The Murder Children

by John Dudley Ball

Here is a frightening, realistic novel of terror in the streets, of the growing power wielded by lawless youth gangs.

When newly-promoted Lieutenant Ralph Mott of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was assigned to gang control in East Los Angeles, he knew little about the barrio or the extent of the violence there. Although he had heard of the seventeen warring youth gangs, he was unprepared for fourteen-year-old hitmen, for the savage brutality of boys still in their teens. Now with gang activity increasing, he plunged into the fight to control the armed robberies, the gang rapings, the shotgun attacks on houses, and the constant warfare between hostile gangs that raged on every street and hillside. Most of the people in the Mexican-American community were law-abiding, yet Mott soon learned that fear of gang vengeance kept them silent when they had witnessed a crime.

Chillingly accurate in its detail, The Murder Children is a story of fast, exciting action. It is also a story of people—of individual gang members, of priests and prostitutes, of good citizens and bad. And it is the story of Lieutenant Mott, who with the men and women of the sheriff's forces, had the dangerous job of trying to contain a spreading evil.

John Ball was sworn into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and then spent more than two years working in the barrio, riding patrol units, meeting with gang members, riding in their cars, and sometimes helping to put their dead bodies into the coroner's wagons. The result of these experiences is this powerful book.

Genres: Fiction

311 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

John Dudley Ball writing as John Ball, was an American writer best known for mystery novels involving the African-American police detective Virgil Tibbs. He was introduced in the 1965 In the Heat of the Night where he solves a murder in a racist Southern small town. It won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America and was made into an Oscar-winning film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier; the film had two sequels, and spawned a television series several decades later, none of which were based on Ball's later Tibbs stories. He also wrote under the name John Ball Jr..

Ball was born in Schenectady, New York, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He wrote for a number of magazines and newspapers, including the Brooklyn Eagle. For a time he worked part-time as a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, was trained in martial arts, and was a nudist. In the mid 1980s, he was the book review columnist for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. Ball lived in Encino, California, and died there in 1988.

Reviews

[Bev · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was written by the man that created the Virgil Tibbs series of books, which went on to becoming a movie (In the Heat of the Night) & then a TV series by the same name. It was written in the late 1970s & is set in the LA area. The main character is a new promoted Lt who was given the assignment to run the gang unit in east LA. The novel is gritty and very raw in places.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is much difference between his version of the gangs of that time & the current day gangs.

The ending was not what I expected. Overall, it was a good read