CLOSE
by Martina Cole Headline, £18.99; 512ppREADING A MARTINA COLE novel is a surprisingly physical experience. A few chapters in to her latest, Close, I had to close the pages and, heart pounding, take a deep breath.
Violent doesn't quite sum it up. This is hardcore. So I had a feeling that meeting the woman herself would be an experience. She did not disappoint. Cole is tiny, blonde and impeccably groomed — with a gob like a bottle rocket. Everything that comes out of her mouth is hilarious, outrageous or utterly filthy: spending an hour with her is as exhilarating as reading one of her novels.
But I might not need to tell you about that — her lifetime sales stand at seven million, so the chances are that you’ve read one.
She admits that her novels are pretty full-on. “When I’m writing it, I’m too into the story to notice,” she says. “But when I read them back I sometimes wonder where it comes from.”
But she says that people question this only because she is a woman. “They’d never say to Stephen King or Ian Rankin — ‘Gosh, your books are so violent!’ If I was a man, I’d be ‘the Irvine Welsh of the South East’,” she says, mimicking a posh voice and laughing at the image.
For many years she felt that the publishing industry looked down at her as “the bleached blonde Essex girl who writes those books”. Now she doesn’t care.
Her first novel, Dangerous Lady, published in 1992, was swiftly followed by a television adaptation and she has gone on to write, on average, one bestseller book a year (Close is her thirteenth). The Take, her previous book, was the biggest selling adult fiction hardback of 2005 and won Crime Thriller of the Year at the British Book Awards. With sales like that, who needs a review in The Times Literary Supplement? Despite her phenomenal success, and the colossal amount of money that it has brought, she swears that she hasn’t changed. She still lives in Essex — although now with electric gates and a pool — and she still knocks around with the same crowd from school.
After the Book Awards she got her driver, Peter Bates (an old friend to whom the latest book is dedicated) to stop off at Wapping High Street for fish and chips. Having money is great, she says, but she insists that one of the best things about her success is the chance to do something worthwhile with it.
That is teaching creative writing to inmates at Wandsworth and Belmarsh prisons. “One of the first things I say to them is the one thing a writer needs is time,” she says. “and that’s something you’ve got plenty of.”
The men who take her classes are often fans (her books are the most borrowed in prison libraries) and she says that they all have a great time. The men usually go on to take literacy courses, but as far as Cole is concerned, “even if they only come out of it writing a better letter home then it’s worthwhile. I’m a great believer in redemption.”
Sometimes she already knows the people inside. “I remember I was on the quad at Wandsworth when they were giving me a tour and someone was shouting out ‘Tina!’ from one of the cells, ‘Tine! it's me!’ and I was like ‘Oh, it must be one of my fans’.”
Born into a large Irish Catholic family in Aveley, Essex, in 1959, Cole was, by her own admission, “a cow — I was expelled from school and couldn’t stand being told what to do”.
Her first boyfriend was a bank robber, “he used to pick me up from school in a blue Jag”, which, in her world, wasn’t something terrible. “My dad used to say banks got no soul,” she explains. By 19 she lived alone with a baby in a carpet-less council flat in Tilbury, with the odds stacked against her.
“Back then it was seen as an awful thing to have a baby on your own,” she says. “But then I saw this perfect little person and fell madly in love.” She says that her son, Christopher, gave her something to work for. Cole is a grafter with no idea of how to be a victim. I put it to her that she would have been successful in whatever she did.
“I would like to think so,” she says. “My dream was to work in a library, but I was always going to be a bit too erratic for a job like that.”
When she had her son she was a pink-haired punk. “I can still remember the midwife’s face when I was giving birth to him,” she laughs, and describes how, when she was really hard up, she would dress her son as a punk too and go to the Tower of London, where Japanese tourists would pay to take their photo.
With her affinity for the criminal world (and vice versa — her books are also the most stolen from bookshops in Essex and East London) and the lawlessness that characterises her books, she has been accused of romanticising violence. This, she argues, is “complete bollocks”. She points out that in her serial-killer book, Ladykiller, the reader knows every girl before she dies, unlike the standard approach where an anonymous, beautiful woman is suddenly murdered.
“My books show the causes of violence and its after-effects. You’ve got to talk to male authors about romanticising violence,” she says. Her books are also unusual in showing the victim’s point of view.
“Everyone can name the Yorkshire Ripper,” she says. “No one can name one of his victims.”
Cole’s defence of her books is, by implication, a defence of her fans. She recalls a review of a Jackie Collins book that contained a single word — crap. “I remember thinking how offensive it was,” she says. “Not only to her, but to all those thousands of people who read her.”
She doesn’t set too much store by the opinion of critics, explaining that she will often read a book fêted by the critics only to discover that they too are “a load of bollocks”.
As for her own work, she gets her feedback from fans and her relationship with her readers is about as far from the Margaret Atwood long pen school of thinking as you could get. Her annual book signings on a stall at Romford market have been become huge (900 people turned up last year) but she can still remember faces. She tells me about the 96-year-old woman who comes every year and tells her “you give me criminals and prostitution from the comfort of my own home” and the girl who had come all the way from Birmingham with her baby. “I was like, ‘get the girl a sandwich!’ ” Her fans are loyal and Cole loves having them behind her, but says the only person she writes for is herself. “I just write something that I’d want to read. That’s my only trick.”
So far it seems to be working. She recalls the morning when her agent Darley Anderson, rang to ask if she had read The Times yet. We had reviewed a book and said that it was in the genre of Martina Cole. “He said ‘you’ve made it — you've been mentioned in The Times and you’ve got your own genre.’ I was like, ‘Brilliant, in that case I'm going back to bed’.”
Cole tells me — lots of times — how lucky she feels and how much she loves her life, and that it was many years before she could say that and really mean it. People tell her what a rough time she has had — her parents died when she was young, she has been hard-up, had cancer and been through two divorces — but she doesn't regret any of it.
“I remember years ago when I was working in an old people’s home, this old lady was dying hard and she told me you only regret the things you didn’t do,” she tells me. “And I think, yeah — so what if you make a cock-up along the way. Your life makes you the person that you are.
“Anyway,” she says, with a wink. “If I hadn't had the life I did, then I couldn’t write the books, could I?”
EXTRACT from CLOSE by Martina Cole
Jimmy Brick was getting anxious; the hall was filling with people and presents, the DJ kept playing Slade for two fifteen-year-olds dressed as twenty-year-olds and the buffet was being eyed up by a bunch of teenage degenerates with cropped hair and painfully new trousers. The tables were nearly all taken now and people were busy with drinks and snacks and were settling down for the night’s entertainment. The parish priest was wandering around like a junkie with a Giro and the bar staff, like the priest, were already half-pissed. Most of the real guests had arrived and these were seated near Patrick and Lil’s table, as arranged. He had a few blokes moving through the place, watching out for the first hint of trouble and under strict instructions not to harm anyone physically until they had been removed from the premises.
The Palmers were there, their kids all getting ready to slide across the wooden dance floor in their brand new white socks and the degenerates Jimmy had been keeping his beady on had already whipped a plate of sandwiches and a bowl of trifle from the buffet table. Things like this could be treacherous if it was not policed properly, and he was making sure that this party went off with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of enjoyment.
Annie saw the man at Lil’s front door and for a split second she wondered if she was imagining things, but when he shoved past her and she saw three other men come bundling into the hallway behind him she realised that her first impression had been correct. The first man was covered in blood and she heard Lil scream out as she was knocked flying. Then she saw that the men had knives and saw them start stabbing Patrick. He was trying to fight back, was attempting to stay on his feet but they had the advantage; there were four of them and he couldn’t take them all on at once. As he lashed out they were laughing at him. Then she saw the blood that was everywhere and she fainted.
Pat Junior and Lance watched . . . while holding their little sisters in their arms, pushing the twin’s faces into their shoulders to try to spare them the sight of the carnage below.
