Serpent Papers set to soar
When John le Carre's grand- daughter attracted a six-figure publishing deal for a three-book series at Frankfurt Book Fair 15 months ago, there was a certain feeling of "of course" about the whole thing. But on reading The Serpent Papers, book one in Jessica Cornwell's literary trilogy, it becomes clear this debutante has what it takes to be a career author. Just like her grandfather.
Cornwell, 28, was born in California and carries her British grandfather's true surname.
Le Carre was born David John Moore Cornwell and from the get-go wrote under a pen-name while he worked as a British intelligence officer. He then became a full-time writer after his identity was revealed to the Russians by British double-agent Kim Philby, who le Carre fictionalised as the traitor Bill Haydon.
Jessica Cornwell confirms she comes from a family of writers and says she believes her home life was an inspiration for her creativity.
"My most profound influence is actually the environment I grew up in," she says from her study at her parents' California home. "I have an American accent, I was California raised, my parents were British and come from a literary family in the UK, but I grew up in very rural California. There's huge mountains, big weather. It was a very different lifestyle than the rest of my family had in the UK.
"My grandfather has been a huge inspiration - I have an enormous respect for his work - and has been in our lives massively as a creative presence."
Cornwell's father Stephen is a film producer and writer, and one of three sons from the literary heavyweight's first marriage to Alison Sharp.
The father-and-son duo worked together on last July's A Most Wanted Man, with another son, Simon Cornwell, who acted as a producer. The thriller stars the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and is based on le Carre's 2008 novel of the same name.
Le Carre's only child to current wife and former Hodder & Stoughton book editor Valerie Eustace is also a writer. Nicholas pens fantasy novels and non-fiction under the pseudonym Nick Harkaway.
"We grew up in the film scene," Cornwell says. "On both sides, professional writing was very much part of the path you could follow."
Her mother's parents are both novelists, with her mother Clarissa Cornwell's father being poet and creative writing lecturer Tom Ingram, while his wife Marie Ingram has written under a closely kept pseudonym. His former partner and book collaborator was the British artist Barbara Jones.
Besides a fine family lineage, Cornwell has an undergraduate English degree from Stanford University and a master's degree in theatre from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.
She worked as a film industry runner at Working Title Films in London before becoming a curator at Santozeum, on the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea.
The eldest sibling of eight children, Cornwell now splits her time between the US and a base in Islington, in London, writing her literary thrillers full time.
"I started working on The Serpent Papers pretty seriously about 2 1/2 years ago. I had been thinking about it for a long time. I would get up in the morning, write a little bit . . . I was working full time at that point and then later that year for family reasons I had to come home and that is when I took a leave of absence from my work and actually, magically, that became what I was doing," she says.
Cornwell helped out her family after her sister's diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, writing full time for six months and producing her first draft.
She then pitched the manuscript to a number of agents, with the prestigious Curtis Brown agency quickly picking up the trilogy before Frankfurt.
Her novel was signed for seven markets, to publisher Quercus in the UK and Australia. In Australia, Quercus is an imprint of Hodder owner Hachette, with the house also publishing le Carre's novels under its Hodder and Sceptre imprints.
Frankfurt was an achievement that changed everything, Cornwell says.
"I committed to writing full time, a little bit over a year ago, so it's still something that's very new and exciting," she says.
The young writer says she hopes to keep writing full time in the future and can see herself doing stand-alone novels.
"I have built a whole world, the Anna Verco universe, and I'm definitely writing the next two," she says.
Verco, her lead character, is an academic who sidelines as a book thief. She stumbles upon age-old letters in a chapel and their contents prompt her to go to Barcelona to investigate a linked cold-case murder - all while hunting a medieval book which started it all, The Serpent Papers. Intuitive Anna is searching for the key to unlock the book's secrets but is unaware the answer is closer to home than she thinks.
Cornwell has produced a mesmerising, tightly written tale for history lovers and fans of good magical realism.
The Times said at the weekend she had made a triumphant debut after publicists called her a literary Dan Brown. The Observer this month named her among its promising new faces for 2015, while The Guardian argued some would consider her first novel high-end Da Vinci Code, while Grazia acknowledged her main character had drawn comparisons to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Lisbeth Salander.
Cornwell is in negotiations for film rights for her Serpent Papers world and recognises that all art is achieved in concert with others.
"It's been an incredibly profound experience and I'm excited to see what'll happen," she says of the publishing experience.
"When you make something, it lives with you."
