Martina Cole interview: 'I know the world of criminals'

It's 25 years since Martina Cole wrote her first bestseller, Dangerous Lady, now reissued in an anniversary hardback. She's just about to publish her 24th book, Damaged, the fourth to feature her tough-minded heroine DCI Kate Burrows, and you do not need a crystal ball to predict it will nip to the top of the charts. The bestselling British female crime writer of modern times has now sold more than 16 million books.

With their propulsive plots of murder and mayhem and their criminal underworld settings, invariably the badlands of Essex or London's East End, Martina's novels are known for an unflinching gritty realism. Yet, she argues, they are also determinedly anti-violence: stories of bad men and put-upon women, with the crims almost always coming to a sticky end. "Men write violent books," she says, in a voice that sounds as though she's been gargling with razor blades. "But they never write about the after-effects. I write about the women caught up in that world, women forced to become stronger because of their situation."

She knows a bit about women triumphing against the odds. For all her novels' pulse-quickening storylines, the most fascinating tale of the lot is Cole's. She was born in Essex to Irish Catholic parents and expelled from her convent at 15 for reading Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers.