The storyteller

Whatever you say about a Martina Cole book, it will carry you along at a terrific lick. Photo / Supplied

Her legions of loyal fans have made Martina Cole a multimillionaire and Britain's best-selling author, though she has long been marginalised by the literary establishment. Still, what does she care? Carole Cadwalladr meets the charismatic author.

It's one o'clock when I turn up at Martina Cole's house, a Tudor pile in a picture-postcard village in south-east England. I don't manage to leave until nearly eight at night. And even then, it's only because I walk forcefully out of her back door, saying, "Right, Martina. That's it. I am going now. I have to go!" And make a dash for my car.

I've run down the batteries of not one but two tape recorders. My note-taking hand is aching. And when I finally arrive home, I have to spend some time sitting quietly in a darkened room. It's not unlike being kidnapped, interviewing Martina Cole, although if you've read any of her novels, you're probably thinking a claw hammer through an eye socket or a shank in the neck and a severed artery or two. In fact, it's a constant, non-stop stream of stories, opinions, homilies, exhortations and offers of tea, coffee, wine, cake, ham salad, water, coffee and wine.

And when I come to transcribe it all, I manage 29 pages, some 16,000 words - or, to put this into context, roughly a fifth of a novel, before I simply give up, overwhelmed.

"Look I've made a ham salad, why don't you have some of that? More coffee? Go on. I'm having a wine, I am, just a refreshing light afternoon one. Shall we go to the pub? Have you seen my chickens? My gals, I call em. C'mon, I'll show you them. Have you seen my library? That's where the ghost is. We see her all the time. Nah. Why would I be scared? I've always said it's the living who'll do you harm, not the dead."

God, she can talk, Cole. It's non-stop. The stories just keep on coming.

She doesn't even need to pause for breath. I begin to suspect that she might have gills. Or that she breathes through her skin like a frog. But then she's written 16 novels, all best-sellers; in fact she's far and away the best-selling British author, translated into 28 languages, trumped in the charts only by the likes of The Da Vinci Code, so it really shouldn't be surprising that she knows how to spin a yarn.

Writers don't usually sound like their books, but Cole does. She's from the darklands in nearby Essex just east of London, and so are they - a brutal world of petty crime, put-upon women and violent men. The voice on the page is her voice in real life. Mistresses are "a bit of strange". Going to prison is "doing a lump". When she's telling me about her grandson, she says how "I just love the bones of him".

What's most unusual, perhaps, is to meet an author who's as charismatic off the page as she is on it. Whatever you say about a Martina Cole book, it will carry you along at a terrific lick. And so it is in her kitchen, too.

It's not just what she says, either. It's the way she says it. She has the kind of gravelly voice that seems tailor-made for voiceover work on a documentary about female serial killers or girl gangs (in fact she's done both).

And yet, despite the claw hammers, the severed arteries, her passion for crime ("I'm a news fanatic, I always have the news on. I love American news, they have much better murders. I'd have much better serial killers if I'd lived there") and the fact that these days she's a multimillionaire, she's just simply very nice: warm, welcoming, totally without affectation. It's my first seven-hour interview (there was a photo-shoot in the middle of it, but even so) but I'd happily hang out in Cole's kitchen any day of the week.

The violence in her books is quite hard to stomach, although it's not without a moral framework. The baddies tend to get done in by other baddies using various methods of dispatch - an apple corer, memorably, or having one's head inserted into a television.

"You know what? I've always had critics right from day one," says Cole. "They go on about the violence but you know, someone once said to me if you [were] a man you'd have been the Irvine Welsh of the south-east [of England]. But I'm not. I'm a blonde. I think there's prejudice against most women. I think there always will be and always has been.

"You still have to do better. It's a male-orientated world, and my job is very male-orientated. Statistically, women buy more books. But statistically men get paid more money. You tell me if you think there's something wrong with that?"

In the books, Cole's women fall into two categories: the downtrodden mugs who throw their lives away for the sake of a man, and those who don't. The ones who stand up for themselves and survive are clever enough to be financially independent and can want a man without actually needing one. Cole was never the downtrodden mug.

"I can't live with anyone except my children, these days, do you know what I mean? Men get on my nerves after a while, they drive me up the wall. I always say, I like a man, I just couldn't eat a whole one'. I think I'm too independent now, I've been on my own too long.

"And I know this sounds terrible, but the more financially independent you get, the less you need them. Plus, men are frightened of me. If they're not frightened of me because I've got too much money, they're frightened of me because they think I'm going to kill them in the night.

"I always used to think that what I needed was a wife. Years ago, I'd have to get Freddie [her daughter] sorted and go and do stuff and you know, if I was a male author, some nice woman would have had a crisply ironed shirt hanging in the wardrobe, wouldn't she? So now I have a housekeeper. And it's fantastic. It's like having a wife, it really is."

The 51 year old is a self-confessed feminist, which just isn't quite what you'd expect somehow, but then Cole herself, with her gold Rolex hanging off her wrist and her Malibu luxury caravan ("it's one of the most expensive in the world, it's got a viewing tower and everything"), her speedboat, organic vegetable patch, chickens and 15th-century half-beamed house with its electric gates, and her voluntary work with prisoners and women's refuges, defies any easy pigeon-holing. She's a total one-off.

"My son says to me, you're eccentric, Mum.' And I say, I choose to say that I'm different.' And he says, you used to drop me off at school in your nightdress.' And I say, that's because I'd been working all bloody night'."

There's a 22-year age gap between her son, Chris, and her daughter, Freddie, who at 11 is almost the same age as her eldest grandson - and they're all close. She tells me how she and Freddie like to watch Bette Davis films together. "We love melodrama. We sit on the sofa and bawl our eyes out." And, when you gather together the facts of her life, scattered as they are like gunshot across her conversation, this isn't so surprising.

* * *

Cole was born the youngest of five to poor Irish Catholic parents in Aveley, Essex, her father a seaman, her mother a nurse. At 15, she was expelled from school (for reading Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers - it was a convent). At 16 she got married, at 17 divorced and then fell pregnant at 18, to the horror and mortification of her mother. She gave birth to son Chris, reconciled with her parents and then Chris' father died, followed soon after by both her parents. "It was so unexpected when my dad died. My mum went to bed literally two days after the funeral and never really got up again. The doctors said it was a broken heart and they'd never known it so young."

"It's like there's some kind of stigma to bad luck. But shit happens. And you can either pick yourself up or you can sit back and think, oh, woe is me'. Or you can think: stuff happens. My son had a really bad car crash when he was 17 and he was in hospital and all these terrible things. When my daughter was born, I got cancer - a tumour on my leg - and had to be operated on but really I just count my blessings, I do."

The biggest of which is her work. "I love work. I do. I'm a worker. I'd take work over a man any day. I'm a patron of Women's Aid and I've always believed you can't put your happiness in someone else's hands. "All my friends were like, I'm having a winter wedding' and I'm going to have a summer wedding with roses and everything'. And I'd say, I'm going to have a good job and have my own flat and a convertible'."

Fast-forward 40 years and that's exactly what happened. She was always a reader, she says, of novels and her dad's shipboard letters ("He loved Greek mythology and telling stories. I think that's where I get it from.")

At 14 she wrote her first novel, at 17 her second, three years later her third. She always wanted to write, she says. Always wanted a writer's life after watching a documentary on Jackie Collins on the TV and envying her walk-in wardrobes.

The first time she was paid for writing was when she had a script accepted by the BBC, but it wasn't until she was 30 that she decided to give it a proper go and sent off a manuscript called Dangerous Lady to an agent.

"I submitted it on the Friday and then on Monday I got this call, this man's voice, you know, very proper, and he said, Martina Cole? Martina Cole, you are going to be a star'."

He sold the first two books for a then record £150,000 and life for her and Chris changed overnight. She's never for a moment stopped being grateful for that. "I try to have a nice day every day. I try as hard as I can. Because there was a long time when I didn't have very many nice days at all. It was just all work and graft and paying bills."

Her agent, Darley Anderson, recalls the first time he read Cole's work. "I was quite new, I'd only been in the game for four years. And I didn't have any particularly well-known clients. But as soon as I read that book, I said to everybody, I have just discovered gold!' I knew straight away what she was. I always say to people that Martina is a genius and I really mean that. Her storytelling is like nobody else's."

Cole might be the best-selling British author today, but it's certainly not through publicity. She's built her readers from the ground-up. And now they're some of the most loyal around. Not only do her books sell 300,000 in hardback, "which nobody else does", says Anderson, but they mostly go in the first few days.

In Britain, there's a huge amount of snobbery towards commercial fiction in literary circles. Cole still finds herself at the receiving end of a certain amount of patronising comments. A well-known female writer once came up to her at a party and said, "well, with the books you write, you can't expect to win any awards". Cole's reply? "That's all right, love. The Booker Prize money wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes."

Such a reputation is, however, unfair as well. Not only was The Take the bestselling hardback of 2005, but it won the Best Crime Thriller at the British Book Awards. In any case, it's all about the storytelling. It's her authenticity that readers respond to. "All that trueness that she stands for", says her publisher at Headline, Tim Hillier. She tells me that some bank robber friends helped her with the plot of The Jump (1995), but I'm not sure how much of this is true and how much is hammed up (although I notice that she has impressive security arrangements at her house).

I can't help thinking the crime's a distraction - family is at the heart of Cole's novels as it is her life. "Your family is either the best thing that ever happened to you or it's the worst thing that ever happened to you. I do believe that. And I always try to show what an effect it has on the children."

And then there's her other great theme - personal responsibility: that only you are responsible for your life.

I say to her, at one point, "you should be a politician", because she's got such strong, passionate views on things like prisoner rehabilitation and equal rights and child protection. "Oh please! They're so two-faced and they're such liars and they're so creepy. You can't change other people's thinking; you've got to just change your own thinking as a woman."

But then hanging out with Cole can have that kind of effect. "I've never played by the women's rules," she says. She hasn't. And in that she's like a breath of fresh air. Or to use a more Cole kind of analogy, a claw hammer through the back of your skull.