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Bill S. Ballinger (born William Sanborn Ballinger on 13 March 1912 in Oskaloosa, Iowa, died 23 March 1980 Tarzana, California) was a prolific American author and screenwriter. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin and was an associate professor of writing at the California State University Northridge, Los Angeles, California.

Working in radio and advertising in the early 1940's, Ballinger wrote 81 radio scripts and produced The Dinah Shore Show, The Breakfast Club, and Lowell Thomas broadcasts. After Ballinger moved from New York to Los Angeles he began writing full time.

The author of 30 books, Ballinger also used the names B.S. Sanborn and Frederic Fryer. The first was The Body in the Bed in 1948. His most famous work was 1950's Portrait in Smoke that received a Les Grands Maîtres du Roman Policier Award and was filmed in 1956 as Wicked as they Come. Ballinger's two main fictional characters in his novels were Chicago private investigator Barr Breed and Native American Central Intelligence Agency Agent Joaquin Hawke. He received an Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Longest Second in 1958.

Ballinger was a frequent writer for American television with 150 teleplays to his name. These included seven teleplays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, two episodes of The Night Stalker, several police television shows such as Tightrope and Ironside and the episode "The Mice" for The Outer Limits.

In addition to his books and teleplays, Ballinger wrote screenplays for Burt Topper's The Strangler (1963) and Operation CIA (1965), a Burt Reynolds spy film set in Vietnam but filmed in Thailand.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bill S. Ballinger", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0