Writers Born Today - Stirling Silliphant

It's the birthday of screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, born January 16, 1918 in Detroit.  While still a child his family moved to California. It was there he made his fame as a writer for television and movies. After attending USC he started writing for television.

His early work gave little hint at his later brilliance. One of his first writing jobs was for The Mickey Mouse Club. After complaining in the cafeteria about a TV executive, he was summarily fired, which was a greater loss for Disney than Silliphant. He went on to write for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide and Perry Mason.

His most productive period of writing began when Herbert B. Leonard hired him in 1958 to write for a new TV crime drama, The Naked City. Based on the 1948 movie of the same name, the scripts featured tightly written plots with elements of noir film. Silliphant wrote most of the first season's 30-minute episodes and also wrote for another new series, Route 66.

In 1968 he won an Academy Award for his screenplay of In The Heat of The Night, a crime film with heavy racial overtones as well as a first rate mystery plot. It starred Rod Steiger as a bigoted southern sheriff and Sydney Poiter as a black detective from Philadelphia who is drawn with reluctance into helping solve a local murder. Based on the novel by John Ball, the movie won five academy awards, including Best Picture. Silliphant also won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for this screenplay. He liked to describe the movie as "The Defiant Ones with cops instead of cons."

Writers Born Today - John Ball

It's the birthday of mystery writer John Ball, born July 8, 1911 in Schenectady, New York. After graduating from Carroll College he began his career as a music critic and reviewer. During World War II he was a pilot and flew supplies over the treacherous Himalayas for troops fighting in Asia.

He wrote for magazines and newspapers and even worked as a sheriff's deputy before turning to fiction. Later in his career, he wrote book reviews in the 1970s and 80s for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

Some of his first novels featured pilots flying planes under difficult circumstances, such as Last Plane Out. But his most famous fictional character was Virgil Tibbs, a black man investigating crime in a white man's world. His first novel featuring the soft-spoken but competent detective was In The Heat of the Night. 

It won the Edgar Award in 1966 for Best First Novel, and was made into a movie starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. The movie version won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1967. The novel also won the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association.

In 2014, L.A. Theater Works made the novel into a play which received excellent reviews.

Ball wrote 6 more mysteries featuring Tibbs, including The Cool Cottontail, Five Pieces of Jade, Singapore. Johnny Get Your Gun, The Eyes of Buddha, and Then Came Violence.

One of his last novels was published after his death, The Van: A Tale of Terror. Released by St. Martin's Press in 1989, and now available in a Kindle edition, was based on a true crime case in Los Angeles involving horrific killings of young women.

John Ball was President of the Los Angeles chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and served for a time as the Vice-President of the national organization. He died in 1988.