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Bill S(anborn) Ballinger (1912-1980) - also wrote as Frederic Freyer, B.X. Sanborn |
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American thriller writer, who specialized from the early 1950's in a multi-level kind of narration or divided narration, and mixed identities. Bill S. Ballinger's best known books include The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1957) and The Tooth and the Naíl (1955). The latter was plagiarized by Finnish mystery writer Mauri Sariola in 1969, writing under the pseudonym Esko Laukko. Sariola paid 5,400 Finnish marks (about $1,000 nowadays, then very much more) to Ballinger, who promised to give the money to the Finnish Writers' Association. Ballinger's books have been reprinted in some thirty countries, and translated into over thirteen languages. Besides his thirty some odd novels, Ballinger wrote over 150 scripts for television and the movies. When he was alive, he was a magician—a maker of miracles, a prestidigitator, an illusionist like Harry Houdini or Thurston. He had been a good manician, but because he died too soon he neevr became really famous like the others I've mentioned. However, he accomplished something that neither of these men ever attempted. Bill
Sanborn Ballinger was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, the son of William M.
Ballinger and Ella Satia; she died in 1918. Ballinger was educated
at the University of Wisconsin, receiving his B.A. in 1934. From
1934 he worked in advertising, and as a radio and television writer. In
1936 he married Geraldine Taylor, they
divorced in 1946. After traveling through Europe and the Middle
East, Ballinger returned to the U.S., where he settled in southern
California. In the beginning of his career, Ballinger published
hard-boiled detective fiction. The
Body in the Bed (1948), his first novel,
introduced the private eye Barr Breed from Chicago, a typical tough
hero of the post-war fiction. However, Breed's office is not a dump,
but
takes up a third of a floor and has and has panelled walls. The story
was more or less a variation of the Maltese Falcon. Breed's second and last adventure, The Body Beautiful (1949), takes him to a nightclub, where a chorus girl is knifed. "Although the novel relies on stereotypical characters and devices, the author's descriptions of clothing, food, business, and locales convey a sense of 1940s Chicago and the plot and dialogue touch on issues of gender roles and sexual conventions." (The Chicago of Fiction: A Resource Guide by James A. Kaser, 2011, p. 24) "I consider myself, primarily, a storyteller. To me the story is the thing." (Ballinger in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly, 1985, p. 50) In 1960, Ballinger received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from
Mystery Writers of America for his TV work, and he was the guest of
honor at the Boucheron World Mystery Convention II conference in 1971
in Los Angeles. Between the years 1977 and 1979, Ballinger served as an
associate professor of writing at the California State University,
Nortridge. He served also as a member of the board
of directors of Health and Welfare Plan and Pension Plan, and in
1978-79 President of Federal Credit Union. Ballinger died on March 23,
1980. His works of non-fiction include Lost City of Stone: The Story of Nan
Madol, the "Atlantis" of the Pacific (1978) and The California Story: Credit Union's First
Fifty Years (1979). Ballinger's novels have been translated into
more thirteen languages. Ballinger married
in 1949 Laura Dunham; she died in 1962, and two years later he married
Lucille
Rambeau. While living in Chicago, Ballinger began to work on his first
success. a nonseries book, Portrait
in Smoke
(1950).
Danny April, the first-person narrator, is the new owner of a minuscule
collection agency. Fixated on her picture, he attempts to trace a girl
named Krassy Almauniski from her
origins in Chicago's slums. Ballinger depicts also Krassy's rise to
fame and riches by changing her identity. Finally Danny finds Krassy,
falls in love with her, but she frames him guilty of murder. Curiously,
the sections of Kitty's backstory, are labelled Part II, while the
present-time investigations make the Part I. The book
was filmed in England under the title Wicked As They Come,
(1956), directed by Ken Hughes and starring Arlene Dahl and
Philip Carey. "Hughes does a fine job helming this intriguing tale, and
Dahl surprises by giving one of her best performances." (The Encyclopedia of Best Films: A Century
of All the Finest Movies, Volume 4, V-Z by Jay Robert Nash,
2019, p. 3054) Ballinger soon abandoned the conventional detective formula,
and concentrated on creating more innovative thrillers. More than
characterization and other aspects of writing, Ballinger enjoyed
plotting. My life, my thoughts, had become so entwined with those of the red-haired man that I could no longer think of him simply as a criminal to be hunted. I knew that regardless of his gun and my gun, his red hair, my black, that we were brothers. And I knew that in the end we must face each other and be killed. (from The Wife of the Red-Haired Man, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957, p. 194) The Wife of
the Red-Haired Man was first published
serially under the title "My Husband is a Redhead" and then released in
book form by Harper in March 1957. The chase story from New York to a
small village in Ireland alternates between
first-person and
third-person narration. At the end Ballinger
reveals the racial background of the
first-person narrator, the NYC detective pursuing an escaped convict,
Hugh Ronan (the red-haired man of the title) and his wife Mercedes; the
police detective is black. Throughout the story, readers are given
hints about the narrator, and to think outside the box, starting from
the way he introduces himself: "There are approximately 22,500 cops in
New York who are white, black, brown, yellow, and red, and who are
Prot- estants, Catholics, Jews, and Mohammedans. . . . Among these men,
it was my number which turned up as a matter of routine duty." (ibid., p. 12) Dorothy B. Hughes used in The Expendable Man (1963) a
similar narrative twist, but with a more underlined social message: the murder suspect is an innocent black
man, a young doctor, who is chased by racist police force. His ethnic identity is revealed after some fifty pages. Jumping back and forth in time, the plot of The Tooth and
the Nail revolves around false money
and faking a murder. Originally the work appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in condensed
from in March 1955. The protagonist is a magician, born Luis Montana, alias
Lewis Mountain (Lew), who is pursuing his wife's murderer, Ballard
Temple
Humphries. Behind the crime there is a plan to counterfeit money. The
alternating narrative tells about a murder trial, in which the identity
of the accused is kept hidden from the reader. At the end, the reader
learns that the avenger has faked a murder, by leaving in Humphries's
cellar, in the central oven, signs of an apparent crime -
a tooth and a nail along other items. Thus
Lewis has successfully framed his opponent and gets his revenge. The
story ends with the words, "Who was it who was it who was it who was it
who was it who was . . . . "In
Germany, the title of the book was rendered in 1957 as Die grosse
Illusion (the grand illusion), missing much of the irony of the
whole story – "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for
hand." Also in the courtroom thriller with lesbian undertones, Not I, Said the Vixen (1965), Ballinger used multi-leveled narration. Cyrus March is a LA lawyer, who falls in love with his seductive client, accused of shooting another woman. The text on the front cover of Fawcett Gold Medal Book says, that "Even on the witness stand, the one thing she dared not deny was her own overwhelming sensuality". In the 1960s, Ballinger participated in the spy boom producing a new series characters, CIA operative Joaquin Hawks, a James Bond-like secret agent, who operated mainly in Southeast Asia. He is featured in a series mostly "Spy" in the title. Hawks made his entrance in the novel The Chinese Mask (1965). Ballinger depicts carefully everyday life in China, Hawks sees dreams of his ancestors, and plays a Chinese circus performer. The resourceful, strong and handsome Hawks is half Spanish and half Nez Percé Indian, a linguist and smooth killer. Hawks continued his adventures in four other books, up until The Spy in the Java Sea (1966). Interestingly, one of the minor themes of The Spy in the Jungle (1965) is religious - not ideological - tolerance. Hawks shows some knowledge of the Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and Islam, and in Hanoi a Buddhist monk gives him a lecture on myths. Ballinger's later novels include The 49 Days of Death (1969), a suspense story of reincarnation based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Corsican (1974), published in the wake of Mario Puzo's Godfather (1969) and the resulting films, told about the growth of a Union Corse 'family' in Corsica and Marseilles, covering the three-decade span between 1943 and 1973. Bryce Patch, the chief of security at a large electronic company, was the hero of Heist Me Higher (1969). Detective Rick McAllister: "Money's nice, but it doesn't make the world go round." In the 1950s, Ballinger made his breakthrough as a script
writer, but before this he was involved in producing such radio shows
as The Dinah Shore Show and The Breakfast Club. His
collaborator was the broadcaster Lowell Thomas. Ballinger wrote for The
Mice (with Joseph Stefano), Alfred
Hitchcock Presents (1955-61), I, Spy, Cannon, M.
Squad, Ironside, and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer,
and The Outer Limits (1963-64) -
more than 150 television scripts in total. One of his adaptations from
1961 was James O. Causey's 'Deathmate,' published in 1957 in the
popular magazine Manhunt.
Ballinger wrote the teleplay to Alfred
Hitchcock Presents. I, Spy, starring
Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, was the first weekly network television
drama to present an African American as a star. Part of the success of
the series was that the stars adlibbed much of their dialogue. The
first episode was set in Hong Kong, but a critic for The New York
Times noted that "the setting was the real star." Ballinger's
television plays included The Hero, Road Hog, Dry
Run, The Day of the Bullet, Escape to Sonoita (with
James A. Howard), and Deathmate. Christian Nyby's action film Operation
CIA
(1965), starring the young Burt Reynolds, Ballinger
scripted with the producer and writer Peer J. Oppenheimer. The events
were set in Saigon. Additional footage was shot in Thailand. It was one
of the early movies dealing with the politics
and spies of Vietnam war. Reynolds described Operation CIA as the worst film
he ever made. "If it played on a plane, people would be killed trying
to
jump out." ('Two Tales in
Tandem' by Nicholas Litchfield, in Portrait
in Smoke/The Longest Second by Bill S. Ballinger, p.7) The Strangler
(1963), directed by
Burt Topper, was shot on location in Boston; the film was
inspired by The Boston Strangler. Some critics disapproved the
exploitation of the real-life tragedies. Ballinger wrote the script,
but he used to talk about it with the director. "He was a pretty bright
guy," said Topper. "I forget how many weeks he had to do it, but he did
it quite quickly." (Earth
vs. the Sci-Fi Filmmakers: 20 Interviews by Tom Weaver, 2005, p.
369)
Victor Buono played a hospital laboratory technician Leo Kroll, who
creates frenzy in Boston when he murders nurses who help his mother
(Ellen Corby). When Leo tells her about the last murder, she suffers a
fatal heart attack. Finally Leo's fetish for dolls betrays him to the
police, and he kills himself by jumping through a window. For further reading: 'Ballinger's Chill and Puzzle Parallel Plots' by Nicholas Litchfield, in The Tooth and the Nail / The Wife of the Red-Haired Man by Bill S. Ballinger (2020); 'Two Tales in Tandem' by Nicholas Litchfield, in Portrait in Smoke/The Longest Second by Bill S. Ballinger (2018); 'Ballinger, Bill S' by John M. Muste, in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights by Robert A. Baker, Michael T. Nietzel (1985); 'Ballinger, Bill S(anborn),' in Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, edited by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler (1976) Selected bibliography:
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