T.T. Flynn - Sailor, Railroadman, Author

Theodore Thomas Flynn (better known as T.T. Flynn, western and detective fiction author) is nowadays remembered for his book, The Man from Laramie, which was made into a successful movie. He also wrote a series of stories about Mr. Maddox, a bookie detective, in Dime Detective; another series about a P.I. couple – Trixie and Mike in Detective Fiction Weekly; and wrote western stories for Adventure, Short Stories, Star Western, and Argosy.

I first came across T.T. Flynn when i read the novella, Satan's Deputy, the first story in the Star Western collection edited by Jon Tuska. Flynn kept the trouble piling up on the hero. In the first three pages, the hero comes out of prison after a two year sentence for a crime he didn't commit and rides off into a stagecoach holdup that goes wrong; the posse that comes to the rescue arrests him as a suspect. In the final shootout, the bad guys set the house in which the hero is hiding on fire. Good triumphs, but not before sailing through a sea of troubles.