Willis Todhunter Ballard (1903-1980) was an American author and a cousin of Rex Todhunter Stout. Ballard was known for his Westerns and mystery stories, novelettes, and book-length novels. He wrote hundreds of stories for the pulps, almost all mysteries and westerns. Ballard also published under a number of pseudonyms, including P. D. Ballard, Jack Slade, Neil MacNeil, Clay Turner, Hunter D’Allard, John Hunter, Sam Bowie, Parker Bonner, Brian Fox, Clint Reno, and Brian Agar. His series detectives under the author name W. T. Ballard are Bill Lennox, a movie troubleshooter, and Lieutenant Max Hunter. As Neil MacNeil, he created the series characters Tony Costain and Bert McCall.
Bill Lennox, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking motion picture troubleshooter, appeared in dozens of short stories and five novels. Lennox worked for the head of the prominent movie studio General-Consolidated Pictures. Not exactly a detective, Lennox’s job generally involved keeping the Hollywood studio’s stars out of trouble and General-Consolidated out of the headlines. Ballard worked as a scriptwriter and producer in Hollywood during the late 1930s and his stories about Lennox reflect his experience.
Say Yes to Murder (Putnam, 1942), the first novel featuring Bill Lennox, starts out with the granddaughter of a venerated movie queen finding a dead man under her bed. The man in question was a skirt-chasing movie star under contract to General Consolidated. He was supposed to be on a movie set wrapping up a film that was nearly done, and his murder meant the entire film had to be scrapped at considerable expense. The grandmother was an old friend of Lennox’s, who admired the elderly doyenne of film immensely. He wanted to protect the granddaughter on her grandmother’s behalf. He deployed his special expertise and spirited the body to a less controversial location for the police to find.
Then one of the actresses that the victim had been seen with recently turned up murdered. Lennox came under suspicion for one or both of the murders, and he had to scramble to clear his name. The plot becomes deeply elaborate. Although the threads all hang together, I had to follow them closely to keep the players and their shenanigans straight. It is easy to lose track.
The writing is the terse, compact style of the pulps with focus on action rather than character or motivation, and the action is relentless. The description of the Hollywood setting and the power of the film studios reflect the times and provide insight into the struggles of anyone who dreamed of a movie career. Ballard also drew some clear lines from vaudeville to the movies and showed how some film stars made the transition and others didn’t. The killer turned out to be a surprise, as did the motive, although Ballard planted a careful hint about two-thirds through the book. A good period piece.