About the Author
John Dudley Ball was born in California in 1911 and worked as a pilot, music critic, newspaper columnist, and public relations director before becoming a fiction writer. Although he penned over 30 novels during his writing career including mysteries, war novels, and adventure stories, his reputation as a novelist is firmly based on his first work, 1965's In the Heat of the Night. Despite considerable pressure from his publisher, Ball insisted upon making his lead character a black man, and the book won him praise for its progressive thinking and keen understanding of racial prejudice. He wrote five other books starring the hero of In the Heat of the Night, detective Virgil Tibbs, including Then Came Violence (1980) and Singapore (1986), but none was as successful as the original.

Having spent a considerable amount of time in Asia, Ball also wrote novels set in that region of the world, including Miss 1001 Spring Blossoms (1968), Dragon Hotel (1968) and Five Pieces of Jade (1972). In later life, he worked as a part-time police officer in Los Angeles and trained in the martial arts. John Dudley Ball died in 1988.