John Ball

Virgil Tibbs Books
Jack Tallon Books
Other Books
Movies

One of the important steps in the evolution of modern crime fiction was the development of the realistic black detective, and no writer did more than John Ball. Ball's first novel, In The Heat Of The Night, was an immediate success and spawned an excellent movie, very successful in its own right. Virgil Tibbs is a black detective who must not only solve the crime, but overcome the racist tendencies of police chief Bill Gillespie. Gillespie, for his part, has to realize that he's going to have to trust Virgil if he wants to catch a killer.

The rest of the Tibbs series are solid police procedurals where Tibbs' race is less of an issue, which adds to the realism but makes them less powerful than his first book. Ball says his attention to getting the details right dates from his teens, when he discovered that the science he had so carefully memorized from his Tom Swift books was total bunk.

Along with Ed Lacy's Room To Swing (featuring black detective Toussaint Moore), the Tibbs books are a milestone not just in mystery fiction but in American fiction in general.