Character
Joseph R. "Joe" Mannix is a regular guy, without pretense, who has a store of proverbs to rely upon in conversation. What demons he has mostly come from having fought in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Unfortunately a sizable percentage of his old Army "buddies" turn out to have homicidal impulses against him. In the episode "The Cost of a Vacation" it is revealed that Mannix worked as a mercenary in Latin America.
Joe Mannix is notable for taking a lot of physical punishment. During the course of the series he is shot and wounded over a dozen separate times, or is knocked unconscious around 55 times. Mannix frequently took brutal beatings to the abdomen; some of these went on quite a long time, particularly by the television standards of the era. Whenever Mannix gets into one of his convertibles he can expect to be shot at from another car, run off the road by another car, or find his vehicle sabotaged. Nevertheless he keeps his cool and perseveres until his antagonists are brought down. While making the television pilot The Name is Mannix, Connors dislocated his shoulder running away from a From Russia With Love type pursuit from a helicopter, and broke his left wrist punching a stuntman who happened to be wearing a steel plate on his back.
Mannix lives at 17 Paseo Verde, West Los Angeles. Following military service in the Korean War, Mannix attended Western Pacific University on the GI Bill, graduated in 1955 and obtained his private investigator's licence in 1956. He is a black belt in Karate. In the first season he carried a Walther PP semi-automatic pistol. From the second season on Mannix carried a Colt Detective Special snubnosed revolver in .38 Special caliber.
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