Post #506440 by bigbrotiki on Sat, Jan 23, 2010 1:35 PM

I seem to have this inquisitive streak...can you tell? :D

The internet makes it so easy nowaday's, but then again it only goes so far...
For example, I could only find two photos of the fella, and they don't look that much alike!? :

(though with age and weight, my face has gotten a bit rounder, too...)

The most interesting description of him besides the usual Mystery novel website bios was this piece by a fellow writer:

University of California’s Mystery Library project and thereby got to spend quality time with the project’s instigator: John Ball, author of In the Heat of the Night (1965) and creator of black detective Virgil Tibbs.
John too was a Munchausen of the first water. The instant any famous name was mentioned in his presence, from Gene Autry to the Dalai Lama, he would claim to know the person well and toss off an anecdote. Shostakovich? “Ah yes, he played the piano for us in this very room when he was last in the States.”
And what tales he’d spin about his hair-raising adventures around the world! Traveling in Asia, he was invited by the local police to help track down some notorious terrorist. On a secret mission behind the Iron Curtain he lured a Stasi agent who was shadowing him into a public urinal in East Berlin and killed him with one karate chop.

If you knew a bit about his life — that he’d been a licensed pilot and had traveled widely in Japan and had reviewed classical music for a Brooklyn newspaper and was a police reservist and a martial arts maven — you could almost believe these yarns, which he garnished with vivid detail.
Perhaps his biggest whopper, and one he should never have perpetrated because so many people saw through it, was that almost everything in the movie based on In the Heat of the Night had been taken from his novel.
Of course, what made that film so successful was the conflict between Sidney Poitier as Tibbs and the racist cop played by Rod Steiger. Go try to find a smidgen of that conflict in John’s novel.
John worshiped every badge he saw. In his world racist cops are like dry water, categorically impossible. Even on the plot level director Norman Jewison and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant junked much of the book, including everything about the murder victim trying to make that sleepy Southern town a Mecca for classical music.
But even when we saw through John’s tall tales it was tremendous fun to watch him spin them. He was the kind of personality that made Casper Gutman say to Sam Spade: “By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are!” I thank Christopher Buckley for rekindling my memories of him."

So we find out that he was an entertaining character, a talker, who made up stories on top of having lived them. And that he was a cop friend, and his main known credit, the Oscar-winning "In the Heat of the Night", was only loosely built on his novel.

The main thing of interest for me was this info:
"...If you knew a bit about his life — that he’d been a licensed pilot and had traveled widely in Japan and had reviewed classical music for a Brooklyn newspaper and was a police reservist and a martial arts maven...