The infamous Black Widow, convicted killer turn successful author, is single again....

England's bravest bachelors please form an orderly queue. The so-called Black Widow is potentially in the market for a fourth husband… Linda Calvey was locked away for 18 years for murder and prior to that, three-and-a-half years for armed robbery. A police officer nicknamed her the ‘Black Widow’ after all her husbands and lovers seemed to end up either dead or locked up.

Her third husband, businessman George Ceasar, whom she met in a pub on day release from prison, died of cancer in Spain in 2015, and Linda, now 77, and a great-grandmother, has remained single ever since.

As the inspiration for the leading character in Lynda La Plante’s hit TV series Widows, it would take a certain kind of man to take her on but she is undoubtedly still very attractive, looks at least a decade younger than she is, and is both warm and witty.

“I am not seeing anyone at the moment but I would never say never to anything, and my children always say nothing I ever do would surprise them,” she laughs.

Since being released from prison in 2009, Britain’s most notorious female gangland boss, has reinvented herself as a hugely successful author of both fiction and non-fiction bestsellers.

'Hope' is the second of three titles in Linda’s gripping new gangland series set in London’s East End and published this week. The trilogy follows three sisters as they navigate the gritty and dangerous East End gangland life.

Linda’s fierce new female lead Hope works with her mother and sisters in a local brothel but finds herself in Holloway prison charged with a crime she did not commit.

“I do base my characters on women I have met in prison and my work has been described by critics as ‘authentic’ which it is of course,” she smiles. “Unlike most crime fiction writers, I am actually from that world although I am a very different person these days,” she hastens to add.

It was fellow crime writer Martina Cole who first got Calvey a literary agent and encouraged her writing, recognising she had a real talent for story-telling, not to mention a mine of real life material to draw on.

But Linda had begun her writing career long before that, penning letters to her family every night she spent in her prison cell.

“I come from a very large and supportive family and it is amazing how interesting you can make the most mundane of circumstances sound in a letter when you have to,” she says.

“It was a way to reassure them, my parents in particular, who have always stood by me, and were looking after my children, that I was OK. When I was first locked up I only had a couple of hour visits a month so letters were a way of keeping in touch and keeping those relationships going.”

Aside from her parents and children Neil and Melanie, now in their 50s, Linda also corresponded with Reggie Kray. He wrote to her asking if they could correspond and she agreed. Reggie Kray proposed to Linda twice but she declined.

Nevertheless it was Linda who Reggie called when he received the news that his brother Ronnie, being held in the maximum security hospital Broadmoor, had died in 1995.

“I was asked by the prison officer if I would accept a phone call from Reggie,” Linda explains. "It had been on the TV news that morning Ronnie had died so I of course said yes and it was arranged that I would speak to him an hour later.

“He was distraught on the phone, especially as he had only just heard his request to visit Ron, who was seriously ill, had been turned down. He actually heard the news Ron had died from another con. I told him he mustn’t give up, he must keep going and he said he would.”

Not giving up is very much a theme for the woman who has steadfastly refused to admit her guilt over the murder of her lover Ron Cook. To this day the former armed robber insists she did not shoot him in a botched hired hit man attack despite evidence to the contrary. To admit it would have seen her serve less than half of the time she did serve.

“Even though I knew I could be freed if I admitted it I just couldn’t admit to something I didn’t do,” she says. “I was happy to serve my sentence for armed robbery because I’d done the crime and was therefore prepared to do the time but not this.”

So instead she adapted to prison life the best she could. After being moved around to 14 different jails during her sentence she inevitably crossed paths with child murderers Rose West and Myra Hindley, possibly the only other female prisoners more famous than her. It is well known she slapped the latter across the face when she first came across her in the prison laundry at Cookham Wood Prison but the much-hated Hindley never reported it and Calvey largely remained out of trouble during her lengthy sentence, and was in many ways a model prisoner.

In fact she has even written a book about how to survive jail. Life Inside is a memoir about the harsh reality of prison.

The glamorous gangster’s moll turned hardened criminal, with her bleached blonde perfectly coiffed hair and impeccable dress sense, even managed to keep up her image inside. In fact she was given a job in the prison library, not because she ever read much, but because she looked the part.

She said: “I always tried to keep up appearances. My clothes were always washed and ironed and I presented myself as best I could even though you were only allowed three outfits. That was important to me.” During those long years behind bars Linda missed her daughter Melanie’s wedding, her son Neil’s engagement, not to mention the births of her seven grandchildren.

She is now also a great-grandmother to eight and lives alone in Chigwell, Essex, with many of her extended family living close by. “My family are all respectable and law-abiding. The younger ones don’t know about my past,” she says. “I always told my two children not to follow in mine and their father’s footsteps. The price you pay isn’t worth it and they have seen that first hand.”

Their father, Linda’s first husband, armed robber Mickey Calvey, was shot dead by a police marksman fleeing an armed raid.Madly in love at 19, Linda would check out handy escape routes, and then, after his death, took part in robberies herself, both as a getaway driver and a shotgun-wielding robber alongside hardened male robbers.

“We wanted more than we were born to, and yet we had no way of getting it… not legally, at least,” she wrote in her first memoir.

Now she believes she would never have been attracted to that world if it wasn’t for meeting Mickey. In fact, she barely recognises the woman she once was.

“After he died something changed in me and I felt like I had to carry on, to avenge his death in some way,” she says. “I enjoyed the money and the power but I am so relieved neither of my children went down that road because they so easily could have. Now I wouldn’t so much as pinch a sweet.”

After Mickey died, her next partner Ron Cook, was also violently despatched while on day release from jail.Linda and a man called Danny Reece, whom she later married in jail, were convicted of Cook’s murder. Although she denies the murder she doesn’t deny how ridiculous it was to go on to marry Reece when they were both locked up.

“I realise how silly this must sound but when you are locked up for so long and it is so mundane a wedding causes so much excitement. All the girls on my wing wanted to help make the dress and be bridesmaids. I was having second thoughts but they persuaded me to go along with it. It was a day out for all of us.”

Linda had married her first husband while he was chained to warders in a register office and to her second in a prison chapel. But her third marriage to her beloved George was at St Peter and St Paul’s, an 11th century church in Dymchurch, Kent, in front of 100 guests, a far cry from her previous nuptials.

Today she is busy working on the third book in the trilogy, called Charity, which is due out next year. She’s also contemplating writing another non-fiction work, this time about the Old Bailey, a London landmark she is all too familiar with.

Linda would also like to go into prisons to talk to women about how it is possible for them to turn their lives around. “So many women I met inside were there because of horrible circumstances and many didn’t deserve to be there but they had given up hope,” she explains. “I am proof though it is possible to start again and be successful when society has written you off and that they shouldn’t give up on themselves.”

Linda’s friend Tracy Mackness, a convicted drug dealer, now runs an award-winning gourmet sausage business The Giggly Pig Company.“Tracy is a hugely successful businesswoman now and goes into prisons to give talks and I would really like to do the same, to give something back,” she smiles. “She and I are rare success stories of the prison system which unfortunately is failing so many other women.

“But like the title character in my new book, there has to always be Hope.”

*Hope by Linda Calvey is out now in hardback (Mountain Leopard Press, £18.99), available from all good book retailers