Bill S. Ballinger

Bill S. Ballinger , origin. William Sanborn Ballinger (born March 13, 1912 in Oskaloosa , Iowa , † March 23, 1980 in Tarzana , California ) was an American writer.

Life

Ballinger studied at the University of Wisconsin and graduated successfully in 1934. He then earned his living in the editorial offices of various radio and television stations.

In 1936 Ballinger married Geraldine Taylor. After ten years, this marriage was divorced in 1946. In the following years Ballinger made extensive trips through Europe and the Middle East. In the winter of 1948/49 he returned to the USA and settled in California , where he mainly worked as a screenwriter.

In 1949 Ballinger married Laura Dunham for the second time. She died in 1962 and two years later he was third married to Lucille Rambeau. In 1977/78 he was a member of the “Board of Directors of Health and Welfare Plan and Pension Plan” and was then entrusted with the management of the “Federal Credit Union”. At the same time, Ballinger held a teaching position from 1977 to 1979 as an “associate professeur of writing” at California State University, Northridge , Los Angeles .

Two weeks after his 68th birthday, Bill S. Ballinger died on March 23, 1980 in Tarzana, Calif. and found his final resting place there.

Honors

• 1958 - Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his novel The Longest Second
• 1960 - Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America in recognition of his television work

reception

Under his name, as well as under the pseudonyms "BS Sanborn" and "Frederic Freyer", over 80 texts were written for radio and over 150 for television.

The series of his thirty books began in 1948 with the publication of The body in the bed and ended in 1979 with The California story . The former is a variation of the Maltese Falcon ( Dashiell Hammett ) and in the latter Ballinger dealt with the history of the Federal Credit Union, of which he was once president.

For his detective novels, Ballinger invented the private detective Barry Breed from Chicago, Ill. And the CIA agent Joaquin Hawke, who was of Indian descent.

Some of his novels were made into films. The novel Portrait in Smoke (1950) was made into a film by Ken Hughes in 1956 under the title "Nobody went past her" Wicked as they come . Richard Quine filmed the novel Pushover two years earlier .

Works (selection)

Fiction

• the body beautiful . 1949
• The body in the bed . 1948
• The chinese mask . 1965
• The spy in the jungle . 1965
• The tooth of the nail . 1955
• The wife of the red-haired man . 1957

Non-fiction

• The Californian Story. Credit Union's first fifty years . 1979
• The Corsian . 1974 (the history of the "Union Corse" 1943–1973)
• 49 days of death . 1969 (an interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead )

Scripts

• The beautiful trap . 1953
• Operation CIA . 1966 ( Christian Nyby directed )
• The Strangler . 1964 ( Burt Topper directed )

literature

• John M. Reilly (Ed.): Twentieth-century crime and mystery writers . St. James Books, London 1985, ISBN 0-912289-17-1 .
• Chris Steinbrunner et al. a. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of mystery and detection . Routledge & Paul, London 1976, ISBN 0-15-628787-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Bill S. Ballinger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ballinger's biography ( memento from July 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
• Bill S. Ballinger in the Internet Movie Database (English)