In light of previous rants in this space in which I railed against various no-brow media subjects, not to mention my tendency in conversation to use the words “Joey Buttafuoco” synonymously with the word “contemptible,” it embarrasses me more than a little bit to admit that I have developed an obsession with the true-crime genre. Frankly, I blame Vanity Fair. A year or so ago, VF ran a piece on Jeffrey MacDonald, the so-called Green Beret Killer, and I read the article, and then I went out and bought Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss and spent the next two days reading the book and neglecting other hobbies like eating and getting work done, and then I got onto Amazon.com and ordered everything else McGinniss has ever written. I blame Unsolved Mysteries also; I can’t seem to dial past that show once I’ve heard Robert Stack intoning the words, “Nobody has seen her since.” I don’t know if I can get away with making fun of boy bands when I keep stealing Ann Rule books off the shelves in the laundry room, but I can’t stop myself.

Graduating from The I-5 Killer to Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series of novels seemed like a natural progression, so I stole Postmortem from the laundry room a few months ago. A bit of background for those of you who haven’t heard of the Scarpetta series because you read real authors: Cornwell’s books follow the adventures of a chief medical examiner named Kay Scarpetta. Apparently, Cornwell has conducted exhaustive research at the offices of various coroners and has sat in on many autopsies in order to lend her writing the proper air of authenticity, which prompted me to snag one of her books in the first place (that, and a Vanity Fair profile of Cornwell herself. More on that later), and which she generally carries off. I thought I would like a Scarpetta book even though I generally avoid crime novels, since I don’t like them as much as I like true stories, but I didn’t like Postmortem. The book included a wealth of crime-scene detail, which I enjoyed, but it got on my nerves. Fast forward to O’Hare airport last Sunday morning, when I discovered that I had inadvertently packed all my reading materials in the suitcase that I checked, so I went to a newsstand and bought the latest Scarpetta paperback, Point Of Origin. I had a feeling that it too would annoy me, but I had a four-and-a-half-hour flight to get through and I’d already read all the interesting magazines. Sure enough, I began to feel the familiar tingle of exasperation after about ten pages.

My problem has as much to do with the crime-novel genre as it does with Cornwell’s writing, but make no mistake – Cornwell’s writing stinks. First of all, I don’t know why book editors continue to let authors like Cornwell (and Judith Krantz, and Danielle Steele, and just about every other best-selling hack who really shouldn’t be left alone with MS Word’s thesaurus function) labor under the delusion that “instantly” and “immediately” mean the same thing, but they really don’t. Regardless of the intended audience or the writer’s lack of innate writing talent, usage errors diminish the text, and someone should have caught that one. In fact, the book is riddled with examples of Cornwell’s inability to come up with the correct synonym for a word, or to use it correctly. Take this sentence from page 78: “‘Let’s talk about the other victim,’ I quietly spoke.” “I quietly spoke”? Again, “said” and “spoke” don’t necessarily function as synonyms, and never mind the fact that she could have used the word “murmured” instead – I’ve seen teen-aged Trekkies less awkward than that word order. Of course, I edit for a living, so I probably catch mistakes like that more easily than most, but that doesn’t explain why Cornwell’s editor didn’t catch them either. Nor does Cornwell confine her blunders to language. At one point, she implies that a horse who stands fourteen hands high is fearsomely tall, a gaffe that a woman who lives half the year in horse-farm country should have known better than to commit (fourteen hands is tall for ponies, not horses). She misidentifies the symptoms of migraine onset; she misspells Imodium (“Immodium”); she believes a civil servant employed by the federal government makes enough bank to live in a gated community. She also cites “Robert Chambers of the Yuppie murder fame,” and I could have forgiven the other oversights, but for an alleged crime novelist not to know the correct name of the Preppie murder case, when it occupied headlines all over the northeast for two years, is inexcusably sloppy.

Cornwell repeats certain twee locutions – “I said with feeling,” for instance, and “rather much” – again and again, and she never settles for two or three concise adjectives when she could use six or seven inexact ones instead. Cornwell also manages to make Kay Scarpetta insufferable whenever she tries to portray her protagonist as oh-so brilliant and brave; sentences like “I had learned long ago not to be intimidated by people who hate” do little to impress this reader. Of course, stellar writing and sympathetic characters hardly represent the hallmark of the true-crime genre, and I think that explains why I dislike Cornwell’s writing – she evinces no sense of humor whatsoever, and she could use a short course in research skills, but in the end, she writes crime novels. In a crime novel, the reader has to wade through tangential jetsam about the narrator’s personal life, and I myself would prefer hard-hitting crime-scene descriptions and detailed depictions of autopsy procedure. Gory and voyeuristic tastes, true enough, but I already know more than enough about hackneyed love stories and partially digested internecine struggles. I read true crime books in order to learn something, and ghoulish though it may sound, The Trite Subplot Of Vengeance takes away from my enjoyment of the bloodletting and detective work. I prefer Law & Order to NYPD Blue for this very reason; I like soapy dramas just fine, but kept separate from cop shows. Every time Point Of Origin strayed into informative territory, it yawed just as quickly back to Scarpetta’s obnoxiously overprotective relationship with her depressed lesbian niece. According to the Vanity Fair profile, Cornwell may have taken part of that story line from real life, but when only my memory of Cornwell’s own stalker-esque affair with a married friend can give a plot pep, it chafes me. From now on, I’ll stick to reruns of In Search OfÖ and Joe McGinniss, because Patricia Cornwell might know a great deal about the business of performing an autopsy, but she knows very little about writing a decent book.

La Cornwell in full effect.

The good stuff.

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