by Mentalrage
It might be decades since you could pick up a copy of Black Mask, but anyone thinking that hardboiled fiction has disappeared is clearly mistaken. One of the names you should be paying attention to is Christa Faust, creator of femme fatale Angel Dare, and author of hardboiled pulp gems Money Shot and more recently, Choke Hold.
When an old friend, Sam Hammer, calls her up, former porn star Angel Dare is coaxed into attending a one off shoot at a mansion in Bel Air. Feeling pretty low on self-esteem, Angel is wanting an ego boost, and getting to work with the ripped new dick-on-the-block Jesse Black gets her imagination going. Only things go from bad to worse in the blink of an eye, with Angel finding herself tied to a bed, interrogated, and mercilessly beaten by a heavy who’s fishing for information about a young woman that Angel is connected to – and that’s just for starters! Angel soon finds herself being brutally raped by Jesse as well being forced to watch her oldest friend Sam get kneecapped by another heavy. Jesse then dumps her in the boot of a car, but when it comes to pulling the trigger and offing Angel, he loses his nerve. Wounding her rather than going for the kill, Jesse abandons the car. Big mistake.
With the first Angel Dare novel, Money Shot, Christa Faust introduced one of the best female characters in fiction you could ever wish to meet. Money Shot (which by the way features gorgeous cover art by Glen Orbik) is an adrenaline-fuelled pulp tour de force. Dare finds herself relying on Malloy, a straight talking, granite faced ex-cop and her faithful assistant Didi, whilst trying to find out what’s going on and unwittingly stumbling across a human trafficking operation.
Frank Miller’s Sin City, Tarantino’s Kill Bill and John Dahl’s The Last Seduction all come to mind as Faust’s tale rattles along like a runaway train. However its got plenty of its own charm, with Dare rendered refreshingly human via numerous character nuances. Utterly and completely breaking down after the interrogation and hating herself for it, worrying if she left her vibrator on her bed or put it away in the bedside cabinet in case the cops come to search her place, being wracked with regret about all her friends being dragged into the rapidly expanding shitstorm her life has become, dealing with the loss of identity after disguising herself as a man to try and elude her pursuers, Dare is equal parts sympathetic victim and avenging angel.
Faust’s snappy prose is tight as a drum, written in the first person and in flashback. Both can be tricky to pull off, but here you’ll find yourself being sucked in and eager to follow Angel as she embarks on her journey of revenge and discovery. Almost every chapter ends on an cliffhanger which makes for an even more compulsive read, and Faust’s wry commentary on the adult film business tempers the gratuitous potential of the porn industry setting. “A lot of guys imagine it would be this big turn-on to visit a porn set,” writes Faust. “My advice is, unless you really love watching other men jack off, don’t bother.” With plenty of danger and sex (written in a refreshingly none misogynistic manner), it makes for an exemplary debut at Hard Case Crime.
In the second Angel Dare story, Choke Hold, a random twist of fate sees a former co-star stumble upon Angel, who has been relocated with a new identity. But things soon go awry, and he dies in the midst of a shoot out in the diner Angel has been working in. Feeling indebted to her old friend, Angel finds herself having to escort his son, an up and coming temperamental MMA fighter, through the choking heat of the Arizona desert to Las Vegas. Somehow she gets tangled up in a drug smuggling operation in the process.
Faust herself is just as feisty as the characters she writes. Her response to the argument that pretty girls shouldn’t write nasty stuff: “It’s not worth the oxygen it would require to respond to that one. The bottom line is that you don’t have to like my book. It ain’t for everyone, and I’m okay with that.”
Read SuicideGirls brand spankin’ new interview with Christa Faust, and visit her website and LiveJournal. Anyone wanting to follow Angel Dare’s adventures they’re published by Hard Case Crime.
