Gamblers Don't Win by W. T. Ballard

Introduction
    Willis Todhunter Ballard (1903–1980) is the creator of one of Black Mask Magazine ’s most popular series characters, Bill Lennox, the original Hollywood trouble-shooter.
    Ballard worked for his father’s electrical engineering office after graduating college, but soon moved on to a job as a reporter for a chain of small Midwest newspapers headquartered not far from his birthplace near Cleveland, Ohio.
    His career as a professional fiction writer began in 1927 when he started to sell sporadically to the crime pulps, and during a career of almost fifty years he produced 95 novels, about 50 movie and TV scripts, and more than one thousand short stories and novelettes. His stories have appeared in many different pulps as well as The Saturday Evening Post , Esquire , This Week and McCall's . Although he concentrated on detective and mystery stories early in his career, his later work was primarily in westerns, for which he won many awards.
    Soon after the crash of 1929, Ballard moved to California where he bumped into Major Harry Warner whom he had known in Cleveland where the young Warner brothers had produced movie trailers. Warner gave Ballard a job for $75 a week writing scripts for First National Pictures where Ballard learned how pictures were produced.
    After eight months, Ballard made a crack about Jack Warner that Jack heard, and Warner fired him on the spot. But Ballard immediately moved to Columbia where he was given responsibility to bring in very cheap films for under $10,000 each. The only way this could be done was for Ballard to write the script, direct, produce the picture and even move the sets and scenery. The job lasted six months and exhausted him, but gave him the knowledge to write with authenticity in his Bill Lennox stories.
    While working for the Warner brothers and for Columbia Pictures, Ballard continued to sell to pulps like Short Stories and Argosy , but had no great success.
    In 1931 while living with his uncle in Los Angeles, Ballard heard a radio advertisement for the early film version of The Maltese Falcon starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade. He went to see the movie.
    In his Black Mask Magazine website interview, Ballard recalls that:
    Excerpts of dialogue forced themselves through to me. Dialogue the way I had always wanted to write it. I had been trying to please Dorothy Hubbard at Detective Story Magazine , a lady who favored the Mary Roberts Rinehart and Agatha Christie styles and types of material…. It was Hammett’s dialogue that enthralled me. Hammett's ear for words that sounded the way I thought criminals and detectives should talk. It rang true, the way I wanted mine to do.
    The radio advertisement gave a credit to Black Mask Magazine , which was the first that Ballard had heard of the publication. He left the theater, walked to the corner, bought a copy of the then-current issue and read it on the ride back to his uncle’s. He said he felt “that I was coming home.”
    Ballard immediately came up with the idea of a troubleshooter working for a film studio. He could use his experience in the movie world for realistic background. He plotted most of his first Lennox story very quickly on his ride home from the movie theater, and wrote it out in three or four hours that same night. He reported that he mailed it out the next morning.
    A week after he mailed the story to Black Mask he received a letter from Joe Shaw. The famous editor wanted some changes made, but he sent along a check with the letter, an unheard of generosity for the time. The major change he asked for was that Bill Lennox not carry a gun as other fictional detectives did. No one with sense argued with Shaw. So Lennox went without a gun.
    Following that first Black Mask sale, Ballard wrote and sold seven more Lennox tales within three weeks! For a time, Ballard sold Joe Shaw more copy than anyone else did, an average of ten stories a year, more than that including characters