Louis
Nearly forty years old, the Lone Wolf is, as his British Secret Service friend Wertheimer puts it, “superannuated.” His last adventure involved not just the surprise of meeting his grown daughter, but the twin shocks of seeing her fall in love with a secret agent and risk her own death at the hands of murderous Bolsheviks. The excitement has left Lanyard—or...
A muddy figure inches his way across no man’s land, the only living thing in a hellscape of death and misery. Artillery lights up the night sky and he pauses—as stiff and motionless as the corpses that block his path. Darkness returns, and he sprints to safety, tumbling down a ladder into the British trenches. He is no ordinary soldier returned from a...
One rainy winter night, an orphan is abandoned to the care of a shabby Parisian inn called Troyon's. For the next eleven years, the boy is up before dawn to clean and fetch and serve, his only respite the closet to which he retires at night and the books he pilfers from the hotel's guests. A few francs here and there also find their way into his pockets, but not so much...
While taking in an auction, the dashing jewel thief Michael Lanyard spies something more appealing than the artwork on the dock: the stunning Princess Sofia. There to purchase an impressionist painting, the ravishing Russian émigré becomes locked in a bidding war with her diabolical ex-husband, who drives...
Upon a certain dreary April afternoon in the year of grace, 1906, the apprehensions of Philip Kirkwood, Esquire, Artist-peintre, were enlivened by the discovery that he was occupying that singularly distressing social position, which may be summed up succinctly in a phrase through long usage grown proverbial: "Alone in London." These three words have come to connote in our understanding so much of human misery, that to Mr. Kirkwood they seemed
...The early twentieth-century American novelist Louis Joseph Vance created the popular character Michael Lanyard, a criminal-turned-detective known as 'The Lone Wolf'. His sensation thrillers and whirlwind adventure stories were well-regarded for their imaginative, gruesome and engaging qualities. He published many bestselling books and established his own motion picture production company, whose films were distributed by Paramount Pictures. Many
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