Before becoming a writer Christa Faust was a porn star. She does
not hide it – the back cover of Choke
Hold mentions it. Without ostentation nor shame she puts her past
experience into her characters. Hers are the first female hard-boiled stories I have ever read. She feminizes all the genre
codes with a remarkable efficiency. In Choke
Hold the opening scene, so important in dark crime, shows it all. We are
presented with the hero, her past, the prize character (Cody) and the
antagonist side, all in a handful of pages, opening quietly, emotionally, almost
happily, ending in a fury of violence. From there on, the pace never slows
down. In this action whirlwind it takes Faust’s iron grip on her writing to
keep the story afloat. Up to the final scenes every sequence is depicted in a
crisp, finely cut style.
Strangely enough, though belonging to the tough side of the hard-boiled
tradition, she often sounds closer to James Lee Burke than to Raymond Chandler.
Like Dave Robicheaux her Angel Dare keeps running from a past which wants her
dead. More, no matter how much she kills of it, that past grows back. It does
not only try to murder her when she is awake. Like Dave Robicheaux’s, it haunts
her nights and her soul, destroying her faster than she can destroy it.
For all their similarities Christa Faust does not
write with Burke’s lyrical abandonment. Angel Dare does not have the gilts and
mauves and mists of Louisiana to soothe her mornings. The novel is not lit by the
sun. It bathes in the crude artificial brightness of the spotlights. Choke Hold starts in a diner. After a
short scene in a field at night, it moves into a trailer. From there onwards, it
will be the neon lights of MMA training rings, showroom stages, motels – a quick
and furious sex scene at night on the road side, which Angel Dare instantly regrets
– then Las Vegas, more showrooms, a porn movie stage, motels, cars. Everything lies
under that white glare, all in primal colours, like metal paint on pale grey steel.
The gruesome is exposed, the bodies go through ecstasy and pain, the souls are
tortured and Christa Faust sticks it all on the pages, like dissected corpses
pinned on cork. She has no time for lyricism, for compassion, for pathos. She is
not foreign to tragedy (her Hank is the most tragic and poignant of characters,
despite an initial appearance verging on caricature). But her novels are about
survival. Comes the last page, only the bare minimum remains. Just enough amber
under the dust and smoke to let us expect a sequel.
