Bill S (William Sanborn) Ballinger was an American thriller writer. His best known books include The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1957) and The Tooth and the Nail (1955). Ballinger's books have been reprinted in some thirty countries, and translated into over thirteen languages.

Ballinger was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa and educated at the University of Wisconsin. He worked in advertising and as a radio and television writer. In 1936 he married Geraldine Taylor - they divorced in 1946. In 1949 he married Laura Dunham; she died in 1962, and two years later he married Lucille Rambeau. Between the years 1977 and 1979 Ballinger was an associate professor of writing at the California State University, Nortridge. Ballinger died on March 23, 1980.

Ballinger began with hard-boiled detective fiction, featuring private eye Barr Breed from Chicago. In the 1960s he participated in the spy boom, producing a new series characters, CIA operative Joaquim Hawks. His first success was Portrait in Smoke (1950) The book was filmed in 1956 under the title Wicked As They Come. In the 1950s Ballinger became a screenwriter for movies and TV.

Bibliography

The Body in the Bed (1948)

The Body Beautiful (1949)

Portrait in Smoke aka The Deadlier Sex (1950)

The Darkening Room (1952)

Rafferty aka The Beautiful Trap (1953)

The Tooth and the Nail (1955)

The Longest Second (1957)

The Wife of the Red Haired Man (1957)

Beacon in the Night (1958)

Formula For Murder (1958)

The Fourth Forever (1963)

Not I Said the Vixen (1965)

The Chinese Mask (1965)

The Spy in the Jungle (1965)

The Spy in Bangok (1965)

The Heir Hunters (1966)

The Spy at Angor Wat (1966)

The Spy in the Java Sea (1966)

The Source of Fear (1968)

The 49 Days of Death (1969)

Heist Me Higher (1969)

The Lopsided Man (1969)

Triptych (1971)

The Corsican (1974)

The Law (1975)

The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

Lost City of Stone (1978)

As BX Sanborn

The Doom Maker aka The Blonde on Borrowed Time (1959)

As Frederic Freyer

The Black Black Hearse (1955)