INTERVIEW: Christa Faust, author

Literary Editor Alan K gets tied up with author Christa Faust.

Christa Faust throws fivepowerful adjectives at you, sharper than a switchblade through the bare skin of your back, that suitably describe her “Cynical. Kinky. Outspoken Audacious. Complex”.

Quentin Tarantino described her in another, but no less flattering way “Christa Faust is a Veronica in a world of Betties”. She is a self-proclaimed “Hard-boiled cynical bitch”, collaborated on Triads with Poppy Z Brite (they met in a boy-brothel in Bangkok in 1939) and she is the first female writer for Hard Case Crime publishing house with her new novel Money Shot.

In Money Shot, Faust has gave breathe to another uncompromising, strong, occasionally ruthless (although not without justification) woman. In the opening chapters she is raped, half-beaten to death and shot. Angel Dare spends the rest of the book, dressed as a man, seeking out the bastards responsible and as in all Faust’s novels finds ultra-violence her only reliable ally. “My female characters tend to have a lot of attributes that are traditionally considered “masculine”.

They remain essentially female at their cores, but they are also pro-active rather than strictly reactive, choosing – often violent – action over words”. It is a pretty flimsy catalogue of literature if you’re seeking gung-ho, trigger-happy women. Baise-Moi by Virginia Despentes, Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi and Queenpin are just three of the obscure titles to come to mind. There is a dearth of hard-boiled women in fiction. Faust agrees “There aren’t nearly enough tough yet realistic female heroes in any genre.

In crime writing you get a lot of too-curious-for-their-own-good perpetual victim types and plenty of ferocious hotties with guns who are just tough guys with tits. On the other hand there are other writers out there creating the kind of complicated, tough but flawed and yet still essentially female characters I find most appealing”.

For those who do enjoy the darker stories, Faust’s books run at an exhilarated pace, revel in violence, sink to the depths of depravity and debauchery and are delightfully satisfying to read. One suspects Faust has seat-wetting fun writing “some days writing is fun and other days it’s like pulling teeth, but the trick is to keep at it. If I only worked when it was fun, I’d be homeless, pushing a shopping cart down Hollywood Boulavrd. I’d love to claim that it’s all just effortless lark, but it’s tough going sometimes”.

Christa is strongly influenced by horror writers like Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury and Karl Edward Wagner, as much as the heavy-weights like Stark/Westlake, Day Keene, Richard S Prather and of course Chandler, Hammet and Thompson. Christa is also a professional dominatrix and swing-dancer, – does one cultivate a position or does it arrive naturally?

“It came very natural. In fact, discovering the BDSM scene was like finally putting a name to something that had been there all along.” Faust was raised in New York City, ran away a lot, wrote a lot “when I was young, I felt like I was the only one who had these kinds of weird thoughts, and then when I found out there’s a whole world of other people who are just like me, it was like coming home”.

Faust has also written a novelisation of Snakes on a Plane and tie-ins for both a Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the Thirteenth. Even imbuing Freddy with that particular menace last seen in Wes Craven’s original.

Although Faust admits she had little control over the material “I was lead to write about Snakes on a Plane and Freddy and Jason by the pay check. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love writing tie-ins and had a real blast trying my hand at famous monsters, but I didn’t get to choose the subject matter.” “I did” Faust slyly adds “however, get to sneak in some of my own flavours into those books just for fun.”
As for the “real” books, I write about things that interest me.

Clearly Control Freak, while it’s not even remotely biographical, was about something very close to my heart. As for my other books, I get these crushes on certain topics. A kind of fascination or obsession that drives me to learn all about something like Lucha Libre or Peking Opera”.

So like her contemporary Poppy Z Brite, who has more or less moved away from dark literature does Faust ever see herself been lured from the underbelly? “I write what I like to read. That is always subject to change, of course, but I don’t really see myself moving into, say, chick-lit. I think it’s a safe bet to say that I’ll always be attracted to fiction that explores the darker side of human nature.”

Money Shot is published by Hard Case Crime Fiction February 08.