Small Town Murder in Black and White

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 98
John Ball, In the Heat of the Night

The richest man in a small South Carolina town lies murdered beside the main highway. This town’s police force is completely unprepared to investigate a murder, particularly one where the victim has national connections outside the South. So the frightened police chief orders a mass roundup of likely-looking suspects. His best patrolman brings in a traveling Black man guilty of nothing worse than being Black. Only it turns out he’s found an off-duty homicide investigator.

If you’ve seen Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning movie of the same title, you’ll recognize the broad strokes of John Ball’s most famous novel. Police chief Bill Gillespie, wracked with the prejudices of his time, doesn’t want detective Virgil Tibbs’ help, but he needs it. Tibbs doesn’t owe Gillespie anything, but feels honor-bound to solve a crime once it’s been identified. But the town would rather let the guilty go unpunished, than accept a Black man’s help.

But don’t think they’re the same story. Where Jewison shows the tension between Black and White in a South structurally resistant to change, Ball’s story is much more internal, driven by characters’ private motivations, which they struggle to acknowledge, even to themselves. Chief Gillespie’s sense of order collides with Virgil Tibbs’ faith in justice. This collision happens in Wells, South Carolina, a mountainous village that hasn’t changed in years, and isn’t ready to change now.

Most importantly, the characters are drawn differently than the movie. Unlike Rod Steiger’s middle-aged, gum-chewing cynic, this version of Bill Gillespie is young, only thirty-four, and inexperienced to the brink of incompetence. He botches the early stages of his investigation because he hasn’t read the correct textbooks yet. He begrudgingly accepts Tibbs’ help because he needs it, but an angered city councilman admits Wells hired him because they expect him to uphold generations of segregation.

This Virgil Tibbs, meanwhile, differs from Sidney Poitier’s screen depiction. Where Poitier intones “They call me Mister Tibbs!” with the suppressed rage of a man ready to resist unjust authority, this Tibbs simply speaks that line. He doesn’t actively resist South Carolina’s systems of bigotry, an action he knows would likely get him hanged. Instead, he quietly stays just inside the rules, giving unreconstructed bigots just enough powder to shoot themselves. Which they inevitably do.

One trait this novel shares with the movie is that the mystery isn’t the most important part. Though the murder of a small town’s most prominent resident starts the story, it becomes secondary to the character interactions. Because of history, these characters can never completely trust one another, and constantly scrutinize each other’s actions, hoping for a critical misstep. Yet somehow, socialized to their various social roles, nobody ever truly goes one step too far.

1967 cinema poster for In the
Heat of the Night

Author John Ball shifts his story among several viewpoint characters, mostly but not exclusively Chief Gillespie and Patrolman Sam Wood. Both men are racists, among their multiple failings, and view Tibbs through racialized lenses. Even when Tibbs proves his competence enough to earn their grudging respect, they still consider him through their own prejudices, and consider him “almost a white man.” As readers, we understand and appreciate these characters. But we can never like them.

One viewpoint we never get is Virgil Tibbs. He remains the one character we observe entirely from outside. Unlike Gillespie and Wood, whose bigotry we see in such detail that it almost clings to us, Tibbs’ anti-racism remains private to himself. Instead, we see him act. He uses others’ narrow bias against themselves, turning the intolerant into their own worst character witnesses. It’s no surprise to discover Tibbs is also a fairly advanced Judo practitioner.

Through his Judo-influenced investigation techniques, Tibbs forces several retrenched South Carolinians to acknowledge the blinders they’ve worn so long, even they forget they’re wearing them. Simply by remaining present when White people talk, he makes them uncomfortable enough to reveal long-simmering truths. By the end, Tibbs probably hasn’t cured anybody’s racism. But he forces people to admit, to themselves if nobody else, that they are, indeed, bigots.

Nobody likes to face hard truths about themselves.

Even by genre novel standards, this book is remarkably short: under 160 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. Yet it never feels short. Ball’s language is terse yet detailed, convincing us to sympathize with characters without ever liking them… and making us question why we like or dislike anyone. By the final page, we feel we’ve undertaken a journey. And like Chief Gillespie, our journey isn’t over yet; the next step is up to us.