Christa Faust and The Get Off
Hard Case Crime, pulp writers, underrated film noirs and more
Christa Faust is one of the most respected crime writers around. Her work is bold, pulpy, unapologetic, and steeped in the noir tradition.
The Get Off, her latest, is the third novel about sex worker-turned-fugitive Angel Dare, and it brings the character to new places—the rodeo, for one, and motherhood.
The Get Off is fast-paced and thrilling, but it’s also thoughtful, character-centred and smart. It’s incredible how well Faust combines the voice and pace of old pulp novels with modern-day concerns. She’s also written comic books, novelizations (including The Killing Joke with Gary Phillips), and done work for hire.
When she was in town for the Vancouver book launch of The Get Off, we had a chance to talk about rodeo, films, AI and professional writers, and a lot more.
Order The Get Off from your favourite independent bookshop.
The Get Off reads like the ultimate Hard Case Crime novel—the pacing and story and atmosphere feel ripped from a dogeared ‘70s paperback, but Angel’s story is very contemporary. At your reading you described yourself as a pulp writer, that you write to entertain, and that it’s a job. What do you think sets pulp writers apart?
I would have originally said speed. When you’re banging out 95K in 6 weeks, there’s no time for all that pretentious literary navel gazing. You gotta get in, get out, and get on to the next one. Of course, that’s not how it worked with The Get Off, so that shows how much I know.
Seriously though, for me it’s all about pacing as much as entertaining the reader. It’s not that I don’t explore deeper, more complex themes and challenge genre cliches, I just deliver it with enough fast-paced action that you never feel lectured. A Stephen King door stopper or some weighty, epic fantasy series can be entertaining too, but there’s something uniquely cravable about a fast and dirty pulp tale that rides you hard and puts you away wet.
I also love reading mid-century pulp fiction because I feel like it gives a real unfiltered window into what life was like back then. Not that it isn’t over the top and filled with exaggerated cliches, but it’s also written so fast that there isn’t time to invent a lot of details from scratch. A lot of writers fell back on whatever was going on around them to fill in the space between the shootouts. It’s something I love about cheapo B-pictures from that same time period too. I can get lost looking at the products on the supermarket shelves, the shoes and hats on the extras, and the books and magazines in the newsstands.
When I tell people writing is a job, they sometimes think that means I don’t care about the writing quality. I feel like the opposite is true—the quality matters enough to take it seriously.
Don’t get me started on the whole parasocial “girlfriend experience” thing that seems to have taken over all sorts of fandoms. There are far too many readers who want to believe that we do what we do (on the page and on social media) as some kind of altruistic public service because we just love storytelling that much. That wanting fair compensation for our labor is somehow morally questionable. It’s exactly this kind of thinking that leads to the inevitable silencing of any and all voices that don’t belong to the kind of people who don’t have to worry about bills.
There’s also been a general devaluing of professionalism and hard-earned skills across all sorts of other creative fields, like art, music and film. Nobody thinks a chef doesn’t really love food because they work in a pricey Michelin starred restaurant and not at a free soup kitchen. Or that a person who hustles really hard to keep their neighborhood restaurant open and their employees paid is some kind of soulless sell-out who can’t possibly produce delicious food.
On the other side of that same coin, you get all this AI nonsense and the notion that anybody with a cool idea can “create” a book. That all you need to be a successful writer is the ability to deliver a fuckton of algorithmicly tailored bestseller knock-offs as quickly as possible. That recombining everyone’s favorite trope-bricks into shiny plastic Lego sculptures to provide exactly what (they think) readers/consumers want, with just enough variation to make it seem “new,” will allow you to bypass the boring part and smash cut directly to fame and fortune.
But ask yourself this: Do you ever hear of anyone who is pushing AI as this great innovation in storytelling talk about how much they enjoy reading AI books? Seen any lists of the top AI generated novels of the year? Or any organic buzz about the amazing new AI novel everybody can’t wait to read? Of course not, because this kind of high volume slop exists in a world where readers don’t matter. AI authors are like Pick Up Artists, angry wannabes who feel that they are being unfairly denied a prize. Readers, like women in the PUA universe, exist to be tricked into dispensing the desired commodity (in this case money/fame) with no thought given to their enjoyment of the experience.
What I want out of books or films or art of any kind really, is a) to connect with a real human who has something important to share about the real human experience and b) to trust that real human’s storytelling chops to carry me all the way through our shared journey without dropping me on my ass and inadvertently booting me out of the story. That requires both a human POV and professional-level skill. For which I’m more than happy to pay!
The Get Off is partly set in the world of rodeo. What was the research process like?
When I get the kind of topic crushes that kick off a new story idea for me, I do read a lot and watch a lot of films to start with. I had been thinking a lot about professions that involve selling your body, using often dangerous physical skills to entertain an audience in one way or another. That has been my thematic throughline in the Angel Dare novels.
Once the crush really gets a hold of me, I like to find a way to interact in the real world with people who do that thing. In Money Shot, I had it easy because I was already a part of the adult film industry and had been for years. With Choke Hold, I spent time following a young MMA fighter prepping for his first fight and actually grappled (and got my ass handed to me repeatedly) to understand what that felt like. So when it came time to learn about rodeo, I just started cold calling various stock contractors and small time rodeos until I found one that would let me in behind the scenes.
Just like I wasn’t interested in the UFC when I was doing my MMA research, I wasn’t looking into the PBR or NFR, the two biggest promotions in the rodeo world. I have always been far more interested in the smaller events, the local ones. Fresh kids on the way up and older guys on the way out. Less flashy Vegas sparkle and more raw dust and grit. More real.
When I headed down to Helotes TX for my first rodeo, I thought I was going to be writing about bull riders. But I quickly realized that I was more interested in the bullfighters, known by outsiders as “clowns.” The guys whose job it was to distract the bulls while the riders got to safety.
I followed those guys around for two years, going to different types of events and seeing them through injuries and victories and everything in between. I listened to what they said, and paid attention to what they didn’t say. I learned so much more from being with them in person than I ever could have found on Wikipedia.
Were there books or films about the rodeo world that resonated with you? You mentioned the Steve McQueen-Sam Peckinpah film Junior Bonner, which I love. Are there others?
Films, mostly. I’ve been high-key obsessed with The Misfits for way too long. It’s a profoundly haunted artifact of a film, weighted with existential melancholy and behind-the-scenes tragedy. It’s a love letter to a damaged and dying marriage, a last stand for its damaged and dying actors and an unflinching exploration of a damaged and dying way of life.
The rodeo element is only one piece of the larger narrative, but there’s an almost throwaway line from the bull rider Perce that stuck in my brain from the first time I saw it. After a head injury caused by a rough buck off in the saddle bronc competition, he plans to get on a bull next. Rosalyn, the Marilyn Monroe character, is desperate to talk him out of it and asks him why he would do something so foolish and dangerous. He looks at her with complete incredulity and simply says “I put in for it. I entered.”
He is offering up his body for the entertainment of others because that’s just what he does. It’s who he is. That didn’t really translate directly into the story that The Get Off would become, but that kind of dark and inevitable gravity was always there in the back of my mind while I was writing.
I also got a lot of food for thought out of a flick called Bull about an aging Black bullfighter and his neighbor, a teenaged white girl on the brink of delinquency and despair. It’s an imperfect little flick and maybe doesn’t exactly stick the landing, but it’s one of the few films I’ve seen that centers the bullfighters instead of the riders.
If you want more, you can hear me and my pal Jen Johans talk way too much about these and several other rodeo flicks here:
https://rss.com/podcasts/watchwithjen/1601986/
Your writing voice is smart and sardonic and never flinches from sex or violence (or both at the same time). But it also never feels like it’s talking down to the reader, or not taking the story seriously. There’s no ironic distance from us and Angel.
In the middle of Angel’s first rodeo experience you write, “I won’t bore you with all the details of the rodeo. Either you already know what it’s like and you don’t need my clueless, city girl play-by-play or else you don’t know what it’s like and don’t really care.” It’s a terrific short circuit of the “slowly draw them into the world of the story” idea, yet feels true to the character, how she would describe it.
I really love telling stories using that kind of close first person, because I want the readers to feel like they happen to be sitting on the next barstool and listening to somebody tell them about this crazy thing that just happened. I also have characters speak directly to the reader a lot (like in the above example) in a way that breaks the third wall. Part of that comes from my long standing love of Film Noir and the kind of intimate, first person narration used in flicks like Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity.
But I also chose to narrate the Angel Dare books this way because it’s very important for me to present a sex-worker character in such a way that the reader can’t objectify her. Too often in crime fiction and films, sex workers are just titillating set dressing. Nameless babes twirling on poles in the background while male characters talk about important man stuff. Dead (but still hot!) bodies that make Sad Daddies feel sad and horny and ready to kick ass. I want the reader to share Angel’s experience, to see through her eyes and feel what she feels. To be her.
Film noir titles are so similar that I realized I hadn’t seen Gun Crazy until last week. Is there a classic that you hadn’t seen until recently? One you’d recommend?
Just saw Mickey Spillane’s THE LONG WAIT for the first time at Noir City Seattle. Talk about a forgettable, generic title, but get a load of this amazing lobby card!
The plot is bonkers, a wild and barely coherent mish-mash of hardboiled cliches. Our tough-guy hero Anthony Quinn wrecks his car, gets his fingerprints burned off and winds up with amnesia. He spends the rest of the film trying to figure out which one of four hot dames is his long lost girlfriend, who incidentally had plastic surgery to hide her identity. Still with me? Anyway the “figuring” mostly involves making out with each of them in a genuinely distressing, borderline cannibalistic fashion.
But forget all that because there’s this incredible artsy bondage sequence that almost feels like we’ve been transplanted into a completely different movie. You don’t have to be a pervert like me to appreciate it, but hey, it doesn’t hurt.
Anyway it’s very definitely NOT a good movie, but you should check it out anyway.