Book Review: Money Shot by Christa Faust

One can’t help but notice the irony of the books published by Hard Case Crime. In the nearly fifty-book run, every cover has a woman on it, usually painted to be beautiful, evocative, steamy, and just plain sexy. Another constant is that all the books have been written by men.

Until now. Christa Faust’s Money Shot is the first book written by a woman and published by HCC. Let me just tell you: it was worth the wait.

Most of the women on other covers of the other books have at least some clothes draped over them. The lady whose eyes bore into you from the cover of Money Shot is naked. Not nude. Naked. She’s wearing earrings, a cleverly-placed $100 bill, and nothing else. She’s got one hand teasing her hair, the fullness of her breasts are merely hinted at, covered by the folded bill. The smooth sway of her hips extend outward from the C-note, suggesting even more. You can’t tell if she’s standing or laying down but you can tell one thing for sure: she’s got a gun pointed right at your gut. And you know what she’s saying. In that soft teasing voice, she’s saying “You know you want it. I can see it in your eyes. Come on. Pick me up, open me, devour me, ravish me. I dare you not to. Because if you don’t, I’ll blow a hole in you.”

Thusly dared, thusly threatened, I picked up the book and discovered the woman’s name: Angel Dare, former porn star now owner of Daring Angels, an adult modeling agency. She’s through with the porn business—at least, from in front of the camera—but not with what the industry can still give her. And the cover blurb helps to define her character: “It would take more than bullets to stop Angel Dare.” So, if you, a potential reader, were not already drawn to the book by the cover painting (by Glen Orbik, here's a short interview) or the blurb, just give the book the first sentence and/or paragraph test. The first paragraph’s too long to quote here so I’ll give you the first few sentences.

Coming back from the dead isn’t as easy as they make it seem in the movies. In real life it takes forever to do little things like pry open your eyes. You spend excruciating ages trying to bend your left middle finger down far enough to feel the rope around your wrists. Even longer figuring out that the cold hard thing poking you in the cheek is one of the handles of a pair of jumper cables. This is not the kind of action that makes for gripping cinema.

But it does make for gripping fiction. From that first paragraph, I dare you not to read further (see, there’s that dare word again). Or how about this, the last two lines from the excerpted section in the front pages of the book.

"Angel Dare," he said. "Wow. You look amazing. This is gonna be awesome."
Then he punched me in the face.

This book is eye-opening. In stylish, unsentimental prose that holds nothing back and slaps you every now and then like they knows you need it, Faust and Dare skewer the porn industry, showing uneducated readers like myself what happens to the ‘glamorous’ guys and gals when the camera lights go off. It ain’t pretty. Nor is Angel Dare pretty after being punched, beaten, tortured, raped, shot, and left for dead. Oh, and then she’s framed for murder. She’s got ample reasons to be pissed off. It’s a good thing the folks at HCC didn’t commission that painting. People would run from the bookstores, screaming about the scary-looking woman with a gun in her hand and revenge in her eyes.

For that’s what Money Shot is: a revenge book. But unlike so many other crime fiction stories (mainly with men), Angel Dare is not a stone-cold killer who was trained in combat and can take out an adversary with her bare hands. She’s a normal, not-usually-violent person, just like the rest of us. And that’s when you realize that Angel’s story is our story. What would we do given the same set of circumstances? Angel Dare has to make those choices and make them from within herself. She does have help along the way but in every crucial milestone of this story, it’s Angel, by herself, in her head, making decisions. She lives with them, no matter how much it rips her heart out.

And we live with this book, at least for a time. There’s a lot in there. To be honest, this is a book I’m likely to read again, I enjoyed it so much. I know I probably missed things. The pace is fast but not breakneck. Angel has moments of contemplation and that allows the reader to catch his breath and then ask of himself the same questions Angel asks of herself. We may arrived at different answers than does Angel but it’s Angel’s story.

The end of the book, the last 30 pages, is almost sublime. For over 200 pages, Angel has gone through the ringer, operating by a set of rules so foreign to her that she doubts the kind of person she has become. But the actions she takes and the choices she makes in that last couple of chapters reveal the true nature of Angel’s character. I will spoil nothing here. You have to read it for yourself. Then, when it’s over, ask yourself that same question: what would you have done?

I highly recommend this book to folks who like this kind of book. It’s stark. The subject matter is not pretty and sometimes ugly. The jokes are often hilarious but not quotable here. Read it. I dare you not to.

What I Learned As A Writer: In many of the modern crime fiction/noir books I read, some authors relish in the graphic details of what happens to a person when flesh meets bullet or blade. That stuff happens in Money Shot. No doubt. I’ll leave it up to your moral code as to whether certain characters deserve what they got. But Faust pulls the less-is-more card from her deck. She lets the reader fill in all the blanks. And, given the circumstances of some of the scenes, I scared myself with the thoughts that I came up with. Genius storytelling.

P.S.

Last week, I mentioned that Allan Guthrie has earned himself a place in my Must-Read list. Christa Faust is now there.

Among the folks who blurb the book (Megan Abbott, Vicki Hendricks, Jason Starr, Duane Swierczynski, and Allan Guthrie) is none other than McKenna Jordan, one of the good folks who work at Houston’s own mystery bookstore, Murder by the Book. Congrats McKenna.

At Christa’s website, she has posted a self-made trailer for the book. Check it out.

Coincidences

In my New York Times Page-a-Day Crossword today, the day after I finished The Thin Man and wrote my review, there is this clue: One of Asta's owners. Four letters. Beginning with N-O-_-_.

Here's my latest bit of coincidence: I just finished reading my first Allan Guthrie novel and I'm currently reading my first Christa Faust novel. Love them both...but my local libraries don't have any other copies. And I've been to five bookstores looking for Guthrie works...and there are none. Granted, that might be because they are so good everyone is buying them. So I'm looking at the table of contents for an anthology I have but have not read (Hell of a Woman) and what do you know? I've got stories not only by Guthrie and Faust but Bruen, Charlie Huston, Sara Gran, and Eddie Muller. Guess I should have opened the book sooner. I would have been ahead of the game.

Has that kind of thing ever happened to you? Where you get some notion or idea or thought, you ponder it, and then something comes out of the blue and it is just what you needed to hear/see/feel? Weird that way.

Book Review: The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

One of the things about coming to the crime fiction scene so late in my life is that I know the clichés before I actually get to their origin point. The same is true for films, too. When I finally saw “Casablanca” in my 24^th year of life, I was amazed at how many phrases/scenes were originally from that movie. It was fun but it lost a little because I had seen cartoon characters utter certain lines for laughs, not human characters saying those lines like they meant it.

When I first decided to read Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, I knew enough of the book to know that the stars of the show were Nick and Nora Charles. I am a child of the 1980s. As such, certain things are ingrained in my head and I bring them to every new adventure I go on. With The Thin Man, “Moonlighting” and “Hart to Hart” were the things that moved past Star Wars miscellanea and rare music trivia to set up shop at the forefront of my brain. There they sat, ready to divulge some little chunk of knowledge that might prove useful with my new book.

Honestly, I was disappointed. With those two TV shows in my head—and the relationship between the respective couples active in my memory—I read The Thin Man waiting for the book to be like those shows I remembered. It didn’t happen. Granted, the book was published in 1934, but I expected a little more involvement from Nora. There are large chunks of the book where she’s relegated to their hotel room while Nick, the former PI, goes off and solves the case. True, Nick and his cop pal, Guild, go to places a socialite like Nora wouldn’t want to go to, but still, I’d have thought she’d be in more scenes. And take a look at that cover. Glamor and intrigue ooze from the cover painting. Didn't find much in the prose.

The story itself is light but not in a bad way. Much of the action is relayed to Nick or Nora by other characters telling a story. As a modern writer whose mantra is ‘show don’t tell,’ some of the scenes were annoying. The dialogue between Nick and Nora was fun and the reader, William Dufris, does a remarkable job of speaking in multiple female voices.

Another preconceived notion I had going in was a direct result of an earlier Hammett novel, Red Harvest. In that novel, much blood is shed. I kind of expected some more blood but I guess The Thin Man was something of a cozy in hard-boiled clothing.

I can’t help but wonder how it was that I knew Nick and Nora Charles before I read the book. The Thin Man was Hammett’s last novel but there were something like six films made. Perhaps that is where their fame emerges. I have the movie and I plan on watching it this week.

What I Learned As A Writer: As previously mentioned, 'show don't tell' should still suffice as the fundamental mantra for any writer. Additionally, for this, my least favorite Hammett novel to date (I haven’t read The Glass Key yet), frankly, I’d like to do a better job. I hate to write that because Hammett is a giant in the crime fiction field. Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon were much more enjoyable to me. But I do think there is room in the world for a modern take on the husband-wife crime-solving team. It will be fun to try.

Charles Ardai on Fresh Air

Charles Ardai, one of the two founders of Hard Case Crime, was on NPR's Fresh Air today. Here is the link. Listen how Ardai talks about noir fiction, the imprint Hard Case Crime, his own novel, Songs of Innocence, and his take on the history of crime fiction.

What's great about Ardai's two novels (Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence) is that his PI, John Blake, is not your typical PI. He's bespeckled, slight, a liberal arts major, and not very good at his job. He's a little like me, to be honest. I'm a liberal arts major, middle-class, doing well for myself, isolated from the bad stuff that goes down everyday...and I like reading about and I'm writing about people I'd be scared of. Weird?

A Great SF Podcast

What Behind the Black Mask does for crime fiction, Adventures in SciFi Publishing does for science fiction and fantasy. Aside from the fantastic in-depth interviews with authors (talking about their books, writing process) and members of the SF/F publishing field (Lou Anders is a frequent guest), Tobias Buckell serves up an "Ask the Writer" segment. It is always a pleasure to hear how others writers deal with this strange thing called creative writing.

Check it out. Subscribe to it. Love it. Be it.

My Desk and Writing Area

Over at Murderati, there is a discussion from the question: What is on your desk? Here is my response.

I have two desks--one made by my dad--and I use them in different ways. The writing desk is literally the desk I sit at to write anything long hand. There are times when pixels and a keyboard don't do it for me. I break out the pen (Pilot PreciseGrip 0.5mm, blue ink) and paper (college-ruled comp books) and compose. Yes, there are times when the ideas flow too rapidly that my handwriting is horrible. (During those times, I make notes in the margins or on yellow Post-its.) But the old-school way of writing helps the flow sometimes.

Then I have the computer desk. It's really a old server thingy--with shelves on both sides of a central post. On the closest shelf, I have it lowered to where my ergonomic keyboard sits. The other shelf I have raised so that my MacBook is almost eye level. Behind the Mac, in plain view when the Mac is closed, are my Current Books. (Right now: Money Shot by Christa Faust, Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, By Night in Chile, Hell of a Woman (anthology), The White Trilogy (Bruen), and the book I just finished and reviewed, Kiss Her Goodbye by Allan Guthrie) On the walls next to my Mac are my awards (four so far). I won an authographed photo from the band Chicago when I wrote a short story using over 70 titles of their songs. My first novel, Treason at Hanford, twice won third place at the Ft. Bend Writer's Guild contests. My second novel, Justice in H-Town won third place just last month. And I have a framed copy of my first published piece: a memorial to the journalist David Bloom, published in the Houston Chronicle in April 2003.

I use them to remind me that I have the talent to be a writer...and that only persistence will help me become a *published* author.

Female Crime Writers and Female Characters

Since my second novel, Justice in H-Town, has a female HPD detective as the main character, I'm becoming a bit more sensitive to 'woman things.' By that I mean that, well, I'm a guy and have guy thoughts. But I need to be sure to put gal thoughts in the head of my detective, Anne Chambers. My wife is a great resource as are the women (and men) in my writing group.

Over at the Behind the Black Mask, Clute and Edwards have posted the podcasts they did for Noircon 2008 in Philadelphia. I just listened to the Wise Guys and Femmes Fatales episode. C&E interviewed Megan Abbott, Vicki Hendricks, Christa Faust, and Jonathan Santlofer. Had to laugh when Jonathan mentioned that his female editor, at one point, mentioned that he did not have enough 'girl stuff' in his books. Great episode and it, and all the episodes from Noircon, are well worth a listen. Looking forward to when I'll be attending, first as a fan and then, maybe, someday, as a writer.

BTW, after finishing Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye, I'm currently reading Christa Faust's Money Shot (Hard Case Crime). Tune in to Behind the Black Mask in May when C&E will interview Faust. I've read the first chapter already. Holy cow! I'm already blown away.

Book Review: Kiss Her Goodbye by Allan Guthrie

Let’s get this out of the way first: if Hard Case Crime publishes it, I’ll read it. Period. In fact, I have used it to learn about new authors and get reacquainted with older writers long out of print or lacking the respect of modern critics. Ken Bruen is a name I first learned because of HCC. Richard Aleas is another. Add to that list Allan Guthrie.

As I mentioned in my post about crime novels, I’m a late comer to the crime genre in fiction. I’m ever expanding my list of Must-Read authors. Allan Guthrie just landed himself on that list. And it was because of Kiss Her Goodbye.

Kiss Her Goodbye is Guthrie’s second novel after Two-Way Split. One of the best things about HCC is the cover blurbs. I’m not talking about “From the author of Touch of Evil;” I’m talking about those one-liners that grab you by the shirt collar and scream for you to read it. For KHG, it’s this: “For what she went through, somebody had to pay…” On the cover is a typical HCC girl—pretty, daring, wearing an expression to make a priest blush—with a baseball bat. I’m there, brother. Bring it on. Granted, as the story goes on, I did begin to wonder who the ‘she’ actually was because there are multiple candidates. And that's part of the beauty of the story.

The main focus of the story is about Joe Hope, the muscle for a loan shark in Scotland. His daughter committed suicide and the cops think he killed his wife. His love for his daughter is palpable and struck me, a parent, right in the gut. It brought me along on a story of a guy who’d I’d cross the street to avoid.

The writing is tight but dense. Guthrie gives Joe good chunks of internal struggle. It is this internal struggle that carries us through half the book, as Joe spends most of the first half wandering in a daze or inside a police station. I’ll admit that there are times, when reading a book, where I skim over the longer paragraphs to get to the next bit of dialogue. No so KHG. I dug deep and felt Joe’s pain.

In one of the blurbs on the KHG page at HCC, a reviewer mentions Guthrie’s ‘mastery of casual violence’ and I didn’t know what that meant. KHG is a modern noir book. I expected violence and I got it. But I now know what ‘casual violence’ is. Almost like reading a grocery list, violence just happens. There’s no big lead-up, there’s little warning, it just is. I guess that’s what it’s like in real life. I like it. I’ll try to incorporate it into my fiction.

One last thing: it’s a rare book whose last sentence delivers a punch. Branded Woman is one. The Day After Tomorrow is a fantastic example. Kiss Her Goodbye delivers one, too, but it’s a more nuanced punch. Don’t get me wrong: it still smacks you but in a good way. Try it. You’ll like the feeling.

Now, you’ll have to excuse me. I have to go to the library and find me some more Allan Guthrie books

First Adult Crime Fiction

The Rap Sheet tags a conversation over at Crimespace: What was the first adult crime story/book/author you read?

I devoured the Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators. Actually, truth be told, I enjoyed T3I better than the Hardys. Even as a youngster, I realized the Hardys were structured stories and I liked to compare notes on how Frank and Joe's ages and hair color were introduced.

After the Hardys I sank my teeth into SF: Clarke, Star Trek (yeah, yeah, I know), Alan Dean Foster. Searching for a college to attend, I read my first Stephen King book, Pet Semetary. What a book to start with, huh?

TV-wise, I always loved PI shows, cop shows, lawyer shows. Loved watching Perry Mason late at night, Murder, She Wrote, Ironside, Miami Vice, etc. Movie-wise, I love almost all murder/mystery/crime movies. Always have.

Book-wise, I'm a late comer. The one book that really started my craze for crime literature was Mystic River. I heard Dennis Lehane on NPR and listened to him describe how he wanted to write an epic story covering generations. That sounded good to me. I bought it. The prologue was heart-wrenching. And the first chapter had a great opening sentence. Here it is:

Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy, loved her like movie love, with an orchestra booming through his blood and flooding his ears.

Lehane hooked me good. I discovered his five previous PI novels. Then, I discovered George Pelecanos. Throw away the key, man. I'll stay behind bars as long as you feed me this stuff. Pelecanos's characters talked and lived a life so unlike mine, I felt like a voyeur. And I savored every last letter.

This was in 2001. I started compiling lists of authors and books I Needed To Know: Elmore Leonard, Hammett, Chandler, Cain, MacDonald, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The next author to kick in my teeth was Ken Bruen. I read The Guards and thought I haven't read anything better. It's still up there in that Big List in the Sky of Great Books. Soon, thereafter, Hard Case Crime started publishing their books. Man, I was in heaven. And those covers! Among my favorites there are Little Girl Lost, Plunder of the Sun, Branded Woman, and Dead Street. I just finished reading my first Allan Guthrie book, Hard Case Crime's Kiss Her Goodbye. (Review forthcoming). Next up: Cristina Faust's Money Shot.

So, what were you're introductions into the fabulous world of Crime Fiction?

Another Novel Milestone: 100 pages

Up until now, I have written only two things that were longer than 100 pages. The first was my thesis in college and the second was my Truman novel. Today, at lunch, I can now count three things I have written that were over 100 pages. I passed the 100-page mark today for my new novel. It happened in chapter 14 and I managed to write chapter 15 as well. It's an exciting milestone to reach.

Somewhere, I read a comment by Elmore Leonard that said that a book's character doesn't appear until he's written about 100 pages. Ironically, the prose in chapter 15 was quite difficult to write and 'see' in my head. I hope that does not continue for the next 100 pages. It's a scene where my heroine is being grilled by her commanding officer. I can do cop talk when it's a scene between a cop and a thug. Cop-talk is just a truncated version of English. But a CO to a subordinate, both of whom are cops, is tougher. Don't know why but it is.

"The Music Man" and Election 2008

This little video, over at Politico.com, is one of the most clever things this election cycle.