'I think bank robbers are fabulous'
(Johnathan Margolis, The Guardian, 28 November 2001)

Forget about your wussy McEwans and Amises and Zadies. If you're part of the extended family of London's East End, living out on the south Essex plain anywhere between Stratford and Southend, modern literature for you means one author - a ballsy local woman called Martina Cole, who writes crime novels that are intensely readable, but of a bleakness and violence that makes EastEnders look like Teletubbies.

Richly populated with slags, child abuse, chips, saveloys and cups of Rosie Lee, Cole's novels are ultimately redemptive, even if there are a lot of pages before you get to the redemption. But in places like Essex, they enjoy turning these pages enough to have made 42-year-old Cole one of publisher Headline's top names. Her first novel, Dangerous Lady, was published in 1992 and five more have followed since, making the single mother and former agency nurse a millionaire.

When Cole did a signing for her latest novel, Faceless, on a stall in Romford market recently, she shifted 700 copies. Another 500 went at Costco in Thurrock, which isn't even a bookshop. In Southend, 250. Waterstone's branch in Ilford, the only large bookshop in the area sold all 36 copies it ordered: it's now on the Sunday Times bestseller list, even if on the other side of London, at Waterstone's in Richmond, it has sold just 12 copies.

Cole still lives close to her roots, as well as her material, near Tilbury, though in a big house rather than the carpetless council flat that she shared with her baby when she started writing. She was 20 then, but kept the manuscript of Dangerous Lady in a drawer for a decade. Then an old woman she was nursing told her that when you are old, it's the things you didn't do that you regret, note the things you did. On the way home, she saw an electric typewriter in a shop, bought it for £200 with a tax rebate she'd just received and sat down for six months to recraft her story. Then she picked and agent, Darley Anderson, from the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook because she liked the name and assumed from it that he was a woman. Anderson, an old-school gentleman, thought it was extraordinary that a woman could write something so gritty, but read it in a day and phoned her immediately. '"Martina Cole?, he said, he was ever so posh. I said 'Yes?'. He said, 'You are going to be a star'. I was like, 'S'cuse me?'." Anderson quickly got her a £150,000 publishing deal.

Eight books on, Cole was delighted to expand on her unique literary demographic when we met for coffee at one of the smartest hotels in London, where, gold Rolex resplendent, she confesses to being partial to the in-house Marco Pierre White restaurant.

"One man said to me, 'You were the topic of conversation all night in my pub down Dagenham, because we all got the book and we all read it. All of us were of the same opinion that you know too much about us men and about how we think.'

"I know plasterer," she continues, "who said he used to put John Le Carre covers over my hardbacks so that no one would know that he was reading me. Now he says its great because a man can be seen reading Martina Cole and nobody takes any notice. Oh, yeah, and the police read my books. A policewoman told me the other day, 'We all read your books at the station'. She invited me out in the squad car far a night so I can see what they do."

But it's the criminals who comprise Cole's most enthusiastic market. It's not merely that, as one bookshop manager in east London told her, "Your books are the most stolen ones in the shop". They are also renowned as the most requested books in the prison library system - especially, she says. The Jump, which was about a prison escape.

Amazingly perhaps, except to those who see The Bill and their clients as one big happy family, the prison service seems to love Cole, too. She was invited by the officers to talk to the prisoners in Wandsworth and is a regular creative writing tutor at Belmarsh and Holloway, although at the former, she refuses to teach VPs (vulnerable prisoners, who include rapists and paedophiles). She grew up on a rough estate, and her first boyfriend was an armed robber: she has little time for 2nonces". As she writes one of the characters in a previous book, Two Women: "He was guilty of incest, the worst crime in working-class communities after rape and paedophilia."

So does she still hang out with active criminals? "I still mix with some people who I've known all my life. I think everybody does but just doesn't realise it. I mean not everybody in my life is a criminal. I just think there are different levels of criminals.

"I'd rather mix with bank robbers than people with no soul. They're regular people who just took a different path. To me they're a fabulous crowd. I never look at anybody's history, because I don't want to know and get preconceived ideas. Whatever they've done, it's wrong, but they've done it and been sentenced and while they get 20 years, a rapist or paedophile will get seven.

"And there are the Jeffrey Archer ones who walk away, and I do believe that you can buy justice in this country. Archer was on my lifer's wing at Belmarsh for a while. It was so funny. Apparently he told them all not to take any notice of me and my writer's class because my books were all rubbish."

I wonder whether people in her classes like to follow her example by writing about crime. "No, they actually write romance and poetry, especially love poetry. A good poem is valuable on the black market in prison, because people send it to their wives. For a lot of the wives it's the only time that they have been romanced in their lives. A prisoner's wife I know said, 'God forgive me for saying this, Tina, but I love it when he's banged up, because we all know where he is'. I said, 'Who do you mean by 'We?' She said, 'Me, his mum and his girlfriend.'"

Cole is happy to acknowledge that her view of "honest" criminals may be a little romanticised. "Every other woman at my book signings says to me, 'Where can I get a Patrick Kelly?' [Patrick Kelly was the criminal from The Ladykiller who ended up with the policewoman.] Women adore him, but he is a baddie.

"Now, I know it's a paradox that I write about so much violence, because I am very anti-violence. I've just become a patron of Chelmsford Women's Aid to help them raise awareness of the issues, which I try and do through the books anyway. My books don't condone violence. Men write the most violent books and they don't explain why it happened and the knock-on effect of it.

"The secret of my books, why so many people enjoy them, is that I write about people who have been violently treated and what happens to them as a result."

This article was taken from The Guardian, 28 November 2001.

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