John Ball (American author)
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Juhn Dudley Ball (1911-1988), writing as "John Ball", was an American author best known for novels involving the character Virgil Tibbs, first introduced in 1965 in In the Heat of the Night. Tibbs was an African-American police detective from Los Angeles who in the first book of the series must solve a murder in a racist small town in the American South. That novel won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America and was made into a movie of the same name starring Sidney Poitier.
Ball was born in Schenectady, New York, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended college at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He wrote for a number of magazines and news papers, including the Brooklyn Eagle.