Sun 21 Dec 2014
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: JOHN BALL – In the Heat of the Night.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights[3] Comments
by Marcia Muller
JOHN BALL – In the Heat of the Night. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1965. Paperback reprints include: Bantam, 1967; Perennial Library, 1985; Carroll & Graf, 1992.
John Ball is best known for his series of novels about Virgil Tibbs, black homicide specialist with the Pasadena, California, Police Department. While Tibbs was preceded by Ed Lacy’s Toussaint Moore in Room to Swing, he is the first fully realized black series character. This first Tibbs novel is a strong start, in which the author explores racial conflict far from his hero’s usual beat, in the Deep South.
Wells is a sleepy little Carolina town where nothing much happens; so sleepy, in fact, that some prominent citizens have planned a music festival in hopes of attracting badly needed tourist dollars. Then, on a steamy August night, the conductor hired for the festival is found murdered, and Police Chief Bill Gillespie and Officer Sam Wood have more of a case than they can handle. Help comes unexpectedly when Wood detains a black man passing through town, and the man turns out to be Virgil Tibbs.
Wells is a typical small town with typical southern racial prejudice, and its lawmen are no exception. Grudgingly they accept Tibbs’s aid, prompted by the urgings of the man who had planned the music festival. And as Tibbs quietly and methodically pursues his investigation, working against the handicap of his racial background, the lawmen each come, in their way, to respect him and acknowledge his exceptional ability.
In the final confrontation with the killer. Tibbs turns his race to an advantage- proving that what one man considers a handicap can be another’s blessing. This is an engrossing novel with a powerful premise, but it leaves us wishing we had really gotten inside Virgil Tibbs’s mind and viewed the case through the eyes of the book’s most interesting character.
In the Heat of the Night was made into a 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. Other novels featuring Tibbs are The Cool Cottontail (1966), Johnny Get Your Gun (1969), Five Pieces of Jade (1972), The Eyes of Buddha (1976), and Then Came Violence (1980).
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
December 21st, 2014 at 3:11 pm
Although I was from a southern town (well southwestern) we actually had a black deputy sheriff in the fifties, I went to high school with his son, but I know that wasn’t true in most of the Deep South.
The tone of the book is different than the film though the latter is faithful. I think it is the intensity of Poitier, Steiger, and Warren Oates. Casting Warren Oates as any character is bound to change your perception.
I didn’t read the last two Tibbs novels, just never ran across them in paperback, but enjoyed the ones I did. Virgil is certainly a different character than Lacy’s black eye, Cohen’s Florian Slappy, or Baxt’s Pharo Love, but didn’t Chester Himes beat Ball to the draw with black cops, and wasn’t Donald Goines writing black crime novels before 1965?
December 21st, 2014 at 3:41 pm
Goines is the early seventies, but Coffin Ed and Gravedigger made their debut in 1957 in FOR LOVE OF IMABELLE, and several were written before COTTON COMES TO HARLEM in 1965.
That doesn’t change the importance of Ball in opening the door, though it isn’t until Walter Mosely and Easy Rawlins that a black crime writer broke through. Prior to that most of the black tecs other than Himes were from white writers like Ball and Lacy.
Of course black novelist Frank Yerby broke the color barrier on the best seller list and in Hollywood long before any of them.
December 21st, 2014 at 4:50 pm
I read the book after seeing the movie, and while I can’t tell you why now, I do remember being let down. That makes sense, though, since the movie is in my All Time Top Ten Favorites. At the time it came out, when my wife and I saw it together, it provided a punch I’ll never forget.