John Ball

• Born: July 8, 1911
• Birthplace: Schenectady, New York
• Died: October 15, 1988
• Place of death: Encino, California

Type of Plot: Police procedural

Principal Series: Virgil Tibbs, 1965-1986; Chief Jack Tallon, 1977-1984

Contribution

John Ball’s mystery novels document his status as a pioneering master of the police procedural genre. These finely crafted, intricately plotted works focus directly on the minutiae of criminal investigation, emphasizing both the efficiency of plodding routine and the necessity of dovetailing teamwork in solving and preventing crime. He concentrated on different aspects of these tasks in his two series. Virgil Tibbs works primarily on his own, meticulously piecing details together until the entire complicated picture emerges. Jack Tallon, on the other hand, is—as chief of police—the consummate organizer and team player; his solutions to problems arise from organized group efforts. Taken together, the two series (along with Ball’s nonseries mysteries) develop what might be called a systems approach to crime and detection. This focus on teamwork and on following established procedures was Ball’s trademark.

Biography

John Dudley Ball, Jr., was born in Schenectady, New York, on July 8, 1911, to John Dudley, Sr., a research scientist, and Alena L. Wiles Ball. He attended Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1934. After becoming a commercial pilot for Pan American World Airways, he joined the United States Army Air Transport Command at the outbreak of World War II, serving as a flight instructor and a member of a flight crew until 1946. Following his service, Ball pursued a career as a music critic and annotator, first as a writer of liner notes for Columbia Masterworks Records (1946-1949) and music editor for the Brooklyn Eagle (1946-1950) and then as a columnist for the New York World-Telegram. Ball also worked as a music commentator for WOL, a radio station in Washington, D.C. During this time he published his first books, on the record industry and early recordings of classical music. Later, Ball worked in advertising and for various public relations enterprises.

In 1958, he joined the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences (IAS) as public relations director, a post he held until 1961, when IAS was absorbed by the larger American Rocket Society. At that point Ball joined DMS News Service, a publishing company in Beverly Hills, where he was employed as editor in chief until 1963. He served as writer, chairman, and editor in chief for the University of California Mystery Library Program. During the mid-1970’s Ball also became a sworn deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County and a volunteer associate of the City of Pasadena Police Department.

The year 1958 marked Ball’s return to book publication. Since then he wrote or edited more than thirty books, including fourteen mystery novels, winning the Edgar Allan Poe Award (1966) and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award (1966), both for In the Heat of the Night (1965). In addition, Ball wrote some four hundred articles on aviation, music, astronomy, and travel. He died October 15, 1988, in Encino, California.

Analysis

John Ball’s first mystery in the Virgil Tibbs series, In the Heat of the Night, both catapulted him to popular and critical acclaim and established the central themes of his work. Virgil Tibbs was an instant hit. Appearing as he did at the height of the agitation for civil rights of the mid-1960’s, he incarnated many of the qualities that the public wished to attribute to members of the recently insurgent African Americans. Tibbs is simultaneously proud and circumspect, sensitive to the outrages of prejudice yet aware that public attitudes cannot be forced, only quietly persuaded. Tibbs is a vector in the campaign for universal human tolerance; he forces a recognition of his humanity through his superior achievements.

In the Heat of the Night

In the Heat of the Night remains Ball’s most popular and most widely acclaimed book, though it certainly is not his best. It captured and holds the popular imagination more for its setting and its central character than for its style or the quality of the plot. The novel opens in the middle of a heat wave in Wells, a small town in the still-segregated North Carolina of the early 1960’s. The town stagnates in poverty. To improve economic conditions, a local civic organization is sponsoring a musical festival, headed by the great conductor Mantoli. In the small hours of one sweltering morning, Mantoli is found murdered. The local good-old-boy police chief, hired more for availability than skill, lurches into action. Sent to the train station to check for suspects, a deputy spots a likely one: a thirty-year-old black, alone and flashing a suspicious amount of money. The case is apparently already solved.

When the chief interrogates him, however, the man—Virgil Tibbs—states that he has earned that money working as a police officer in Pasadena, California; that unlike anyone on the Wells police force he has experience in homicide work; and that the chief has already made mistakes that could make solving the crime impossible. The chief is dumbfounded. Bad enough to lose a prime suspect, but far worse to have that suspect—a black man—humiliate him in the process. To save face, he resolves to get rid of this rival, but the case has such heavy political and economic implications that he finds himself forced to ask Tibbs to stay on as an officially requisitioned consultant. Meanwhile, tensions rise as the heat continues to bake the town. Economic survival depends on solving the crime and salvaging the festival, tarnished by the murder and shorn of a big-name conductor and impresario. Further, Tibbs threatens the social and racial equilibrium of the segregated town: His position gives him authority over white people accustomed to unanimous consent about keeping blacks in their place.

Throughout this potentially explosive situation, Tibbs keeps his composure, complacently tolerating even the casual insults that segregation imposes on him. He too, however, suffers in the heat: After all, to escape this kind of situation, he had gone to California, where a man could expect to be judged by the quality of his work rather than the color of his skin. Still, he remains professional, methodically proceeding with his investigation and providing lessons in tolerance along the way. Tibbs’s professionalism shows most in his method and attention to detail; in instance after instance, he sees what others overlook, and he is constantly aware of the figure in the pattern he is attempting to reveal. In the process he is able to keep the chief from jeopardizing his own career by arresting the wrong man. Significantly, the climax of the novel occurs when Tibbs deliberately breaches the decorum of segregation by demanding service at a whites-only diner; thus, he is able to demonstrate that bigotry is the real culprit in the case. The novel ends with the chief’s acknowledging that Tibbs is a man; the chief leaves him to await his train on a whites-only bench, though he refrains from shaking hands with Tibbs.

The book is cinematic, as novels of setting and character often are, and its screen adaptation was a phenomenal success. Released in 1967, the film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Sidney Poitier). Still, although this acclaim had much to do with the book’s popularity, the film fails to capture the essence of the novel. The book’s distinction is founded on its depiction of police procedure, its patient analysis of routinely acquired details of fact, and its theme of transracial tolerance—that is, the acknowledgment of our common humanity as the only means of achieving harmonious social order. Before this novel appeared, few American crime writers had centered on painstaking, depersonalized methodology as a basis for their fiction; in other traditions, only Margery Allingham, E. C. Bentley, Michael Innes, and Ngaio Marsh had treated it extensively, and they either emphasize the eccentricity of their police dectectives or place them in quite exceptional situations. As a precedent, the enormously successful television series Dragnet (1951-1959, 1967-1970) must be acknowledged, though even there, attention to eccentricity predominates. Virgil Tibbs reverses this. His ethnicity creates expectations of eccentricity, but Tibbs is the essence of impersonal normality, of basic humanity. His behavior is that of the superior culture: He “outwhites” the whites. His is the dispassionate soul, the cool intellect struggling to understand, and in the process transcending, prejudged boundaries. His is the colorless, raceless future of humanity, achieved through exercise of compassion and reason. In this respect he is a remote descendant of the character of Jim in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

The Eyes of Buddha

Some of the later Virgil Tibbs books realize these themes more successfully. All of them, to be sure, lack the steaminess of setting, the readily identifiable tension, the overt racial confrontation of In the Heat of the Night. Further, because they advance the same themes, they remain less innovative. Even so, the best of them, The Eyes of Buddha (1976) and Then Came Violence (1980), raise Virgil Tibbs to greater definition. Racial confrontation is absent from these novels; in fact, in both novels Tibbs is isolated, shown as an exceptional individual working on his own. In The Eyes of Buddha, Tibbs is given temporary leave from his official duties to pursue a private case of an heiress who had vanished from a beauty pageant. His investigation winds a tangled path to eventual success in Katmandu, where he is given the opportunity to confront an alien culture and where his discoveries also lead to solution of an apparently unrelated case back in Pasadena.

Then Came Violence

In Then Came Violence, Tibbs is forced to lead a dual life: While ostensibly continuing to carry out his normal police work, he is also detailed to the State Department of the United States to provide cover for the exiled family of a progressive democratic African chief of state under attack by insurrectionist forces. The wife of the president proves to be a female African counterpart of Tibbs himself. Poised, articulate, the product of a composite culture, she is willing—like her husband—to put her life on the line to realize her vision of a better society. Clearly, this vision corresponds to the object of Tibbs’s vocation as a police officer. His goal is not merely to solve crimes, still less to capture or punish criminals, but also to create an atmosphere in which peace and justice can flourish. The dual role imposed on Tibbs here nearly undoes him. Not only is he on duty all the time, denied the repose and relaxation necessary to function efficiently, but also he finds himself falling in love with the woman he has sworn to protect and keep inviolate. In the end, Tibbs does solve a tricky armed robbery case and a convoluted vigilante operation, but he loses the woman and family he has come to love—they escape to a more secure refuge in Switzerland when it is found that the husband-father may still be alive. Tibbs, though personally devastated, accepts this situation philosophically, as does she: It is part of the price the gifted must pay to secure some semblance of order in society.

This pattern of the exceptional idealistic loner required by circumstance to subordinate himself to higher purposes would be overbearing if attention were not continually directed toward established methodology and teamwork. What emerges is an interlocking set of paradoxes in the novelistic world of Ball. For example, Tibbs is the only man in Southern California qualified to serve as consort to the wife of a deposed African leader, but at every opportunity, Ball shows him to be dependent on the joint efforts of the police force, every member of which possesses unique qualifications. More than once Tibbs’s Japanese American partner, Bob Nakamura, is referred to as a genius in his own right, and every police team is a composite of professional specialists. Similarly, Tibbs often arrives at his solutions by the most startling leaps of intuition, yet these revelations hinge on disparate details assembled by plodding routine. Again, everyone seems well disposed and perfectly attuned to the other members of his team.

In such a world it is sometimes difficult to imagine where any impetus to crime could originate. On occasion this lends an air of unreality to the proceedings, and the characters begin to look like mannequins going through mechanical motions. Ball has sometimes been faulted for the stiffness of his dialogue, but when his world works, as it does in the best of this series, these objections become irrelevant, blotted out by the consistency of vision. In Ball’s world, the world of Virgil Tibbs, evil exists, but it can be countered by the goodwill of talented men working together with singleness of purpose.

Police Chief

These themes carry over into the Chief Jack Tallon series. On its face the fictional premise for this series seems completely different. In Police Chief (1977), Jack Tallon begins as a police sergeant in Pasadena. After putting in overtime on an emergency hostage situation in which one police officer is killed and a bus accident in which six die, he looks up from the bodies to see his terror-stricken wife in the crowd of onlookers; at that moment he remembers that this evening was to have been their wedding anniversary celebration.

Recognizing that the constant mayhem and crises of major urban police work are taking their toll on his private life, he applies for the position of chief of police in Whitewater, eastern Washington, population ten thousand. On arrival, he discovers a calmer environment but a small staff of largely unqualified personnel. He accepts the challenge of developing a professional team out of this collection of people and soon learns that violence and personal strain are not confined to the big city. A series of brutal rapes occurs, accompanied by a malicious underground campaign that holds the new chief himself, the intruder into this cozy world, responsible.

Dismayed by this lack of trust, Tallon nevertheless devotes himself completely to this problem, recruiting help from the community to augment his limited force. He initiates a training program for the staff, emphasizing the necessity of detail work and routine. Soon his efforts begin to show results. By piecing together isolated clues, he is able to break a drug ring at the local college. Tallon’s force gains confidence and pride with increasing competence, and the community’s goodwill mounts. Aware of the enhanced character of his people, Tallon resists pressure to call in the heavy guns of the local sheriff. Finally he is able to put into action a plan to trap the rapist—one that is, ironically, almost ruined by the interference of a well-meaning citizen newly motivated by pride in his community. The rapist is revealed to be a native of the town, the assistant to the editor of the local newspaper. Peace returns to the community, but only at the expense of the revelation that the seeds of violence are everywhere, that no place is safe, and that everyone is responsible for combating the evil that constantly reappears.

These themes weave through the Tallon series as well as the Tibbs series, as do certain insistent motifs. One is the image of a young woman who has chosen to escape from a situation of luxury or celebrity by retreating into a religious community, sometimes turning her back on her family. Another is the necessity of tolerance, of recognizing a common humanity, especially with apparently unorthodox groups. Often this appears in inverted form, as when Ball connects violence or crime with the mindless malice implicit in prejudice, whether racial, social, sexual, or religious. Connected with this theme is a sympathetic treatment of Asian religions and cultures and of syncretistic religious movements.

Yet dominating these motifs, and to a certain extent absorbing them, are the dual touchstones of personal pride and integrity. Ball’s central characters believe in themselves but nevertheless strive to improve. Although confident in their own abilities, they know that unaided they can do little; so they give themselves to others unreservedly, becoming consummate team players and tireless workers and in the process instilling pride and competence in other members of the team. This approach to character seems somehow Asian; Ball’s characters possess the discipline, the selflessness, and the concentration of the Asian warrior. Aware of the smallness of their share in the divine plan, they remain equally aware of the uniqueness and the necessity of their contribution to the welfare of the whole.

Principal Series Characters:

• Virgil Tibbs is a black detective officer on the Pasadena, California, police force. Unmarried, he is described as about thirty years old in the first novel and remains in his thirties throughout the series. Cool, competent, self-possessed, and systematic, Tibbs has risen above his deprived boyhood in the segregated South of the 1940’s, yet in his job he must repeatedly confront the effects of discrimination and hatred.
• Jack Tallon , a thirty-four-year-old sergeant on the Pasadena police force, leaves the stress and strain of urban violence and major crime to become chief of police in the small town of Whitewater, Washington. There he discovers a need for police professionalism equal to that of the big city: Even in small towns, fighting crime calls for a particular kind of character, teamwork, and integrity.

Bibliography

Ball, John. “Virgil Tibbs.” In The Great Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Argues for the place of Detective Tibbs in the pantheon of great literary detectives.

“John Ball: Seventy-seven, Writer Noted for Virgil Tibbs.” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1988, p. 26. Describes his life and career and notes the genesis of the character Tibbs.

Panek, LeRoy Lad. An Introduction to the Detective Story. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Introductory overview of detective fiction by a major, prolific scholar of the genre. Provides context for understanding Ball.

Pepper, Andrew. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Examination of the representation and importance of various categories of identity in mainstream American crime fiction, including black detectives such as Tibbs.

Reddy, Maureen T. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Comparative analysis of race in both American and British crime fiction. Sheds light on African American detectives, including Tibbs. Bibliographic references and index.

Walsh, Louise D. “Collector Tracks Down Fiction’s Black Sleuths.” The Washington Post, September 8, 1988, p. J01. In this article about a Washington, D.C., area collector of fiction featuring black detectives, the effect of the Tibbs character is discussed.

Winks, Robin W. Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1982. Brief but suggestive history and critique of the detective genre. Helps place Ball’s writing in the greater context.