can do that. And if I show people what I really see and I let that invade my imagination, I don't know if I can survive it because I'm going down every morning and seeing horrors on the tables. Someone struck by lightning, someone killed by a wild animal, somebody who's been raped and murdered.

I've seen thousands and thousands of cases over the years, and And by that time, there were serial murders that had just started in Richmond.

Oh, yeah.

This was 1987, the South Side Strangling Cases. And they began while I was working at the M. E. 'S office. And I'm telling you, all of us were terrified. That's when I bought my first gun and took shooting lessons. I put a deadbolt on my bedroom door. I was divorced at that time, so I was living alone. And I thought to myself, and I watched Dr. Fiera work in these cases, she'd come home. She'd get called out in the middle of the night. Here's a terrible story. One of the early victims in the South Side Strangling Cases was a woman neurosurgeon who was finishing her residency at the Medical College of Virginia, right down the road from the Emmies office. This lovely young woman. Here's the weird thing. A year earlier, I'd been over to that medical college with Dr. Fierro. She was doing a lab, what they call a wet lab, where you take, in this case, brains that have been fixed in formula. I can tell you guys this, since you have a show named Morbid, this is your fault. It's your fault that you're getting all this, okay? We'll take it.

We're happy to have it.

She's doing a brain cutting around all the neuro pathology students and neurosurgeon residents. There was this one woman in a lab coat on the other side of the room, young woman with long red hair. I was feeling so ill at ease because I'm this stupid person. It was an English major. I'm not a med student. I have three books that nobody's wanted, and I'm still trying. And I was just, I don't know, I was having an uncomfortable moment, and I felt somebody looking at me. I looked across the room, and the red-headed woman was staring at me, and she smiled. She was warm like, Hello, you're fine here?

That's all it takes sometimes.

That was the woman who was murdered. And when that happened a year later, I've never forgotten her looking at me. And I And then I'm looking at her and crime scene photographs when I'm out with a detective. Oh, that's awful. Yes. I can't imagine that. And so I'm saying to myself, how do I write about something like this without actually adding to problem. We're celebrating what we should condemn. And I figured out, you know what? If I'm going to show you the real thing, then damn it, I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm going to do it through Scarpetta's point of view because Because that is the only way, really, that I can get away with it. Because she's not celebrating it at all. She's trying to fix it. She's doing a job. She's also not going to lie to you and say, Oh, it didn't hurt very much. No. She's going to say, This was awful. Right.

That's what I love about her.

That's my very long story for how that all happened. Now you don't have to read my memoir when it comes.

We still will.

We will in the spring.

Oh, I'm excited for that.

That's awesome.

I'll read it anyways.

So that's when you may have to come visit me in person.

Oh, we'll absolutely do that. We're in, yeah. Because you're welcome back anytime. I can't wait to hear more about this. Actually, I love hearing these stories because I worked as an autopsy technician in Boston for, I think, five years, actually.

Well, that's really called in my old biz, that's called burying the lead. Because I didn't know I was talking to a Confederate here where we can compare notes.

As soon as I heard you talk about the wet specimens and all. The brain cutting. The brain cutting. Elaina was a brain cutting.

You know what? You'll never forget that smell of formalin, will you? No. And formaldehyde, which I hate even worse, at least the diluted stuff doesn't. But that was terrible. Yeah.

And you can taste it, too. It's awful. Like, food would taste like it later.

And so you understand when I write about that, when Scarpetta comes home at the end of a long day at the morgue, when she goes in the shower, or she showers in her office before she goes home, then appreciates that. But she washes up inside her nose. Yeah, you have to. And gargles because the molecules of the nasty stuff are in the air. And when you're smelling it, it's because it's the molecules of lovely things called putrefaction, among other things. And that's what you're smelling. It's unmolecular. And so she scrubbed dub-dubs because I remember when I first started smelling that stuff, I would start imagining I smelled it, like right when I was getting ready to eat something. Yes. Oh, yes.

Yeah. I was very surprised to... I think one of the first autopsies that I was part of, I went to dinner later that night with my husband. And the first bite I took, I was like, Why do I feel like this smells like what I was just in. And he was like, God, it's horrifying.

It's your memory because your sense of smell is really your most powerful sense. It blew my mind. My neuroscientist partner, Stacy, could tell all the reasons why that's the case. But that's why smells olifactory experience is so powerful. And in fact, you can smell something and it can create... It triggers a memory that will actually make you feel the way you did when you smelled it before. I went to, and when I took a tour, I drove across Austria way back in the early '90s. And one of the things I wanted to see when I was there was the Mothausen death camp, the concentration camp. I'd read a book about it, and I thought, I want Scarpetta, I want her to see this through me. I want to see the reality of one of these horrible places. When I was walking through one of the barracks where they kept these poor, the Jewish prisoners that they were so merciless to, I smelled the inside of a cooler, and you know exactly what I'm talking about.

It's a very distinct smell.

I smelled old death so powerfully that I said to the person I was with, I have to leave. That was all just really hallucination, obviously. But it was remembered odor. This may sound gross to people, but you need to understand why all this is important to human biology. We are programmed to be repelled by things that we should stay away from. Absolutely. If the whole colony was wiped out by a plague and you smell that in the woods when you're in the primitive age, you go the other way really fast. That might happen to you.

Yeah. It just comes down to survival.

Absolutely.

All of this is all about survival. Our fear, our wanting to read scary stories is all about our survival instinct.

Yeah, it gets that fight or flight going.

Since you worked in a morgue, then in my opening scene in Sharp Force, when Scarpetta is working on a floater in the autopsy suite, some guy, poor guy that's been in the river for a while, then you know what that's like.

That's a unique experience, for sure. That is a very unique experience, a very unique smell, and a very unique- It's horrible. Way of going about an autopsy. It's totally different, which is crazy. And that'll stay with you, that image, for sure.

Well, I was coming... This is, I think, a wonderful way to think about it. One day when I was working at the medical examiner's office, and we had such a case, A man who had been out fishing with his young boy in the James River in Richmond. And this was a hot summer day, and we don't know why, or nobody knew why, but he ended up going overboard. And his body wasn't found for a while. When it came to our office, it was very, very decomposed, and it was really, really awful. I mean, it would go through the whole building, to be honest with you. I was in staff meeting, and I was getting ready to downstairs with Dr. Fiero to Scribe while she did her cases. And she was going to do that one because she didn't... Nothing faced her. We're riding an elevator down, and I said, You know, sometimes I really don't know how you stand this. I don't know how you do it. And she looked at me and she said, I just tried to imagine him before he got here. And so suddenly I saw this man on a beautiful summer day with his boy fishing, with his baseball and the white sparkling on the water and everything's happy.

And that's what I tried to think when I was actually looking at what she was doing after that. I thought that that is how we should do it because we don't want to objectify human beings. I mean, what we leave behind is not pretty, but if we were around to see it, we would be embarrassed. We'd apologize. Sorry, I'm such a mess.

Yeah, it's so true. It makes you feel like you have a purpose when you think of them that way before they got on the table, there's a purpose to the whole thing instead of just meaningless clinical way of looking at it. One of the things I always say when I worked at the morgue was it always little things would get me during an autopsy, like somebody having nail polish on. I was like, you didn't know that that was the nail polish you would be wearing forever. That was the last time you were going to put on nail polish. Or if they had their hair in a braid or something, I was always like, wow, you just didn't know that that was your last hairstyle. I never wanted to cut those hairstyles. I was always careful to not cut the braid off if I was doing a neuro case. You have to make it personal. You can't look at it just deadpan because it gets worse.

You have to have the ability to have some empathy. You imagine that person on the table, if it were your mother or somebody you deeply care about, if it's you. I'm so lucky that I was around the right people when I was learning all this, but most of all, Dr. Fierro. There was one thing she would never tolerate in her autopsy suite. You so much, you show even one iota of disrespect towards those cases. Is in there and your ass is thrown out. She said, Out.

Out. That's who she should be. Yeah. Because it keeps you on task to sit there. You have to keep reminding yourself like, this is somebody, somebody. So I have to be as careful if I could be.

Well, you know the interesting thing in some cultures, there is a belief that when you die, your consciousness, your spirit, whatever you want to call it, hovers around the body for a while. So in particular in primitive cultures, they would not do anything to anybody. They leave them for a while. Even in Italy, I think you've got to wait about 24 hours before you do an autopsy.

Yeah, that makes sense.

It's because of this, of not being sure when that transition is being made and trying to be as respectful as you can. Yeah, absolutely. I always just think, don't ever talk around a dead person. Don't say anything in front of them. You wouldn't say if they were still alive, and then you're safe.

Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. It's so true.

Maybe their ghost won't bother you as much as when you won't creak in the walls and you don't hear someone walking on your floorboard late at night.

Yeah, you won't feel like they follow you home.

Well, and with all your experience, I know that sometimes I find myself nitpicking in pop culture, like books, movies, TV, about crime scenes or autopsies, if they get it wrong.

Are there things that drive you crazy that happen a lot in pop culture for autopsies and crime scenes?

Well, I think one thing is when somebody acts like they have a bedside manner in the morgue, it's ridiculous. I mean, we're respectful, you know that, but you're not saying, Oh, no, this won't hurt very much. And, of course, the other thing is, now, I understand why TV has to do this. I mean, because they're visual. But you've seen the shows like CSI, where they have mirrors on the table so you can see the dead person's face? Yeah. Never. Of course, that isn't done. But I understand. My attitude is they're translating and making a story that works for their medium.

And have to make it palatable.

And a lot of what they do, they don't have a whole lot of choice because of what they're doing. But there are, I can't think of anything right off the bat, but there are so many times where I've seen things where I go, you didn't even try to get that right.

Me, too. Those are the ones that.

There's no way somebody would just say that or that they would do what you just did. I know, when they touch things with no gloves on. Yes.

That makes me crazy.

Or no masks. And why? Because I get it. You don't want the actress covering her face all the time. I'll be honest with you, the way people are bundled up in Tyvek these days, they really do look like a house under construction all wrapped up. And so that's not a good look if you're a movie star.

No, it doesn't quite translate. The gloves thing always drives me nuts, though, because I was always like, no, you wear at least three or four pairs of gloves so you can keep ripping them off the whole time.

It's so funny.

Well, I remember one of the early scripts for the Scarpetta movie that never got made. And by the way, we do have a show that will be out in the spring. But I remember that the writer had Scarpetta stopping in the middle of a terrible part of town for a crime scene on her way home from something else. She goes in, she whips out her makeup bag, zips it open, gets a pair of tweezers out, and then goes and collects a piece of evidence with it. And I said, What is it about my books? You're like, I'm sorry, what? I don't understand.

Where did that come from?

She also was driving a red Tesla electric car. And I thought, way back in the day when I thought, she's not going to take any chance to have that electric car. No way. They're going to go dead. Where she's parked right now.

Absolutely not. I would never put her in an electric car.

She's the way she is. You don't see as much of that anymore, though. People really, truly, I know because I'm dealing with screenwriters right now for the Scarpetta show, and they're much more well-versed in all this, the writers are, than they used to be. And there's also so much more available.

Yeah.

I mean, even Google. Yeah, it's so true. There's so much more that you can find out for yourself now.

Oh, definitely. And speaking of the Scarpetta television series, because I've been waiting for so long. I started reading your books. I'm 39. I started reading books when I think I was 13 or 14 because I was super into it. I read Postmortem first. I went all the way through. My husband will buy me each new book whenever it comes out. It's like the present. He gets me. That's very nice.

Well, you tell him my thank him for that.

I will. He'll love that. But I've been waiting for this. I've been really excited to see it on any screen, really. And one thing that made me so excited was hearing that Bobby Cannavalli is playing Moreno. I feel like that is the most perfect casting choice.

I've told everybody. I said, Can you really expect that he and Dr. Scarpetta are not going to have an affair now that she knows he looks like that?

Honestly.

She would say to me, Well, you didn't tell me he looks like that. The way you describe him in your books, you can see why I didn't have an affair with him. Anyway, yes. I can assure you because I have seen the eight episodes that you will be seeing next year in the spring, and he's fabulous.

I believe that.

In the scenes with him and Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis, I mean, it's all... You couldn't ask for a more powerful cast. They've done a great job. I think people are going to have fun. I mean, don't expect it to be identical to my books because it can't possibly be because it's TV. But the other thing is, if you think about my books, for the most part, there are a few that I wrote from what we call the third person point of view, but they're always from Scarpetta's perspective. I mean, almost all of them, especially the ones now. So if you're only seeing what she's seeing, the screenwriters have to create a lot of scenes that aren't in my books. What happens when Moreno goes home and has had a squabble with Dorothy or what's Lucy doing in the guest cottage? Those things. And that's fun because you're not only getting my story, but you're getting something new.

Yeah, absolutely.

I hope you and everyone will have lots of fun with it.

Oh, I'm sure I will. Yeah, people are very excited. I'm so excited for it.

I'm very excited. I think we'll have a big watch party.

Yeah, for sure.

Good. You mentioned working with screenwriters. Are you able to write on it at all, or have you been able to?

I haven't done any writing, but I do review all the scripts. My big thing is the techniques and the science and all that, making sure, helping with that as best I can. Occasionally, they'll ask me to sit in on the writer's room if they have some questions. Also, just because I like to encourage them. I love to encourage... A lot of them are very young, and that this at least I can do at this stage because I know what it feels like.

Exactly.

I know what it feels like to get started. Of course, they're doing a pretty good job getting started since they're on such a major show. But it's not exactly small potatoes to I'm going to start with when you're writing something for three Oscar-winning actors, Jamie and Nicole, and also Ariana DeBose, who plays Lucy. Oh, my God.

Oh, awesome. This is stacked.

I'm just so excited. I just wanted her to hurry up and sing.

Right?

Let's go. This is an iconic cast. It really is. We're so excited. Something else we're obviously so excited for is Sharp Force, which if you're listening to this the day it premieres, it will come out. Sharp Force will come out tomorrow, October seventh. So while writing Sharp force, what was the most bizarre piece of research that you did where you thought, if somebody saw this, I'd be in a lot of trouble?

Well, the truth is, if anybody saw most of what I'm doing, I'd probably be in trouble. I keep waiting for a knock on my door because of the stuff I search on the internet. We can really tell that. How many times can you be asking about this weapon or how long it would take to kill somebody before somebody decides they better check out You're in reprise.

What's going on in there?

But the hologram part of it, that was very creepy to research the notion that you can create a hologram. Well, let's just back up and say, what is the genesis of this? Ghosts. We've heard about ghosts all our life, and you know people who've seen them. Maybe you have, or you've had a weird experience that defies any explanation. I thought, I'm always interested in what technology could supply an answer or an explanation for things we see that we don't understand, whether it's Bigfoot, a quote, flying saucer, or in this case, a ghost. I thought, Is there technology that could create ghosts? And the answer is yes. Holographic technology combined with highly, highly technical drone technology that can be a flying projector, so to speak, And understanding that electromagnetic energy isn't always light waves. It can also be radio waves that can go right through your bedroom wall. So the idea that you could wake up in the middle of the night with this horrible phantom creature hovering over your bed, looking like something from the 1800s with red, glowing eyes and saying, Death becomes you, death becomes you, death becomes you, and creepy music playing.

The idea that that could really happen is true.

Yeah, that's the thing.

Closer to it than ever.

I know we really are.

The hologram can't kill you. However, this serial killer who uses this for stalking, he does it before he shows up. That was eerie technology to be digging into. And the old psychiatric hospital, Mercy Island. I love creepy places. Creepy places are a character. Anyone with a show called Morbid certainly knows that. Oh, yeah. And then, of course, when she's driving home in the snowy fog, and she hears this weird animal howling coming from the woods on her property. And then it turns out when they do voice analysis, the vocalization of it does not seem to belong to any animal on this planet.

That is horrifying to me.

Yeah, that's chilling for sure.

That alone would have been... I love that. I think that is so chilling.

I don't know how she stays in her house. I don't either. Every time I have a scene, I'm working on a new one now, and Scarpetta is in her house, and it's a horrible thunderstorm, and a transformer is blown somewhere, kaboom, and the power goes out, and all the security clamors are dark. And I'm thinking, Why are you staying in this place? Get out She's like, Get out. What are you doing, girl? Don't find a nice little condo with a dorm man. Yeah.

Seriously. Maybe one of the tallest floors he can get.

Yeah, survival instinct. Let's go.

She's never really scared. She just takes it in stride. She's always forgetting her gun.

Yeah, she never runs away, though. She's never running.

Rats, I knew I left something behind. This guy standing there in front of the greenhouse. Oh, boy.

We've all been there. Yeah, it happens.

You know what? After more than 30 years of writing Scarpetta, how are you able to keep her evolving? Because you really do keep her evolving, but still maintaining what a badass she is, the core of what she is.

It's really important that I write stories that are set in the real world, in the real world that we live in now, which is changing at the speed of light. It's a very hard world to set a crime novel in because there's cameras everywhere. I mean, there's so much technology that if you're not careful, the book would be one page long. Yeah, it's so true. Because we already know who did it. We found their signal bouncing off that cell tower, and then we got one cell DNA and figured out who did whatever. So a lot of people aren't choosing to set readers, and they're setting them in the '80s and the '90s for that reason. I insist on letting Scarpetta, in fact, making her live in the same world we do, and then dealing with it accordingly. And so by having that as my focus, I'm going to come up with a different idea for every book because if you're just watching what's going on in society, and I have to know what all the latest technologies are, not only to use them, but to defeat them. So that if I want a scene, for example, if I don't want your phone picked up, no signal, then I might have you use a Faraday bag like this.

This is a real thing. You put your phone in this and you cannot receive signals, and they will not transmit signals. That's the technology they use in what are called skips, where you go over top secret information. They use what's called Faraday cages or Faraday bags that block out all electromagnetic signals. If you go to visit some of the various buildings at the FBI Academy in Quantico, they will take your phone the minute you walk into certain buildings and it gets put in a metal locker that's basically a Faraday cage. Oh, wow. Because your phone can be used to spy.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

With Wi-Fi technology, we're open channels for something to hack into it. As you know from having worked in a medical examiner's office, the big threat these days are our phones and people going in and filming and photographing Photographing. And then next thing you know, the body's all over the internet. We've seen that every time there's a huge case. It's all over the news.

Oh, yeah. It's such a problem. And it becomes more and more of a problem as these phones get smaller and thinner and have more technology on them and things you can hide. It's crazy.

Now we also have to worry about photographs being posted out there that aren't even real. They're fake. That's the scary thing. And people believe that is the injury somebody had and it's completely made up. So these are all part of the modern challenges that Scarpetta lives with. But what I try to do is not get too bogged down in all that because it's withering after a while, and people want... They want something that makes them feel.

Yeah, for sure. Definitely.

You want the haunted old hospital where there's a burial ground, where there's a suspicion about how some of those people in the asylum died hundreds of years ago. You want these these things that really go to our core. Just like when you walk into Scarpetta's house, you want to smell her wonderful food. You want something good in the kitchen. You want a lovely bottle of wine or whatever they're going to open. I try to make it a rich sensory experience for you, both good and bad.

You really have, too, because that's one of the things I love about Scarpetta, is that she's a brilliant cook as well. I love that she has those two parts of her because cooking is so creative and emotional and grounding in a different way.

Everybody can be friends when they're eating. It's so true. Over the years, I've had a lot of people ask me, I mean, does Scarpetta know Dexter? If she met Dexter, I mean, would she rat him out, and I said, Well, listen, I believe that he lives near her, and I think they get together on foodie night. I love that. They have barbecues where she does her- I love that a lot. Her flash dogs and her bourbon honey steaks on the grill, and they discuss pasta. I don't know if she knows what he does, but I know she knows what he eats.

Yeah, for sure.

I think so. They said a potluck.

And I think that they're buddies. I'm sorry, but I think they get along just Fine.

Oh, I love that. That's canon now.

That makes a great image in your head.

She would say, Well, I know that person had it coming, but... Natural causes.

She saw nothing.

This pasta is great, though. Yeah.

So specifically for Sharp Force, but honestly, this can go with really any of your novels. Were there any scenes you've written that you thought like, Hmm, this might be too far. I should tone this down. Or when you feel that way, if you have, do you just lean further into it.

I don't feel that way about what I write these days because I'm really, really careful of it. But there were some books I wrote earlier, particularly when I decided not to use Scarpetta as the point of view, but to have it more what they call the omniscient point of view, third person, which means you have to spend time with the killer. It's going to show what the killer is doing or thinking. And In my book, Book of the Dead, which ironically, won one of the biggest awards of all of my books, but there are things I did in that book that I wouldn't do again. And this character, the evil person was into cannibalism, and it It was quite graphic, disturbingly so for me. I quit eating at my desk while I was writing that book. But I actually had somebody, I won't say who or where, but there was a research facility where I was offered. They said, Would you like to cook some human flesh and see what that smells like? And I said, No, I would not. No, thank you. I will not go that far for my research. Thank you for asking.

I don't I don't know what people think, but I've been asked if I wanted to try the scalpel and do a Y incision. I said, No, never. That's not for me to do. I'm an English major.

It's harder than you think, too.

I don't practice on a dead body. No, I'm an author. No, that's not for me to do. You do it, and I'll describe what you did.

Yeah, there you go. I can observe and still have all that I need to see.

But it's a good question because everybody should have certain boundaries stories. I don't want... It's an alarm system that's built in me. Actually, I think my books are a little bit more gentle that way than they used to be. It will sound crazy But I try to kill people without it hurting too much.

I love that. I love how beautiful. Even if they're bad, I just say, You know what?

I'm going to get rid of you. You have to be done in, but I'm not going to drag this out. It won't be terrible. Just go back to sleep. You'll end up in some other book and you'll be fine.

Yeah, there you go. We'll dispatch a view here and we'll see you later. Well, that makes so much sense to me because I've published two books, and they're serial killer readers, and they also have a female medical examiner that I got from my own experience. I found this a challenge in my own books, and I think you're so masterful of this in particular. I'm curious to know how you managed to maintain such sharp, in that pun intended, sharp accuracy forensically in your books. You really keep all of that so accurate and so grounded. But you also-Thank you. You're welcome. You also keep that pace, though, in your books, really tight and keep it really thrilling. I'm just wondering how you're able to maintain. How do you achieve that?

Well, fortunately, because I started out actually learning from being in the actual environment, if I wanted to know what the scanning electron microscope would do if somebody used one of these little things, a post-it, to lift trace evidence off of, they're putting it on the hand or whatever, because things will adhere to that very weak adhesive that then go up to the Trace Evidence Lab, and then you might see something on the scanning electron microscope. It's magnifying something 100,000 times, maybe even a million times. When you learn about these technologies and what they are and how it works, and that, for example, a scanning electron microscope on Earth is actually doing something very similar to what the Webb telescope does out in space, where it's not only defining the morphology, the shape of what you're looking at, like a jagged piece of dust might look like an asteroid when it's magnified that much with the microscope, but it's also telling you what something's made out of. It can tell you that an asteroid is made out of platinum. It can tell you that this fleck of paint also has traces of lead. That might mean it's old paint, or there's a little bit of asbestos, or that there's many layers of paint, meaning the car was painted over and over again multiple times.

That would be a unique identifier If you find the car that hit that person, the hit and run, see what I mean? If you've learned the fundamentals of these scientific applications, then when you roll ahead 35 years, as long as you keep up with what's actually being used, it's really not changed that much. You now have rapid DNA testing where you can put a swab in a little machine, basically, and in minutes, it will give you a DNA profile. Well, there was no such thing as that. No, definitely not. Getting started. But it doesn't change the DNA science. It just what it tells you is that it's so sensitive now that in some cases it's almost an obstruction. Because if you can walk through a room and leave one cell of DNA, one skin cell, that's going to give your profile. What if that skin cell is from eight months ago?

Oh, yeah.

You're picking up all kinds of stuff. Yeah. That is actually because it's so sensitive. It's both good and it's bad because it's also picking up all kinds of things that are interfering with what you're thinking. So it's just if you learn, you build on what you learn. If you stop learning, then one day the gap is too big and you can't catch up. So what I say to everybody is whatever you're interested in, and if you spend a lot of time in your early years getting proficient in it, keep up with it because you'll understand all the changes. But you got to know the fundamentals first.

That's so true.

It is definitely.

You let that gap happen, like what you said is totally correct, because having to catch up on all that afterwards, you're just going to be completely out of the galaxy with it.

There's no way you can catch up. And you know, autopsies, they're not done all that differently than they were Back in the days when Michelangela was doing it to learn more about what the human body looks like. There are things you can use in modern times, like scanning equipment, the virtual autopsy, which is done with a CT scanner like the military uses, like the Baltimore Medical Examiner's office has one of those. But for the most part, I think autopsies will just keep being done the way they've been done. First of all, As you know, anybody that's worked in that system, it is not... Scarpetta has an unusually amazing budget. She sure does. She's always complaining about her budget, but whatever she wants, it's somehow magically there.

Which you need.

Because I'm Santa Claus. I'm not thinking you need I'll give it to her. We not only need that microscope, but we need one of these kinds, too. You're getting willing. That's just another million dollars. Yeah, that's fine.

Don't worry about it. It's funny because when I worked in the morgue, I was shocked to find out that the things we as rib cutters were just hedge clippers from Home Depot. They were the orange handled.

That is the dirty. Oh, listen, when I worked in the morgue, since the main show was Dr. Fiera, the woman who then became the first woman chief in Virginia, she would bring in the knitting needles from her in-laws, the mother and the mother-in-law, because they're Italians. They all lived in the same house. She'd bring in the knitting needles. They didn't need anymore. She used them for bullet probes. So she'd get out the knitting needle. Oh, my God, that's smart. Put that. Here's the entrance. Let's see where that thing... It stops here, no, there. Especially in multiple gunshot wounds. That's genius. It worked fine. Now, you could buy a bullet probe for X I remember hundreds of dollars that she didn't have.

And it's the same thing?

When I was doing some research in the Charleston Medical Examiner's office in South Carolina, this is my idea of having fun with a forensic pathologist on the lunch break, we went shopping. We went shopping to a restaurant supply store. Oh, my God. So they have huge pots so that when the skeletonized body stuff, bodies are coming in, when you want to clean the bones, you boil all this.

Well, that takes a very- A big pot.

Cauldron. And so you can't get that in your regular place. So my treat, because I was making the big bucks, I take them shopping. I say, Do your hearts content any ladle you want, any big pot, any two-cup steel measuring cup so that when you're seeing how much someone hembraged in their chest cavity, I'm your person. Let's go.

You're Santa Claus to all.

Look at that.

Now, that is morbid Christmas right there.

Yeah, it is. You need to come on morbid more. You fit right in.

You do. See, nobody's going to like me anymore after hearing this because now they're hearing, What a weirdo I am.

No, you came to the right place.

They're going to love you more. Our listeners will love you.

Our listeners are called weirdos, in fact.

Exactly.

Well, I'll tell you the weirdest research I ever did, and I don't recommend this for anyone, but I really did want to know how long a bite mark. If you bit somebody after they're dead, how long does that bite mark? If it's an indentation, how long can you see that before it might fade? Well, I didn't know any dead people that would want me to bite them, not that I would be willing. Or did I know any living ones, including me, who might agree to such a thing and wouldn't be the same because I'm going to heal. So I thought, well, what about a piece of chicken, a dead raw chicken?

Oh, there you go.

So that's what I did. I practiced the bite marks with a piece of raw chicken and answered my question, and then would very quickly wash my mouth off with the most powerful antiseptic you can imagine.

I was just going to say. That's exactly what I was just going to ask.

That was lawless of you. Look at them.

Anything for the research, though, right?

I were to do it again, I don't know why I didn't just get a pair of dentures or fake teeth. Oh, yeah. Wouldn't that been smarter?

But you know what?

I'm a little bit slow on the take sometimes. There were many ways to simulate that without me putting my own silly little chip chops on it. You were just committed. And gave some horrible disease from raw chicken meat after that. You were just committed. You were just committed. You were getting some horrible disease from raw chicken meat after that.

You'd get some salmonella.

All in a day's work, right? Well, what did you find out?

I found out that they would fade a little bit in that if someone bites a dead chicken, we probably can figure out that the chicken was bitten. In other words, it was rather worthless. All right.

But you can say you did it now.

It worked for my purposes, whatever. I just was curious.

And you know what? You have a good story now, so it was worth it. I like that.

So it was worth it. But you know that I was also the blood supplier when I would do When I would be filmed for Primetime Live or various big shows, and they wanted blood on the floor for something. I'd say, All right, I'll be right back and go prick my finger and go dripping blood everywhere for them.

Oh, my goodness. Just leave your DNA. Here you go.

You're welcome. If you have a copy from Potter's Field, oh, now here is a morbid factoid that hardly anybody knows. Oh, I love that. If you have the early hard copy from Potter's Field, which came out in the mid '90s. On the cover, there is a footprint in snow that has blood drips on it. Now, I made that footprint in snow by buying an antique military boot. We put fake snow out. We put the footprint in it. I pricked my finger and bled my own blood. And so I said, hypothetically, my DNA is on the cover of that book. That is so bad. That is my blood you're looking at because- You put blood on. Nobody else had any blood handy.

So I said, Biggie, I'm just pretty. I got some. I got some. I got a lot.

You took blood, sweat, and tears to the next level on that one. You did.

Yeah.

Amazing. Switching gears a little bit here.

I wanted to talk about your characters a little bit, and obviously, you've been writing them for a while. Do you feel like they lead you to where they want to go sometimes at this point, or do you feel totally in control writing them where they should be?

It's a funny thing. I guess the best way to answer that is I would say it's a collaboration because I think in terms of scenes, and sometimes I'll have a list of certain scenes that I want to do, and I map out how to get her to wherever that scene is. But sometimes she has ideas of her own. There are also times where she and Moreno are getting in the truck to head somewhere, and I'm not really sure what they're going to find when they get there. I'll say to them, not literally, but I'm thinking, I hope you know what you're doing, because I'm drawing a big blank about where to go after this.

You better show me.

They're driving along, wishing they had a cigarette, chewing gum. They're not listening to me. No. In fact, when they go to the the food court after a hard day of working terrible crime scene, they sit there and Moreno says, It was like something straight out of a Patricia Cornwell novel. I thought, Do you not even know that you're in a novel? I mean, I thought, Well, do we know what we're in? Maybe we're in a novel. Maybe.

Sometimes I feel that way.

It does feel that way.

I love that.

Well, there is the theory that we're living in a simulated universe.

And every once in a while, you'll be like, Is it true? Sometimes things happen that you're like, Makes sense. Yeah. So how does it feel Still, I have to ask this, to have inspired literally a generation of thriller/crime writers, particularly women, specifically me?

Good. Then I've done a good thing if I've inspired you.

You really have. You are the first person, especially a woman writer, in writing about the things that I was so excited to learn about because I was always very interested in the autopsy part.

Now, in your books, who is your main character?

My main character is Dr. Wren Muller.

And what A doctor is she?

She's a forensic pathologist.

I'm going to give you a... I'll share a trade secret with you then, since we both write about the same thing, is when I was getting started, medical examiners had a very prescribed thing that they did. Sometimes the forensic pathologist would go to a crime scene. Back in those days, there weren't really death investigators. But they did their thing, and they testified in court, and they taught, and that was about it. It's really these these days, boundaries are not quite so clear. I know a lot of forensic pathologists who've gone way over those boundaries, where they actually will get more involved in helping you reconstruct what happened in a shooting or this. I think that we have permission to make our forensic pathologist a little bit more proactive, especially since this is something most people don't know, and I don't know if this is true in Massachusetts, but I do know it's true in at the Los Angeles coroner's office that a lot of forensic pathologists are also peace officers. They are sworn police, and they have to have a gun, they have to know how to shoot it, they carry a badge, and they can arrest people.

But they don't usually do it. One of the reasons that they're peace officers is very often, these people, they respond to scenes in very dangerous areas, as you know.

Absolutely.

My only thing I would say to you is, You can let your person, maybe you already do, but I think that you can have them more proactive, because one of the things I would get frustrated with writing about a medical examiner is I want her to sit down with a family and talk to them in their home. I want her to go somewhere. I want her to do something. I want her to get... I want more drama. Yeah, absolutely. So I have really ramped up the drama. I mean, I have Scarpetta doing all kinds of things that maybe she wouldn't really do, but it doesn't matter, does it?

Yeah, and it makes sense.

But I had to learn to not be too wedded to what I knew was true, and that it took me years to get over working around the real environment all the time because I feel like, Well, you can't have her do that, a medical examiner. Oh, no, she can't be a helicopter pilot. No medical examiner could be a helicopter pilot. She better make Lucy the helicopter pilot. Well, if I were doing that again today, I probably would have Scott had to be a helicopter pilot. Because why not? I might have that she learned it in the military. Terry, who knows what I would do. I would give her a very different background. If I were starting this all over again, I would have her a little bit more dramatic, more involved in stuff. I think that you can do that. So it's like in Great Britain, where they have what's called a police surgeon. That's really the old tradition is having a doctor that assists with the police, but they're actually working more with the police than just something that's very separate from it. So I would say, pull out all the stops, baby.

Hell, yeah. That's great advice. I love that because I love having that because I think it's fun to say... One of the things I love about Kay Scarpetta, especially, is that we get to see so much of her life inside and outside of the morgue. And I think she has so much agency outside of the morgue as well. So that's why her character has really always been my number one girl, because I just really think she's such a badass in and outside of what she does.

Oh, well, listen, if If we did a laundry list of how many people she's had to kill, how many times someone's tried to kill her, I don't think there's any human on the planet that's had so many near misses or so many dramatic moments has got Dr. Scarpetta. But considering she's been out there for 35 years, if she wants to carry her gun in her bulletproof Kevlar briefcase that Lucy gave, or that, by the way, is also fireproof and can sustain a microwave weapon, true story. I have I have one under my shelf over here. I love that. Because when I write about something like that, then Stacy decides, my partner decides that I should have a Kevlar briefcase, too. I'm thinking, where might I carry that?

I love that.

Everywhere.

I love that. She's like, You're Santa. She's like, Well, you need one, too.

I order strange things. If I have the character who's wearing a gas mask, then I've got to know what it feels like to put one of those on. I order stuff and then end up giving it away to somebody who would want such a strange thing. That's awesome.

So you're very tactile.

Well, if I believe it, then you'll believe it. Yeah, that makes sense. If I don't believe what I'm saying because I really don't know the answer, then I just can't write about it with authority. For sure. So I try to... I mean, a lot of things you can imagine, you can fill in the blanks. You don't have to try everything. Certainly, don't try being a serial killer. Don't do that.

Yeah, don't try that. Great advice.

If you take one thing away.

But I think there's never a substitution for witnessing something for yourself, if you can, because you will learn something. You will be surprised by a detail you will never, ever imagine. I remember the first time I stood out on a launch pad at a NASA site on Wallops Island in Virginia, where they fire rockets off all the time. I was taken out to this launch pad, and it was very windy. It's right on the ocean. It's a stark, barren landscape with all the scaffolding. And I'm looking at it, and I've seen pictures. I know what it looks like. But what I never knew is when the wind was blowing through the scaffolding, it created this eerie music It was just eerie, and it was like space music. And I'm standing there and I'm thinking, Am I the only one hearing this right now?

And you never would have known that. Yeah, no.

But it's just you get surprised. And if you If you see cases that come into the medical examiner's office, the poignancy of people, I'm so sorry to say it, but people who have a baby die, and then it's brought in and it's in the bassinet. And that just goes right through you when you see that. Or you find, I'll never forget that this was a true case, a real case in my early days at the Morgue where this woman had gone out to a bar, and she's walking home along a highway around 3: 00 in the morning drunk, and she gets hit by a car, and she ends up in our office. She's on the table in the next morning. And so she The state trooper is going through her stuff, and he pulls the little slip of paper from a fortune cookie out of her wallet that clearly meant so much to her that she saved it. And it said, You will soon have an encounter that will change the course of your life.

Wow. I just got goosebumps.

And I thought, Little did she know that that encounter was a car on a dark highway.

Yes.

And I'll never forget to look on the state troopers' face. He didn't know whether to laugh or to cry for a minute. Wow.

That's chilling. Because it's so bizarre. What are the odds?

Or the goofy teenage boy who thinks it's cool, he's trying to impress some girl. He's 13 or 14. And this country boy standing up in the back of a pickup truck And they went under an overpass, and he hit his head. He comes in, and in his pocket is a dented can of Old Spice deodorant.

Oh, man.

And you can I mentioned that he is trying to smell nice for these girls. He's trying to impress it. He's showing off for them. That's the last moment of his life. And these are things that are so important for me to remember and to witness, because Because if you don't put the humanity into all this, we can joke all we want about morbidity. But if you don't really tell it in the lap of life going on and the pain and the reality of all this, if you don't recognize it at some level, then it's really not worth telling the story. Nobody should want to read it either.

No, it's so true. All of that really reminds me of the nail polish that I would see on people and be like, You just painted your nails. I had no idea what was to come next and that was it forever. It's like those little things were the things that shocked me about my first few autopsies was how they affected me.

It's very true. I did a show that had to do with Princess Diana's death. This was about 20 years ago, a little over 20 years ago. And one of the people I interviewed was the assistant, the pathology assistant, who was there for her autopsy. Oh, wow. And the thing that I remembered so vividly is that he said she had on turquoise toenail polish.

And it's just like that little thing.

I know everything else that he said about what he found and some of the injuries and all that. But the two things that struck me the most were the turquoise toenail polish that she had on, that she put on right before, I guess she'd gone to the Ritz or whatever in Paris. And that I was told by somebody who saw her body that a lot of her fingers were broken.

Oh, wow.

I can't vouch for that myself, but I suspect it's true because she and Dodi Al-Fayed, they weren't wearing seatbelts in the back of that car. Here's one of the main reasons you would wonder if it's really a conspiracy, their deaths, is if they'd had their seatbelts on, they might not have died, but they didn't. So when you, bam, hit that cement piling in that tunnel, you're going to go forward. And the same thing happens in plane crashes, and people break their fingers from trying to... It's a. It didn't even impact.

Yeah, that's the first thing you do.

And it's those details that humanize. And then you see this poor person She might have been one of the most famous women in the world, but that's the poignancy of those human details that grab us. Not so much how much their heart weight, who cares?

It's like she's a mom, she's a friend, she's She's a woman. She's more than what she is on the table. That was always the thing that we were always trying to maintain, was this is more than just a body on the table. This is somebody, somebody.

Well, here's the thing. If you don't see it as more than just a body on the table, you may miss a very important clue.

You shouldn't be in that morgue if you don't see it.

No. I mean, really, truly, because, for example, I remember this early case of a terrible sexual homicide. A young woman comes home and The guy's hiding in her closet because he had a key. He's a maintenance worker. I mean, it wasn't solved for a long time, but it's a horrible case. That's horrifying. He was with her all night long, and she died about 6: 00 the next morning. When her body came to the office, we took it in the X-ray room. This was in the early days when we were just starting to use lasers to look for trace evidence on the body because some things will light up and you find them. This was a new thing, and we were in there using the laser, going over her whole body, looking for any evidence. And it was remarkably clean. And the thing that I noticed is that her legs were so cleanly shaven that either they'd been waxed or she just shaved them. And so I'm thinking, well, she'd been out all day. She came home late at night. She didn't die until the next morning. She shouldn't look this smooth. No. And so I thought, I guarantee you this guy made her take a bath, and Yeah.

And I guarantee that he made her shave her legs, and maybe because that was part of his ritual and part of the control that he was exerting over her. But if you're not really looking at that person, You're not going to start thinking things like that and wondering. You're not getting into them and trying to channel what might have happened to them. Exactly. And we owe them that. As painful as that is, we owe them our most sincere and devoted attention at that last moment. I mean, God knows what they've been through. If they don't talk to us and we don't listen, then nobody's going to.

So true. Is there a book that you've read recently that just blew your mind?

This is a book I keep on my desk that blows my mind, and I highly recommend it. It's called The Creative Act, a way of Being by Rick Rubin. And it's all about creativity. And these little quotes and stuff, like it's not unusual for science to catch up with art, eventually. Oh, look at that. It's unusual for art to catch up to the spiritual. But there's all kinds of things in here that if you are a creative, no matter what creative, writer, artist, scientist, podcaster, that it writes your perspective of the creative process and of the things to be mindful of to make it work for you better. That's so cool. And the biggest thing is it teaches you is to let go. Don't try to force things.

I love that, which I think we all need.

Yeah, that's great advice.

Everybody needs that.

But you should order this. I keep it on my desk.

What was that called again? I'm going to write it down.

The Creative Act, A Way of Being by Rick Rubin, who's a music producer.

All right. I want to order that.

Yeah, but look, I'm telling you that it's something that you will keep around. I like to read things. There are novels that I'll look at because the writing is so amazing, like Chris Whittaker.

Oh, yeah.

All the Colors of the Dark. And he is really such a talented, brilliant writer. And I like to look at what he does with words and how he sets the scene. He's a young guy. I'm still learning from people. I have a Hemingway novel that I've been rereading for decades called The Garden of Eden.

Oh, yeah.

And it was published posthumously. And it's not the best example of his work. But it's fascinating because the main character is a novelist, and you know it's really Hemingway's alter ego. But he describes what it's like to get up in the morning and walk and feel the cold stone under his bare feet as he's walking down to the end of this hotel hallway where he is writing in his room and looking out at the ocean and all these things. And he laments about how writing makes him self selfish, and he knows he's selfish. And anybody, hello, if this is what you're doing, you cut out everybody while you're doing it. And those who live with us have to know that if we don't do that, we won't get it done. Exactly. But it does. But I was so grateful and continue to be, in addition to some of the amazing ways Hemingway describes things. But it's nice to read something that you relate to. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

That you I know exactly what he's feeling. I feel the same thing. I may not be Hemingway, but I know what he's feeling.

Yeah, that makes you feel seen for sure.

And honestly, that's what a lot of your books did for me when I started working in the morgue. It was like, Oh, I get this. I know that smell. I know how she's feeling here. I know the frustration in this point. And I find myself now still loving that thing, but also loving to read books about writers where the writer is a main character because I'm like, Yep, I know that frustration now. It is. It's so When you can relate, it's just such a richer story, I feel like.

Yes, I agree. Well, I feel like that's really why we are storytellers. We want people to gather around and to make them feel included and to share an adventure with them. It's not supposed to be this isolative experience where, Oh, look at what I did. Now tell me how good I am. No. In fact, if you really do a good job as a writer, people shouldn't be all that conscious of your writing, what they should see is what you're showing them. They should woof. That scene, you're taking them on a journey. It's not a book, it's a plane ticket. It's a ticket to ride. It's a voyage. We want to take places that Your medical examiner in mind, we want them to take people places that they don't usually get to go. Medical examiner facilities are really that way more than they used to be, because ever since COVID, in particular, many of these places are very closed. They don't want anybody coming in. They're worried about leaks, they're worried about diseases, they're worried about lawsuits, they're worried about everything.

Oh, yeah. Covid was a wild time in the morgue. I was working in the morgue during COVID.

It was a sight to see when Elaina would come home.

Yeah, we had different... The protocols for that went crazy. I mean, it needed to, but it was in particular doing neuro cases, doing a brain cutting. We had to build a box over the person's head and then use our arms in full gear to do it in the box.

You know what? That's exactly what that... If you go to Johnson Space Center and you want to touch a moon rock, they put them in this tank. I think it's filled with nitrogen, and they have the gloves filled in, and you have to manipulate it. It's called a glove box.

That's what we did with the brain cutting.

So you became an astronaut. Yeah.

Look at that. I didn't even know it. So there you go. Look at me. I can add it to my resume.

We're doing all kinds of things.

Well, that's an interesting thing that you could describe because We hope that COVID doesn't come back, but you could have anything that is hazardous, toxic, possibility, radiation, poisons, anything where you have to implement those kinds of protocols. The nice thing is, you know exactly how it works. Oh, yeah.

It's so true. I could describe that to a T.

You could come up with almost anything. I mean, you could have a big piece of the international space station that crashes down to Earth with somebody that didn't make it. And you can't treat that like a normal means because of where it's been. And when the flying saucer shows up with one of those little great people in it, you can take all kinds of precautions.

All the same precautions.

But we hope that the visitors don't die. We don't want them in the morgue.

Yeah, we don't want that. We want to hang with them. Yeah, exactly.

We want to hang with them.

Find out about them. Well, Patricia, thank you so much for joining with us. This has been so much fun.

Well, you're very welcome. It has been fun. This has been amazing. I mean, good luck to both of you with everything.

Thank you So much. Also, just so you know, you're in the acknowledgments of my first book.

We'll have to send it to you. You should. Yeah.

Well, I think your character needs to occasionally give Scarpetta a call. Just compare notes.

Oh, my God. There you go. The dream.

I'm just telling you, they know each other. Are you aware?

I feel like they do.

They have to. I think they do. I think that they are friends, and they didn't tell us, but she doesn't tell me much. She didn't think I exist. But what I'm telling you is, I bet that they're buddies. I bet so. You know what? I bet they hang out with Dexter, both of them.

Oh, 100 %. That's real now. That's canon.

I love it. Well, everybody, check out the latest installment to Patricia's work, Sharp Force, which comes out tomorrow if you're listening to this right away. It's so good. October seventh. And we also can't wait to tune in to Scarpetta next spring. Huge congratulations to you. And thank you again. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Take care. You too.

Thank you. And you're welcome back anytime.

Yeah, please come back.

We will.

Yeah, definitely.

Exactly. All right. We'll see you then.

All right.

Thank you. Bye. How fucking cool was that?

That was so fun.

It was awesome. You're geeking. When she told me that K Scarpetta and Ryan Muller would be friends.

Yeah, that was next level shit. Even I was just like, oh, my God.

Yeah. I'm not even here anymore.

No. Elaina has passed away.

I've shuffled off. I have skipped off this mortal coil after that. Skipped off this mortal coil after that.

Did a little jig off this mortal coil.

It was fucking awesome. We hope you guys dug that as much as we did.

Also, we are going to bring back the Morbid Book Club. Yes.

We've decided Patricia. Because remember, we have a bonus episode to play around with, so we can make it whatever the fuck we want.

Yeah. Patricia inspired us. I haven't read any of the Scarpetta series, and now I want to. You love her. So in the next couple of months, we're going to start with it's Postmortem.

Postmortem is her first book in the series.

All right. So our bonus episode in a couple of months, we'll be going over Postmortem. So everybody start reading if you haven't yet.

Yeah. I figured we'll sprinkle in the Book Club here and there on a bonus episode. So we're going to make those fun. They can be all kinds of things. So if you guys want to get with us on the postmortem thing so we can talk about it and go through it. So you can listen to it. You can read it. You have a couple of months to catch up on it. We'll let you know when it's coming. Also, how fucking awesome is Patricia's voice? Great voice. She is literally Clarice Starling.

Elaina said it to me before we started the interview and I was like, oh, as soon as it started, as soon as she started talking, I was like, oh, wow.

I was like, she created one of my favorite characters, and she sounds like one of my favorite characters.

She is my favorite character.

I'm like, damn Patricia. I love it.

Yeah, that was phenomenal. It really was. So check out Patricia's, all of Patricia's stuff. We got to our Peta coming.

We got- Sharp Force.

Sharp Force coming. And in a couple of months, we'll have postmortem.

Go take it back to the beginning.

So we I hope you keep listening.

And we hope you... Keep it weird.

But not so weird that you don't join us for our Book Club and check out all of Patricia's things.

Because it's so good.

Everything is so good.

Fun, readers. Fun, readers.