'The Booker prize money wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes'
Martina Cole is Britain's bestselling author. But despite the legions of loyal fans who have made her a multi-millionaire, she has long been marginalised by the literary establishment. Still, what does she care?
Carole Cadwalladr writing in The Observer, Sunday 31 May 2009
Martina Cole is Britain's bestselling author. But despite the legions of loyal fans who have made her a multi-millionaire, she has long been marginalised by the literary establishment. Still, what does she care?
Carole Cadwalladr writing in The Observer, Sunday 31 May 2009
Author Martina Cole at home in Kent, England. Photograph: Richard Saker
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.
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.
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