Portrait in Smoke, by Bill S. Ballinger (Signet, 1951).
William Sanborn “Bill” Ballinger (1912-1980) was an Iowa-born author, college professor, radio scriptwriter, and screenwriter. He penned standalone novels with titles such as The Tooth and the Nail (1955), The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1956), Beacon in the Night (1960), and Not I, Said the Vixen (1965), along with episodes of TV shows including M Squad, Mike Hammer, Ironside, Cannon, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. In the 1960s, Ballinger also concocted five thrillers starring Joaquin Hawks, a U.S. secret agent of Native American heritage.
Not satisfied with those abundant credits, Ballinger also penned a couple of novels featuring Chicago private eye Barr Breed (1948’s The Body in the Bed and 1949’s The Body Beautiful), plus a single book about New York City gumshoe Bryce Patch, (Heist Me Higher, 1969), and Portrait in Smoke, a one-and-done outing for Danny April, who operates a bargain-basement Chicago collections agency.
Although I haven’t read Portrait, someone who has is prolific novelist and blogger James Reasoner. He offers this synopsis:
To start with, Ballinger uses a technique that I hardly ever like, alternating between first and third person, but makes it work really well. The first-person sections are narrated by Danny April (great name) ... In an old file from long before he bought the agency, he finds a photograph of a beautiful young girl named Krassy Almauniski. And to put it simply, he becomes infatuated with her, all because she reminds him of a girl he saw once when he was a young man but never talked to. Love at first sight? Maybe, but certainly obsession at first sight. Danny starts trying to find her, or at least find out what happened to her, and these parts of the novel form a top-notch procedural yarn as Danny traces out the details of Krassy’s life, step by step.Reviewer NancyO sounds no less delighted with Ballinger’s 160-page yarn. “I believe I’ve discovered the ultimate in femmes fatales,” she writes in The Crime Segments. “I read this story this past Saturday, and I did not move from my spot on the sofa until the last page had been turned—that’s
At the same time, in the third-person sections, Ballinger
gives the truth about Krassy’s life, as opposed to Danny’s somewhat skewed view. This part of the book reads more like a naturalistic novel about a young woman’s determined climb out of the poverty and squalor of Chicago’s stockyards district all the way to the heights of wealth and power, no matter what it takes. It’s inevitable that these two storylines will intersect eventually, and when they do, that’s when Portrait in Smoke becomes a noirish crime novel with a very nice twist ending.
how good it is. I actually found myself gasping when I got to the ending … [Q]uite honestly, it blew me away. Trust me: you may think you’ve seen all that these old books have to offer in the way of femmes fatales, but there is no one, absolutely no one in my reading experience quite like this woman [Krassy Almauniski].”(Left) Portrait in Smoke’s back cover.
Hmm. This sounds like a book I should find for myself. Fortunately, Stark House Press reprinted it six years ago in a two-fer paperback edition together with another Ballinger standalone, 1957’s The Longest Second.
Stanley Meltzoff (1917-2006), the New York City-born painter responsible for the Portrait cover atop this post, started his career working for advertising agencies, book publishers, and magazines in the 1950s. His artistry graced National Geographic, Scientific American, and The Atlantic, and he produced for The Saturday Evening Post “a still life featuring a bust of Benjamin Franklin” that, beginning in 1956, appeared on that popular weekly five Januarys in a row to celebrate Franklin’s birthday. Meltzoff’s creations were displayed over the decades on crime novels by Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Georges Simenon, and Day Keene, as well as on science-fiction releases by the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt.
A selection of his covers can be enjoyed here.
