Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia, made her fictional debut in Patricia Cornwell’s first crime novel, Postmortem, published in 1990. Cornwell had been both a police reporter and a morgue assistant. And her character was inspired by a real medical examiner she worked with.

Postmortem won a slew of crime fiction awards, including an Edgar and the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure. It was a riveting read – if you surfed the questionable prose style. I applauded the arrival of a female forensic specialist.

Two years after her debut, in 1992, I saw Cornwell in Melbourne where she was promoting the third Scarpetta book, All That Remains. Blonde and blue-eyed, barely over five foot three, she was the spitting image of her protagonist, as described in the books – and just as frosty.

She had stopped over in Los Angeles on her way to Australia, and told us she was being courted by all the major film studios, who wanted to option the books – and being ardently pursued by actors, including Demi Moore, desperate to play Scarpetta. Later, Angelina Jolie would also try to land the role.

Now, more than 35 years (and millions of copies sold) since her debut, Scarpetta is finally on screen, as an Amazon Prime streaming series – and apparently Cornwell is very happy about Nicole Kidman’s central casting as the older Scarpetta.

Not the Scarpetta I imagined

Postmortem, the novel, establishes Scarpetta as a brilliant forensic specialist, hunting a serial killer she nicknames Mr Nobody.

He’s leaving a glittery residue on his victims’ bodies – and a bad smell behind him. With the aid of all the latest technology, from computerised note-taking to DNA testing (then in its infancy), Scarpetta inevitably gets her man,........

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