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In the Heat of the Night

In the Heat of the Night. By John Ball Written in 1965 ENG2P. A Great American Mystery. A Classic “ Whodunit? ”

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In the Heat of the Night

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  1. In the Heat of the Night By John Ball Written in 1965 ENG2P

  2. A Great American Mystery • A Classic “Whodunit?” • 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. (http://www.rosettabooks.com/pages/title_105.html)

  3. Racism in the American South • What makes the book worth re-reading today is that it reminds us that what we call racism is not a monolithic ideology. Over and over, Mr. Ball shows us the many and varied reasons for the social behavior of each individual. Monolithic: by often rigidly fixed uniformity Ideology: a belief system.

  4. The Racism in Wells • The characters decide to make racially-loaded gestures based on a host of motivations: peer pressure, ignorance, ethical conviction, fear, defiance, empathy, embarrassment, admiration, or simply because they are reacting to an individual rather than a stereotyped group.

  5. Virgil Tibbs and Sherrif Gillespie • 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.

  6. Tibbs and Gillespie continued… • 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. (http://www.mysteryguide.com/bkBallNight.html)

  7. The Movie • The movie version of In the Heat of the Night was released in 1967 and earned numerous awards, including the Academy Award for best picture. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night)

  8. John Ball, the Author • Ball was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1911, and grew up in Wisconsin. For a time he worked part-time as a Los Angeles police officer, was trained in martial arts, and was a nudist. John Dudley Ball lived in Encino, California, and died in 1988. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_%28American_author%29)

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