Alone in his bedroom, Johnny McGuire turned on his small transistor radio. In the few weeks that he and his parents had been in Pasadena Johnny had made few acquaintances and no friends; in his lonesome little life the radio had opened the door to a magnificent new world. People played music for him to listen to and they told him, play-by-play, what was happening in the big league games. Seated on the edge of the bed, he clutched the little set in both hands.
This radio had been the only gift that could be afforded for his ninth birthday and already Johnny McGuire seemed old enough to understand why. He knew that life wasn't always fair, that there was little money to spend, that sometimes his father was angry, often afraid.
This is the story, as only John Ball could tell it, of what happens when an older, bigger boy steals Johnny's proudest possession and Johnny sets out to even the score using his father's .38 Colt revolver.
Told against the scene of black-white conflict in Pasadena, between poor whites and black militants, between rich whites and poor whites, and the highly topical and urgent problem of gun control, Johnny Get Your Gun is first-rate suspense. It is the chilling story of Johnny's adventures with his gun and of a murder and how the murder is solved by John Ball's cool, brilliant black homicide detective Virgil Tibbs. hero of In the Heat of the Night and The Cool Cottontail. There are riots, brutalities, an action-packed chase through Disneyland, and a heartwarming and heartbreaking scene at the end of the book in the baseball park of the California Angels.
Perhaps the most important issue, described with sincerity and sensitivity by John Bad, is the terror and confusion in the mind of a nine-year-old boy—frightened, alone, hurt by the hatred around him, a fugitive from justice.
Johnny Get Your Gun touches on some of the most urgent problems facing America today, and is told by one of America's most accomplished storytellers. John Ball is the author of Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as "a very funny and tender story of what happens when East meets West," as well as author of In the Heat of the Night, made into a screenplay which won the Academy Award for best picture of 1967.
