T.T. Mann, Ace Detective

Six feet tall and weighing only twenty-two pounds, T.T. Mann is the perfect protagonist for this light-hearted take on the detective genre. Unlike the hard-boiled private investigators of noir detective fiction, T.T. is a gentle fellow who is shy with women, but he’s not without resources, notably his excellent martial arts skills. With help from his girlfriend Rosie and his brother Flat Mann, T.T. deals entertainingly with dangerous and daunting cases that arise in San Francisco ca. 1955.

In “Blondes Are Trouble,” he comes into possession of a list of policemen and politicians on the take from the city’s crime kingpin, Biggie Fingers, a list Biggie’s henchmen are trying to retrieve by any means necessary. In “The Angry Heiress,” T.T. is hired by a rich, drop-dead beauty to gather dirt on her estranged husband so she can obtain a divorce he is contesting. As T.T. digs deeper, his investigation uncovers a tangle of shady activities involving a circle of wealthy men who respond violently when he begins to snoop into their affairs. In “Mother’s Way,” Rosie is visited by her overbearing mother, who has come to San Francisco to become a student of a spiritualist medium, Mme. Nowicki. When the question of a financial investment in the medium’s business arises, T.T. and Rosie suspect that the woman may be a con artist. They investigate Mme. Nowicki’s past and fail to find anyone who has complained that she has bilked them out of money, but Thin remains seriously unsettled by her claim to communicate with the spirits of the dead.