It's one o'clock when I turn up at Martina Cole's house, a half-beamed Tudor pile in a picture-postcard Kent village, which is all rambling roses and late-model Mercedes, and 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, whereas in actual fact it's a constant, non-stop stream of stories, opinions, homilies, exhortations and offers of tea, coffee, wine, cake, ham salad, water, coffee. Ah go on, a little glass of wine. And when I come to transcribe it all, I manage 29 pages, or 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 gels, I call 'em. C'mon, I'll show you them. See this, it's from the 15th century, total mess when I moved in. 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, Martina. 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 bestsellers; in fact she's far and away the bestselling British author today, 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, although somehow it is.
Writers don't usually sound like their books, but Cole does. She's from the Essex darklands, and so are they - a brutal world of petty crime, and 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, they'll carry you along the story 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 east London vowels that seem tailor-made for voiceover work on a documentary about female serial killers (which in fact she's done, it was called Lady Killers) or girl gangs (which she's also done). And yet, despite the claw hammers, and the severed arteries and 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. We're always 10 years behind them, aren't we?"), and the fact that these days she's a multi-millionaire, she's just simply very nice: warm, welcoming, totally without affectation. It's my first ever seven-hour interview (there was a photo-shoot in the middle of it, but even so) but I'd happily hang out in Martina's kitchen any day of the week.
A week or so later, I see her at the launch of her new drama serial. Her novel, The Take, has been turned into an expensive, glossy, four-part drama by Sky and was given the kind of expensive launch and celeb-studded party usually reserved for feature films. And it's full of people who've had similar tsunami-style encounters with Cole .
Elaine Pike, Sky's head of drama, who commissioned The Take, tells me, "I was your classic stupid, posh, girl executive and I didn't think her books were for me until I was sent one and read it and was completely gripped. And then I went off to meet her four years ago, and I was completely terrified. I mean, have you read the books? And she was just like, 'Sit yourself down, babe. Have a glass of wine.' What amazes me though is how loved she is. I've been to one of her book launches and people just absolutely love her."
They're unlikely to be disappointed by the drama, either. A very well-spoken man in a pinstriped suit comes up to Martina while I'm standing next to her and says, "It's a very dirty piece of work. Very dirty! And I mean that in the nicest possible way."
It is. But then that's the way that she writes them. The first two episodes are set in the 80s and it's a bit like a cross between The Sopranos and Ashes to Ashes. At the end of the first episode, one of the characters maims his father with a garden trowel while his wife is giving birth to his son. And at the end of episode two, he rapes his best friend's wife. I shan't spoil things by telling you how things turn out, but it's fair to say it's not Miss Marple.
At the Q & A after the screening Neil Biswas, the writer who adapted it for the screen, says, "Martina's got balls, basically."
She has. And the violence 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. They go on about the violence but you know someone once said to me, if you was a man you'd have been the Irvine Welsh of the south-east. But I'm not. I'm a blonde. Worst of all I'm a blonde Essex girl. Do you know what I mean? And I don't just mean that there's still prejudice against Essex girls. I think there's prejudice against most women. I think there always will be and always has been.
"I don't care what nobody says, you still have to do better. If you're in a job, 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 to be able to 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 fucking nerves after a while, they drive me up the wall, if you'll excuse my French. 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."
She's 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") and her speedboat and her organic vegetable patch and her chickens and her 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 night dress.' And I'd 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 moved from Essex, where she's lived all her life, to be nearer Chris and his wife and she tells me how she and Freddie like to watch Bette Davis films together. "Because 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.
She 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's The Carpetbaggers - it was a convent), at 16 she got married, at 17 divorced and then "I was only 18 when I fell with my Chris." She got pregnant to the horror and mortification of her mother, gave birth, reconciled with her parents and then Christopher's father died, followed soonafter by both her parents. "It was so unexpected when my dad died and 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 was totally devastating. "But the thing about having children is, when you've got no support, you just have to get up and get on with it. You have to do it. And I worked so hard. I did any job
I could. I was living in this hostel in Tilbury until I got a council house - no carpets, nothing; and I was a wine waitress and I used to take Chris with me, and then I'd come home and stuff leaflets into magazines until four in the morning.
"But I would work every hour God sent because I wanted to earn. We always had a holiday every year. And he was always well dressed, you know? He had to be because I was a single mother, I had to show people. A friend of mine said to me the other day, 'Oh Tina, you used to break my heart, the things that happened to you' And I said, 'Actually I felt like that about you at times.' And I think she was a bit offended. You know? Like, fucking cheek! Not as unlucky as you.
"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. Oh, I'm so unlucky. Everybody around me is dropping down like flies.' Which is how I felt at one point in my life. 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. And I think that's what happens. Young gels are brought up with Cinderella and everything like that. And boys are brought up with wank mags.
"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 they'd say, "What about you? 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 books and novels and her dad's shipboard letters ("He loved Greek mythology and telling stories. I think that's where I get it from.") And then at 14 she wrote her first novel, 17 her second, and 21 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 she plucked out of The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook
"And 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 of £150,000 and life for her and Chris changed overnight. And 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."
When I ask her agent Darley Anderson for his version of events, it's almost word-for-word the same. "Ah," he says when I tell him who I am and which paper I'm from. "The posh papers have arrived. They always catch up in the end."
He tells me the story though: "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 straightaway 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."
Darley has been her agent for 20 years, and Tim Hillier at Headline has been her publisher for 20 years, and Louise Page, her publicist, has been her publicist for 20 years.
"And that tells you a lot in itself. Martina is a very loyal person. She has an unerring instinct of who to trust. And any of us who've been involved with her, our businesses have always been on the up. She's been the making of my agency."
Her publishers, Hodder Headline, were a new start-up when they signed her. Hillier says, "We had no money and we were totally untested but Sue Fletcher, our editorial director, came
to me and said, 'I have found the best story writer of my entire career and I don't even want you to read it, I just want you to sign this cheque,' and we've just sort of grown up together."
Not that you'll have ever seen a review of any of the novels in this paper, or in any of the broadsheets. Cole might be the bestselling 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.
There's a huge amount of snobbery towards commercial fiction in literary circles and although you'll see Ian Rankin on Newsnight these days, 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." Martina's reply? "That's all right, love. The Booker prize money wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes."
It's unfair as well. The Take wasn't only the bestselling hardback of 2005, but won the Best Crime Thriller at the British Book Awards. And in a literary writer, her use of dialectal expressions would be commented on and praised. High-brow writers using working-class or regional voices is the kind of thing that wins awards - think Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre or London Fields by Martin Amis. Whereas Martina Cole simply is that voice.
And, in any case, it's all about the story-telling. It's her authenticity that readers respond to. "All that trueness that she stands for", says Tim Hillier. She tells me that some bank robber friends helped her with the plot of The Jump, 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). And at the launch, I overhear her telling a schoolfriend, from Essex, "That Brian Cox is ever such a nice man [he plays Ozzy - the king of crime - in The Take]. And you know how I based him a bit on Eddie? And while I was talking to him Eddie came up and said hello."
I missed Eddie, thank God. But I can't help thinking the crime's a distraction. Family is at the heart of her 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, because I do believe that. And I always try and 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. And she says, "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 Martina 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 Martina kind of analogy, a claw hammer through the back of your skull.