In the Heat of the Night

In the Heat of the Night is a detective novel by the American writer John Ball, published in 1965. It won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was the first book about Virgil Tibbs.

The novel is set in the community of Wells, South Carolina, during the civil rights movement, and its main character is a black police detective who is only passing through the town.

Sam Wood is a respected officer in Wells, and one night, after stopping at his usual diner for a snack, he finds a body lying in the middle of the highway. The dead man is soon identified as Maestro Enrico Mantoli, the conductor and lead organiser of the music festival the town is preparing to hold, and the chief of police, Bill Gillespie, is informed of the discovery.

Gillespie sends Sam to the railway station, where Sam finds a black man waiting for a train and arrests him on suspicion of the murder. When Gillespie questions the man, he identifies himself as Virgil Tibbs, a homicide investigator in another city's police department, and everything about the investigation changes after that. Ball went on to write six further novels about Tibbs, and the book became the basis of a film in 1967 and a television series afterwards.