Martina Cole

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2018

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Martina Cole is a British crime writer, known to her fans as the Queen of Crime. Martina has written 24 novels, 15 of which have topped the original fiction sales charts - more than any other author. She has sold more than 16 million books around the world, and her work has been translated into 29 languages. She also works in prisons, leading reading schemes and writing workshops for prisoners. Martina grew up in Essex, the youngest of five children born to Irish parents. She was expelled from her convent school at 15 for reading a book by Harold Robbins. She married at 16, divorced at 17 and then had a baby at the age of 18. She wrote stories and scripts in her spare time to amuse herself, whilst taking on a series of low-paid jobs, including cleaning, waitressing, stacking shelves and leafletting. At the age of 31, she re-discovered one of her early attempts at a novel, and decided to send it to an agent. She chose Darley Anderson from the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook because she liked the sound of the name. He quickly contacted her and told her she would be a star. He was right: she received an advance of £150,000, then a record for a first time novelist. She has written a best-selling crime novel almost every year ever since. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:30.0	Music
0:50.0	My castaway today is the novelist Martina Cole.
0:54.0	They call her the Queen of Crime, and that's just the way she likes it.
0:58.0	With over 16 million books sold, she's carved out a comfortable position at the very top of the bestseller list.
1:05.0	With stories of family, revenge, gangsters and gore, fairy tales, they are not.
1:11.0	Which is odd, because parts of her own life story make Cinderella seem a touch lame.
1:16.0	Expelled from her Convent School for Reading Racy Novels, she was pregnant by 18,
1:21.0	working at among other things as a cleaner, a shelf-stacker to try to make ends meet, they often didn't.
1:27.0	In the early 90s, she posted off the manuscript of her first book to an arbitrary agent,
1:32.0	who called just three days later to tell her she would be a star.
1:37.0	He was right.
1:38.0	Her first novel was sold for a record sum, made it to number four in the bestseller list,
1:43.0	and was turned into a TV drama.
1:45.0	She's pretty much written a hit book every year since.
1:48.0	She says, I do like my characters, but a couple of times I've thought you are doing my head and you've got to go.
1:54.0	I've always said I have the best job in the world, and with people I want to be with all day,
	...

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