Bill S. Ballinger's The Longest Second

The Longest Second is a 1957 crime novel by Bill S. Ballinger. Assigning it to a particular crime sub-genre is a bit tricky. It’s certainly a mystery novel. It has some hardboiled flavouring. It has some affinities to noir fiction. But there’s other stuff going on as well.

Bill S. Ballinger (1912-1980) was an American crime writer who enjoyed great success in his lifetime as a novelist and a writer for film and television. He had a definite taste for narrative experimentation. Perhaps that’s why he isn’t as well remembered as he should be - his experiments could be rather bold. This novel uses a technique (the split narrative) that he employed quite often, in novels such as Portrait in Smoke, but in The Longest Second he’s throwing in some other experiments as well.

There is a serious crime, but there’s nothing simple about it. There’s a mystery to be solved and there are three separate investigations being conducted, not all of them by the police.

A man getting his throat cut certainly qualifies as a serious crime. The man involved is not very happy about it at all.

I don’t want to give any details at all about the plot for fearing of spoilers. The plot does involve silversmithing, stained glass, an Arabic inscription and two women. One of the women might perhaps be a femme fatale.

The story is also very much about memory and identity. It concerns a man who has neither.

It’s also a story about the past. Everything hinges on the mysterious past of a particular man.

The storytelling techniques used here are definitely risky. Ending such a story in a satisfying plausible way is a challenge. There’s the danger that the whole thing will turn out to be too clever for its own good. Ballinger pulls it off reasonably well although it is, unavoidably, a little contrived.

Ballinger is doing more than experiment with narrative structure. He’s being equally daring with the entire concept of characterisation. And with character motivation. This was seriously avant-garde stuff in the 50s but Ballinger manages to make the book an exciting and engrossing mystery story as well. There are plenty of indications early on of the direction the story might be taking but the ending is still not quite what you might be anticipating.

This is one of those books in which the reader knows a lot more about what is really going on than any of the characters do but there’s still crucial stuff we don’t know.

And the characters are not automatons doing things because the plot requires them to do so. The key character does have choices. He has free will.

The Longest Second is wildly unconventional but it’s entertaining if you set aside your genre expectations and just go with it. Highly recommended.

Ballinger was for decades a totally forgotten writer but Stark House have now brought a lot of his novels back into print (The Longest Second had been out of print for half a century).

I’ve reviewed Ballinger's 1950 novel Portrait in Smoke (paired with The Longest Second in a Stark House two-novel edition) which I recommend very highly.