A woman with a killer instinct

SHE’S the 4’6” platinum blonde with the razor-sharp wit who has become a best-selling novelist by transporting hardened criminals, prostitutes, and their violent, blood-streaked lives directly into our living rooms.

The 50-year-old, who appears at the West Cork Literary Festival on Friday next, has 15 bestsellers under her belt – not to mention TV adaptations of her books, The Take, and Ladykillers – and is working on her 16th novel, while researching a documentary for Sky, on Girl Gangs in the UK and LA.

The youngest of five children in a large, Catholic family, in Essex, and with strong Irish roots – her mother, a psychiatric nurse, was from Dublin, her father, a merchant seaman, from Cork, plus she’s a cousin to former lord mayor of Cork, Denis Cregan – Cole knows Cork well.

“I’ve been going to Cork since we were children, we have a huge family there,” she says. But it wasn’t always a case of diamonds and accolades. Never a fan of school, at 19 Cole was a single mother living in a carpet-less council flat in Tilbury with her new-born son.

She often held down three jobs at the same time – and devoted whatever hours were left in the day to writing.

Married in her early 20s, she again juggled writing with running a home and working, but it wasn’t until she was 30 that she decided to seriously devote herself to a full-length novel.

She gave up her job as a secretary, bought an electric typewriter, and decided she would “give it a year.” She’d started working on the manuscript of her debut novel, Dangerous Lady, many years before and it took her 18 months to complete. The rest is history.

Coming from such a respectable and hard-working family, as she does, her insight into the criminal underworld seems nothing short of amazing. But it’s not, really, says Cole: “We lived on the peripheries of that world. We were very respectable – my mum was a nurse and Dad was a merchant seaman, but that kind of world was all around us when we were growing up.”

And, as she points out, men write about violence and nobody raises an eyebrow. Her size – and the platinum blonde hairdo – tend to surprise fans who don’t realise just how tiny and feminine she really is.

“The violence in my books is the violence that happens in that world – if I was a man, they’d say I was just talking about things that are really happening,” she says. It’s just that when they see it coming from her, some people are taken aback. “When I was growing up, I knew people whose families were involved in crime – it was just one of those things.” But she doesn’t glorify violence: “My stuff is violent, but it is a cautionary tale about violence, and is actually anti-violence. A lot of young people get caught up in gang wars and they don’t realise that they cannot leave it easily,” she says.

A recurring Cole theme is the strong woman – and the unpleasant end that awaits those women who display weakness of character: “All those years ago, when I started writing, I just wanted to put a woman in a man’s world. My female characters are very strongly drawn.”

“For the women in my books, it is about looking after yourself. I’m a patron of Women’s Aid and I believe you shouldn’t put your happiness in someone else’s hands. Women are brought up, in a way, to give their lives over to men – and men are reared in a completely different way. Little girls are brought up to wait for their prince – and men are brought up to be in control.”

Financial independence is very important, believes the mother-of-two – as is keeping a part of yourself: “Many women fuse with their husbands and there comes a point in their lives where you don’t know where one begins and the other ends.”

Keep your independence as much as possible, she says.

“I cannot understand people who don’t want to have a job of some sort – it gets them out of the house, and if I was locked up with my children all the time I would run amok. I’m very close to my children and grandchildren and love them dearly, but I always had to work.”

This will be her first appearance at the West Cork Literary Festival.

“I don’t do many things like that, so I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll be in Waterstones, Cork, on Saturday, July 11, at lunchtime, as well.”