Patricia Cornwell: 'Powerful women are more likely to kill'

It isn?t giving too much away to reveal that all of the criminals in Patricia Cornwell?s new book ? and there are several ? are female. There is one who hammers nails into a child?s head, another who is a convicted sex offender, and a woman on death row for murdering a family as they slept. Then there is the mother who smothers her children and ? my personal favourite ? the woman who condemns her victims to long and painful deaths by Botox (she injects food with the botulinum toxin). Meanwhile, men are reduced to mere walk-on roles, emasculated, castrated ? not literally, though this process does appear in other Cornwell novels ? and cast as helpless husbands and ineffectual police officers.

Red Mist is Cornwell?s 19th Scarpetta novel, the one that will nudge her over the magical 100 million copies mark. It is also the book that coincides with her work finally hitting the big screen. Angelina Jolie has signed up to play Cornwell?s protagonist, Dr Kay Scarpetta, a former chief medical examiner of the state of Virginia and forensic consultant.

In previous novels Scarpetta has dealt with sexual sadists and serial killers who leave limbless corpses, but none have featured quite so many female psychopaths. The main killer in Red Mist poisons her victims, which Cornwell tells me ?is very female?. She says this in a cool, clinical manner, matter-of-factly, as if poisoning people was the most natural thing a woman could do after having periods and growing breasts (I suppose this detachment must be what happens when you have worked in a morgue, spent much of your time shadowing forensics experts and frequently attended autopsies, as Cornwell has.) ?[Poisoning is] a long, drawn-out death, so it?s diabolical, sadistic, psychological, which is a female thing. It?s an inversion of the maternal instinct to nurture.? Cornwell stirs her green tea with a manicured hand, served to her in the Savoy?s finest china.

Female killers being reasonably rare ? rare enough for us to be amazed when Rose West or Myra Hindley were convicted and react hysterically when Amanda Knox was first placed under suspicion ? it seems a bit much that there would be as many as four within the pages of one book. ?Well, I think what you are going to see as society evolves is a lot less distinction between the crimes males and females commit,? says Cornwell when I mention this. ?Murder is about power and the more powerful women get the more it will change the good that they do and the bad that they do. Equality will change our behaviour. I mean, we tend to do what we can get away with.?

Perhaps we should see Red Mist as a particularly twisted piece of feminist literature that says ?Hey boys, you may be good at killing, but us women can murder too!?, and view Patricia Cornwell as a modern-day Germaine Greer let loose in a city morgue. Certainly, if a cartoonist was to draw a feminist, then they would probably come up with someone who looks a bit like Cornwell: she flies helicopters, keeps guns, is married to a woman and ostensibly cuts a tough figure ? today she is wearing cowboy boots, leather jacket, ripped jeans and a belt with a pirate skull on the buckle (she collects skulls ? of course she does).

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568409/s/1a7d1e50/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cbooks0C89216140CPatricia0ECornwell0EPowerful0Ewomen0Eare0Emore0Elikely0Eto0Ekill0Bhtml/story01.htm

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