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.
