Wolf Lannihan

Created by Lawrence Sanders
(1920-98)

“She was a little thing but well-machined with everything in abundance and in the right place”

“She was all over me like a wet sheet”

Before he struck it big with The Anderson Tapes, Lawrence Sanders was just another ink-stained wretch, pumping out blood-and-cum-soaked pulp for Swank Magazine, which may explain a lot of things. And the character whose adventures he was regularly pumping out, appearing right there between the beaver shots and the silicone spectacles, was the decidedly non-airbrushed, rumpled, hard-drinking and hard-loving six-foot tall insurance claims investigator WOLF LANNIHAN.

Wolf’s toils away for a “big five-figure salary” for the Manhattan-based International Insurance Investigators (known far and wide as Triple I). He’s the second-highest paid investigator in the company, due to his success rate. He’s been there eleven years, padding expense accounts, sneaking slugs of Jim Beam, making love to various and sundry damsels, and generally doing whatever it takes to crack a case, be it breaking and entering, performing illegal wiretaps or seducing a suspect — including at one point a sixteen-year-old girl. Somehow, though, through the years, he’s managed to save the company’s clients zillions of dollars.

Good, pulpy fun, gleefully un-woke, but a definite sign of what was to soon to come from Sanders, who took his frothy mix of pulpy sex and violence to the top of the bestseller lists in the seventies and eighties.

When the stories were finally rounded up and reprinted in the 1986 collection Tales of the Wolf, Sanders updatied them slightly, inserting assorted “topical references,” but the leering sexism still dates these to an earlier era.

Lock up your daughters…

P.I. fans are advised to check out several of Sanders’ other gumshoes, including Dora Conti, Samuel Todd, Joshua Bigg, Timothy Cone or — if you’re in the mood for something a bit frothier — try out some of his latter books featuring droll, detached Palm Beach twit and sometime-private detective Archy McNally.

UNDER OATH

• “In this neo-adolescent world, women ooze availability…, gays swish and titter, and Lannihan’s tough-guy brutality invariably saves the day… Only 20 years old, but positively prehistoric. Passable caveman fun.”
  — Kirkus Reviews on Tales of the Wolf (1988)

SHORT STORIES

• “Manhattan After Dark” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Rogue Man” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Bloody Triangle” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Man Who Didn’t Come Back” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Woman in the Lake” (Swank Magazine)
• “A String of Blues” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Case of the Purloined Princess” (Swank Magazine)
• “Death of a Model” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Girl in the Office” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Curse of the Upper Classes” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Ice Gang” (Swank Magazine)
• “An Introduction To Murder” (Swank Magazine)
• “The Case of the Missing Nude” (Swank Magazine)
  I’m unsure of the exact issues, but they all appeared from 1968-69.

COLLECTIONS

• Tales of the Wolf: The Cases of Wolf Lannihan (1986) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
  All the stories from Swank, in “slightly-altered” form.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• Start Spreading the News…
  Big Apple Eyes
• You Better Get Some Insurance, Baby

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.