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The Lone Wolf (Michael Lanyard)

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Louis Joseph Vance
(1879-1933)

Louis Joseph Vance‘s MICHAEL LANYARD, better known as THE LONE WOLF, didn’t start out as a private eye, but as a criminal.

However, like Jack Boyle’s Boston Blackie, thanks to his numerous reboots, reincarnations and re-imaginings in radio, film and television, The Lone Wolf is now remembered by many, if at all, chiefly as a sort of gentleman thief turned private eye.

First introduced in the 1914 novel The Lone Wolf: A Melodrama by Louis Joseph Vance, Lanyard was an English-born orphan of unknown parentage who endured a horrid Dickensian childhood after arriving at  Troyons, a Parisian restaurant, where he was “raised” by the cruel and disreputable “Madame,” and trained in the criminal arts by the mysterious Irishman, Bourke who had a “heart as big as all outdoors,” and took the young boy under his wing. Somehow, Michael survived until adulthood, and became a charming sort of rogue, a European jewel thief who worked alone (hence the nickname), despite a soft spot for damsels in distress and a yearning for travel.

It’s a sudsy read—they weren’t kidding about the melodrama—but there’s also plenty of pulpy action: narrow escapes, car chases, rooftop flights, and even an airplane chase. Not bad for 1914.

The character  proved to be popular, right from the start, and appeared in several more novels over the next two decades, and was said to be the inspiration for Leslie Chartis’ The Saint.

His first appearance in film was in the 1917 silent film The Lone Wolf, only three years after the first novel appeared, and he remained a criminal right into the talkies. By 1939’s The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt, he was supposedly “reformed,” a former gentleman thief turned amateur sleuth on the side of the good guys, although law enforcement for the most part remain wary. In The Lone Wolf Meets a Lady (1940), he acquired a valet, Jamison, whose chief job, it seemed, was to provide comic relief, and to become hopelessly entangled in the plots.

The films are enjoyable enough, and while there are no real must-sees among them. there’s are a few nice surprises in store for old movie buffs, with “Hey! Is that…?” appearances in them by Ida Lupino, Lloyd Bridges, Rita Hayworth and Elisha Cook, Jr, scripts by Dalton Trumbo, Stuart Palmer and  Jonathan Latimer, and even a few of that were directed by Edward Dmytryk.

In 1948, after appearing in close to two dozen films, The Lone Wolf moved on to radio, and began a new career, with the cultured European jewel thief now an American private eye, even if the cops still didn’t trust him. The radio series proved successful enough to eventually spawn a 1954 television series. The TV show had a rather schizophrenic hero, with actor Louis Hayward playing the character as a retired French gentleman by day, and the shadowy, wall-crawling Lone Wolf by night.

The Lone Wolf eventually did go gently into that good night, until he was unexpectedly resurrected in comic book form in 2002 by Moonstone, along with—yes–Boston Blackie. Seems you can’t keep a good character down… but they’re sure trying. I mean, in the latest incarnation, The Lone Wolf was a young busty babe in skin-tight leather.

Say WTF?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Louis Joseph Vance was born in Washington, D. C. in 1879, and was educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Around the turn of the century, he began writing short stories and verse, and already had several novels under his belt when The Lone Wolf: A Melodrama was published in 1914. By then, he’d already moved to Hollywood, intent on becoming a screenwriter and to capitalize on his novels, and by 1915 had founded Fiction Pictures, Inc., a motion picture production company whose films were distributed by Paramount Pictures, and eventually sold to Famous Player. The Lone Wolf, was featured in seven more novel and at least a couple of dozen films, and radio and television series. Vance fell asleep while smoking a cigarette ind his New York City apartment in 1933, and died in the resulting fire in 1933. His  widow received an estate of less than $10,000.

COLLECTORS’ CORNER

Sorry, boys, I don’t know where you can find the nifty pendant featured in the old TV show. Maybe eBay? Gary Stark, a visitor to this site, had one given to him as a kid, so we know they’re out there. Somewhere…

UNDER OATH

NOVELS

SHORT FICTION

COLLECTIONS

FILMS

RADIO

TELEVISION

COMICS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

THE DICK OF THE DAY

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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