Red-Headed Sinners (1953)

by Jonathan Craig, PlanetMonk Books (Editor)

'The passionate story of one man's twisted obsession for Red-Headed Sinners. – A big novel of tormented people."

"This book is whack!" – Br. Isaac

168 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Jonathan Craig was a pseudonym for Frank E. Smith, an American writer who lived in Florida. His series character for most of his novels was PI Pete Selby. He also wrote many short stories.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in roughly the same period as Jim Thompson's portrait of Lou Ford, the homicidal deputy, Craig's Redheaded Sinners similarly featured a deputy good and decent on the outside but beset by twisted demons and a red mist of rage on the inside. This too is a story of uncontrollable murderous rage, but it doesn't feature a clever psychopath like Lou Ford hellbent on fooling everyone with his dummy act. Craig's twist is that his homicidal deputy doesn't quite know what's bottled up inside him and only remembers his attacks as memory blackouts.

The writing is at its best when describing the deputy's murderous rage. It just misses being really good because the plotting and psychological explanations are too simplistic and really fed to the reader. Craig is a really underrated writer and this novel really shows where his writing would eventually develop.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Red-Headed Sinners, on the surface, is meant to be a psychological crime drama, spruced with all the period pulp staples - and it delivers - for the most part. What's missing is the element of surprise, complexity, and deep character engagement despite some marred attempts.

The plot follows a damaged and dangerous police officer with murderous tendencies towards women with red hair due to an incident which occurred in his youth in which a red-haired woman was prominently featured.

As the struggle to suppress the murderous urge intensifies, the thin blue line between law and unlawful becomes blurred - to the point of being irrelevant. With lust taking over, the plot boils over into a murder frenzy with seemingly no way out. Any character with red hair is a certain target - for the reader, the only devil is the detail in which the author crafts each characters end.

Personally, I enjoyed this pulp, first published in 1962 and brought to life again in 2013. The story holds up well despite the passing time yet it doesn't quite deliver everything I wanted; namely some element of suspense or mystery; characters pop up, die, and then it's on to the next one. Whilst this is fine, it does become tedious by the fourth victim.

I'd rate this pulp a solid 4 stars despite my misgivings. Red-Headed Sinners is an easy and enjoyable well written book which puts it a touch above most pulps published around the same period I've previously read.

[Randy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Craig was one of a number of pseudonyms Frank E. Smith wrote under. The Pete Selby novels were a popular series. RED-HEADED SINNERS was a standalone novel about a man with problems.

Jeff Stoner had been a cop for twelve years and a good one at that. But even he couldn't explain why he attacked and nearly killed a red-headed woman in an interrogation room at the police station. She wasn't wanted for anything, but was simply there to get a location of a boy friend, Piggy Ferris, wanted for a forty thousand dollar jewelry heist. When the matron stepped from the room, Jeff's hands ended up being peeled from around the redhead's throat.

It cost him his job as a cop.

But Jeff had a plan. Find Piggy Ferris and recover the jewels. That should get him his job back. Not to mention the good graces of his fiancee Marcia.

But Jeff had more problems than one. He drank too much and death followed him wherever he went. Someone, some thing, didn't want him saved.

An interesting novel, not Craig's best work by any means. But a satisfying read.

[Warren Stalley · Rating 4 out of 5]

When frazzled King City cop Jeff Stoner roughs up a female suspect and gets kicked off the force, his troubles have only just started. When the young woman Connie Knight is subsequently found murdered things only go from bad to worse. The only way Stoner can prove his innocence is to stay one step ahead of the cops and try to track down jewel thief Charles “Piggy” Ferris but will this desperate crusade destroy himself and the woman he loves Marcia Webster? Author Jonathan Craig creates a lurid world of heavy drinking cops, twisted minds, midnight bars and devious red-headed women. Red-Headed Sinners is a real pulp fiction tale that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a good shot of dime store crime fiction. Ultimately perhaps not quite as impressive as other titles by this same author such as Alley Girl or So Young, So Wicked but still worth seeking out if you’re in the mood for some escapism.

[Bill Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

What can I say about this work of pulp prose… it’s like a 1950s men’s graphic novel without the pictures. It’s not meant to be funny, at least I don’t think that this story is to be farcical, though it might be tongue in cheek. It’s a story of a disturbed alcoholic who’s underlying trigger happens to fire… for reasons revealed rather late in the story, about childhood trauma and sexual abuse… I would offer a spoiler alert, but seriously, if you can’t see the end of this train wreck straight from the gate, then brother you’ve got to read more pulp…
Well as it happens the story starts with, a senior police lieutenant gets kicked off the force for roughing up and nearly choking to death a fugitive jewel thief’s moll… as it happens, the lieutenant probably had a few drinks in him and the moll in question was a flaming redhead. Now disgraced Jeff stoner seeks redemption, by finished the jewel thief and recovering the jewels… but to do that, he has to find out where he’s hiding… so he goes to talk to that redhead… but he should probably have a few drinks the settle his nerves, and a couple more to take the edge off, and just go and … talk to her…
And thus begins the tale and trail of bodies leading to the demise of Jeff Stoner… a cautionary tale tis true, a story ripped from the headlines of yesteryear. .. dangerously damaged people should not be given badges and bourbon.
What had happened to the three hours? He tried, painfully, to think back over his actions. He’d stopped at the liquor store, he remembered. He’d had a couple of healthy ones in the car … maybe more than a couple. He bent and lifted the fifth of whiskey. Almost half gone. It didn’t seem possible. He stared at the bottle for a moment. One more couldn’t hurt. He had to pull himself together, didn’t he? He unscrewed the cap and tilted the bottle and shuddered as the whiskey scalded down his throat. There! That was more like it!

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty Good.

[Larry Piper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be decent enough pulp fiction. Quality literature this is not. Even the publishers agree that it is not quality literature: it came out in 1962 and is already in the public domain. Generally, to be in the public domain, a book needs to be something like 40 years older than this. Whatever, I found it to be an interesting enough read.

It's about a policeman who pulled a nutty whilst interrogating a hot, red-headed suspect, and almost choked her to death. As a result, he gets kicked off the force. He vows to find the jewel thief, whose whereabouts the red head was shielding, so as to get back into the good graces of the force, and, thereby, be reinstated into the only job he's ever wanted. Over the course of his investigations strangles several more hot, red heads. Along the way, we have flash backs to his youth and find therein the seeds of his madness. It doesn't help his recurrent bouts of madness that he drinks a lot, an unimaginable lot, seemingly endless glasses of double whisky shots.

This is a guy's book, perhaps the male equivalent of harlequin romances. The attitudes toward women and toward sex in general would make any sensible feminist want to choke the first handy man they find. I wouldn't blame them. It's surely a reflection of our benighted past. It's also interesting how they have to dance around the sex issues implicitly, given that writing about explicit sex was still a no-no back in the day. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It seems quaint but veils to some extent the mindless, and not really necessary, crudity people feel compelled to inject into today's literature.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few weeks ago I read and very much enjoyed Craig's Junkie, so it's hardly surprising that I came back for a second bite. This book's certainly not in the same class, but it's still compulsively readable.

Jeff Stoner has been a good cop for a dozen years, moving steadily up the promotion ladder, but one day he nearly kills a pretty young redhead in the interrogation room.

Thrown off the force, still not able to understand why he did what he did, he decides, in hopes of ingratiating himself with his erstwhile superiors and getting his badge back, to track down and deliver to the law the gangster whose moll was the woman he almost killed. But everywhere he goes he comes across attractive redheads and, if they're showing a fair amount of flesh (which they mostly are) and if he's seriously drunk (which he mostly is), the dark curtain comes down in Jeff's mind and he finds himself seized by an uncontrollable urge to strangle them. Everything can be traced back, although he can't directly remember this, to the beautiful redhead who sexually abused him in childhood and then ran off with his father.

I couldn't work out if this novel really had something to say about the damage that underage sex can do or if it was just an exploitationer, and I'm not sure I can even now. Today the same theme would be tackled in four or five hundred densely-worded pages and we'd all agree the subject was a serious one, but Craig was writing back then and so he gave us a shortish, hard-hitting page-turner instead.