Crime writer Martina Cole's Cork cousins keep her grounded

Martina Cole may have sold millions of books, but her Cork cousins help the crime author keep her feet on the ground, writes Suzanne Harrington

MARTINA COLE writes crime novels. One a year for the past 24 years, apart from one year when her son had a motorbike accident. Each novel does better than the previous one, so that she regularly outsells John Grisham and Stephen King, and is up there with Dan Brown in number one best-seller land. She has never won a literary prize, and says that the Booker prize money wouldn’t keep her in fags.

In 2011, her sales exceeded £150m (€176.8m) , the first British female novelist writing for adults to do this; around the world, in over two dozen languages, she has achieved sales of 15 million; her hardbacks regularly sell between 200,000 and 300,000 copies alone.