Tibbs has a black belt in karate and a brown belt in aikido, is highly observant, and like many fictional detectives is something of a polymath: he has an extensive depth and breadth of knowledge in many fields of the arts, sciences, and modern culture. His general demeanor is somewhat cold, and highly intellectual. He is tolerant of non-criminal behaviors outside of the social mainstream, such as nudism.
Tibbs is uninterested in glory or media attention. He is a perfectionist, and his sole motivation is duty and justice. In the films, Tibbs displays a considerably larger degree of anger over issues of race than in the books. For example, in the novel In The Heat of the Night, the phrase "They call me Mr. Tibbs" is a statement ending in a period, while in the movie, it's an angry exclamation.
Physically, Tibbs is slender, quick, strong, and handsome. His nose is relatively narrow, and his mouth is "straight and determined". His skin tone is neither exceptionally light nor dark.
Tibbs has several romantic liaisons in the novels and seems to be well on the way to be getting married by the end of the last Tibbs novel Singapore. In the first film, Tibbs is not married, although the second and third films he was depicted as having a wife (played by Barbara McNair) and two children.
For the book The Great Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler, published in 1978, John Ball contributed a short story in which Ball himself (or rather his counterpart in Virgil Tibb's universe) meets with Tibbs and asks him to recount his upbringing. This short story establishes that Tibbs' superior on the police force encouraged Ball's fictionalizations of Tibbs' cases to promote positive public relations. (Robert L. Fish took a similar approach with short story about Captain Jose Da Silva for this anthology; other writers simply contributed reminiscences of writing.) "Ms. Diane Stone, secretary to Chief Robert Mc Gowan of the Pasadena Police Department, was on the phone. "The chief has approved the release to you of the details concerning the Morales murder" she told me. He has authorized you to go ahead with it at any time, if you want to". Of course I wanted to: the unraveling of the case via the patient, intelligent investigation work of the department in general, and Virgil Tibbs in particular, would need no embellishment in the telling. As I