Description:
A Hollywood publicity office, a boss with too much power, and a woman willing to trade loyalty for advancement: W. T. Ballard's Fury in the Heart is a sharp mid-century novel of ambition, sex, jealousy, and corruption. In the late 1950s, the Hollywood branch of Etna Public Relations is a place where careers are made through charm, calculation, and betrayal. Ken Coate runs the office and shares his bed with Kitten, but Kitten has her own future in mind-and that future may belong to Don Prentice, the man positioned to inherit power when Coate falls.
Ballard builds the story out of the raw materials of noir: desire turned strategic, business made intimate, and private weakness exposed inside a world built on image. Hollywood here is not glamour but pressure-an office culture of favours, sexual politics, wounded pride, and professional survival, where every personal choice carries a professional cost. The result is a brisk, sordid, and tightly wound crime novel from the paperback-original era, driven less by clean detection than by appetite, resentment, and the consequences of wanting too much.
This Black Curtain Books edition presents Fury in the Heart as a vintage noir novel of Hollywood, power, and compromised desire. For readers interested in mid-century American crime fiction, paperback noir, hard-boiled fiction, Hollywood novels, workplace intrigue, femmes fatales, and the darker side of 1950s ambition, Ballard's novel delivers a bitter little world where publicity conceals rot and every deal has a price.
Brief description: W. T. Ballard, born Willis Todhunter Ballard (1903-1980), was an American writer of mystery, western, adventure, and crime fiction. He published widely in the pulp and paperback markets, using his own name and pseudonyms including Todhunter Ballard, John Grange, and Robert Wallace. His work appeared in the magazine and paperback traditions that shaped twentieth-century American popular fiction, where speed, plot, atmosphere, and professional storytelling mattered as much as literary reputation.Ballard's crime fiction is especially suited to readers of vintage noir, hard-boiled fiction, private-eye stories, Hollywood crime novels, and paperback originals. His books often draw on compromised motives, professional pressure, sexual jealousy, ambition, and the rough moral weather of mid-century American life. Fury in the Heart shows Ballard working in a noir register: a world of publicity and power where desire becomes leverage, careers become traps, and the line between personal weakness and criminal consequence grows thin.