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Few detective novels can make as strong a claim to social and political relevance as John Ball's 1965 mystery, In the Heat of the Night. Its protagonist, a black police officer from Pasadena California named Virgil Tibbs, passes through a southern town at an inauspicious moment. An orchestra conductor has been gruesomely murdered, and the police, without much in the way of evidence or possible motives for the crime, arrest Tibbs. When the police discover that he is not the killer, but in fact a highly-skilled homicide detective, they enlist him to help solve the case.What makes this novel so interesting-and what made it so timely-is not merely the fact that its hero is a black police officer (at the time, a very unusual figure in popular culture), but that he is teamed with a bigoted southern police officer, Sheriff Gillespie. The evolving relationship between the two men, and the mutual admiration that develops between them, exposes the bankruptcy of racial prejudice. Rational, gentlemanly and a highly capable detective, Virgil Tibbs forces Gillespie to reconsider his stereotyped notions and accord him the kind of respect that the racist sheriff is not used to granting to those of ethnic backgrounds different from his own. Tibbs has not only Gillespie to deal with: his investigation takes him through the backwater town and exposes him to different forms of prejudice harbored by the townspeople. For it is not just Tibbs' ethnicity that rankles the locals he comes into contact with, it is also his urban sophistication and his California background. Part of Ball's achievement in this novel, though, is that he refuses to discredit one stereotype by merely adopting another. That is, he manages to write a tale about a region of the country where ignorance and racism cause terrible suffering without making the mistake of depicting every Southerner as ignorant, or racist. If Virgil Tibbs topples some people's preconceived notions, the portraits of some of the Southerners in this novel do the same.A fascinating pop culture document from the Civil Rights Era, In the Heat of the Night is also a great mystery. Winner of the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America as well as the Crimewriters' Association's Golden Dagger Award, it was also recently named one of the hundred greatest detective novels of the century by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. It has also spawned two extremely successful adaptations, most famously the film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, which won a Best Picture Oscar in 1967. The television show, which starred Carroll O'Connor, was a successful but somewhat more loosely-based adaptation.
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Subjects
African American police, Fiction, Mystery, Police, Thriller, Large type books, Fiction, mystery & detective, police procedural, Southern states, fiction, Tibbs, virgil (fictitious character), fiction, African americans, fictionPlaces
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In the heat of the night
2001, Center Point Pub., Center Point Pub
in English
1585471151 9781585471157
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E ye zhui ji ling
1997, Yuan liu chu ban shi ye gu fen you xian gong si
in Chinese
- Chu ban
9573228130 9789573228134
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In the heat of the night
1985, Perennial Library
in English
- 1st Perennial Library ed.
0060807350 9780060807351
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- Created June 22, 2010
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July 1, 2019 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
July 30, 2014 | Edited by ImportBot | import new book |
April 6, 2014 | Edited by ImportBot | Added IA ID. |
September 26, 2012 | Edited by VacuumBot | Updated format 'eBook' to 'E-book'; Removed author from Edition (author found in Work) |
June 22, 2010 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from marc_overdrive MARC record |