The undisputed Queen of British Crime is… well, it’s Agatha Christie, but Martina Cole has spent the last twenty years having an almighty tilt at the title.  Having sold 10m books, and recently become the darling of Sky1’s Thursday night programming, Cole writes gangland thrillers that are about as authentic as it gets.

The Faithless is the 18th book to issue forth from her bloodstained typewriter, and introduces us to the Tailor family, a clan dysfunctional in the extreme, that makes the Borgias “look like the Mickey Mouse Club.”  At their heart is Cynthia Tailor, a demanding, highly sexual woman, for whom the ends invariably justify the means.  She runs her household with the proverbial iron fist, waging psychological war against her husband, her parents, even her own children, in her quest to get what she wants.  The book follows the Tailors, and their associated spouses, over a period spanning three decades, from the early eighties to the late noughties, as they lurch from crisis to crisis, including gang violence, felicide, drug addiction, prison sentences, and, unsurprisingly, murder.  The usual cheerful stuff from Essex’s finest then.
Cole’s prose is accessible (cynics may say simplistic), leaping around the minds of the principle characters as third person narrator, opening up each member of the cast with the minimum of either frippery or dialogue.  The language is what the BBFC would describe as “constant, coarse,” but then, this is essential given the milieu under examination.   There is a powerful hypnotic quality to The Faithless.  Cole spends far more time inside her characters’ minds than depicting events around them.  The effect can occasionally make the action seem distant, as if observed through a telescope, but overall, and certainly towards the finale, it serves to make The Faithless yet another example of why Cole will not be beaten for gangland character study.

As with much of Martina Cole’s work, the arcs of those characters are impressively expansive.  During the course of the book, two generations of the Tailor family are born, and Cynthia in particular ranges from embittered egocentricity, to psychopathy, to a flirtation with redemption, and back to psychopathy again.  Her children grow from toddlers to young adults, from indulged horrors to tragic figures, partly through their own misguided actions, but overwhelmingly because of the vindictive machinations of their mother.  As a villain, Cynthia is outstanding.  She drags the narrative along, inviting at every end and turn the righteous infliction of violent retribution depicted in the prologue.  In a book crammed with blaggers, dealers, hoodlums and big-time crooks, Cole reminds us just how much deadlier the female of the species is.

The great strength of The Faithless is its unglamorous portrayal of the underworld.  She is, as her dust jacket will remind you, “the person who dares to tell it like it really is,” and The Faithless is testament to that.  Any true crime section in the country will furnish you with cockney fantasies of easy money, and the high life that comes with crime.  Instead, Martina Cole examines the buried alive horror of lengthy prison sentences, the pitiful proceeds of crime that average out lower than minimum wage, and of course, the pervasive threat of violence and death.   There could hardly be imagined a stronger “crime doesn’t pay” message; it will surely be impossible for any reader to stagger away from The Faithless believing otherwise.  This is a tale of tragedy, suffering and the most horrific of internecine family warfare.  It is sometimes shocking, always authentic, and has a killer epilogue with shades of Tiberius Caesar and his “viper in Rome’s bosom.”  In short, yet another winner from the high priestess of gangland.

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