Alias the Lone Wolf, published in 1921, is the third in the 8-book series about a reformed French jewel thief, Michael Lanyard–the Lone Wolf. This story is set in the years after the Great War (World War I), and Lanyard has ended his connection to the British Secret Service. He is enjoying some leisure time in the south of France near an area called the Cévennes. He’s using the name Andre Duchemin, which he used in the previous story. While a guest at the Chateau de Montalay, he falls for the young heiress there, Eve, and he also meets the Countess de Lorgnes or Liane Delorme, who turns out to have a shady past and a manipulative nature. One night, thieves break into the Chateau, steal Eve’s jewels, and injure Duchemin in the struggle.

After recovering, Duchemin begins a quest to recover the jewels for Eve but quickly realizes he’s also a target of Bolsheviks and other criminals, who have spread the rumor that blames Duchemin for the theft. So he flees the chateau, shaves his beard, loses the criminal who is trailing him on the way to Paris, and continues the quest, now as Michael Lanyard. He eventually follows the trail of the jewels to a small ship, crossing the Atlantic and bound for New York, with a criminal gang (which includes Liane) bent on smuggling the jewels and alcohol into the Prohibition U.S. Lanyard calls on his expertise in reading people and his Lone Wolf skills of finding his way out of the tightest jams, to arrive in New York, having stolen the jewels back from the jewel thieves.

The Lone Wolf series was also made into 24 films between 1914 and 1949, as well as radio and television dramas. Louis Joseph Vance (1879-1933) was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and early-day film producer who worked in the movies for a time in Los Angeles. His body of work includes short stories and verse and many popular novels. Vance died at age 54, in an accidental fire in his New York City apartment.

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The False Faces: Further Adventures from the History of the Lone Wolf, by Louis Joseph Vance, was first published in 1918, and is the second of what eventually became an 8-book series. The main character, known as The Lone Wolf, is a reformed jewel thief who in this story, is a British spy, who uses several names including Michael Lanyard.

This second book begins in the “No Man’s Land” France as Lanyard crawls through mud and horror toward the British lines. He then moves to a ship crossing the Atlantic he’s thrown overboard by German agents just before the ship is torpedoed by a German submarine. Lanyard takes refuge on the sub, pretending to be a German agent. He’s discovered, taken prisoner, lands on a secret German sub base on Martha’s Vinyard, escapes, and comes to New York City with vital information for the British Secret Service. Along the way, Lanyard meets a young woman, whose story becomes interwoven with his and is aided by an American Secret Service agent. Spies clash, traitors are revealed, and struggles both physical and mental bring the “Great War” to the U.S., as Lanyard seeks his archenemy from the first book, the German spy, Ekstrom.

“The Lone Wolf” series was also made into 24 films between 1914 and 1949, as well radio and television dramas.

Louis Joseph Vance (1879-1933) was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and early-day film producer, who attended the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and worked in the movies for a time in Los Angeles. His body of work includes short stories and verses, all written after 1901, and many popular novels. Vance died at age 54, in an accidental fire in his New York City apartment.

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The Lone Wolf: A Melodrama, by Louis Joseph Vance, was first published in 1914 and was the first of what eventually became an 8-book series.

The main character, Michael Lanyard, also known as The Lone Wolf, is a jewel thief who in later stories reforms and becomes a private detective. In this first book, we learn of his difficult past and his journey that led to this pre-war moment, when he gets entangled with both a Paris crime mob and a woman, confronts his present and future course, and then seeks ways to escape his life of crime.

“The Lone Wolf” series was also made into 24 films between 1914 and 1949, as well as radio and television dramas.

Louis Joseph Vance (1879-1933) was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and early-day film producer, who attended the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and worked in the movies for a time in Los Angeles. His body of work includes short stories and verse, all written after 1901, and many popular novels. Vance died at age 54, in an accidental fire in his New York City apartment.

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Thunder on the Left is a story about—but not for—children. It’s a public domain mystery by one of the foremost mystery writers of the early twentieth century, Christopher Morley. The title also has nothing to do with politics. It’s a story about children who make some declarations at a birthday party about growing old, only to find themselves whisked into the future for all but the last chapter of the book. Here they live the lives of adults, wanting more out of life, struggling with issues unimagined in their childhood. All this while only one of their group actually keeps the pact to not grow old, and so presents an increasing tension for the others. Think TV show “The Twilight Zone,” if it had been written in 1925.

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Men Without Women is a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway, published together in 1927. His long writing career had begun in earnest, when a major work, The Sun Also Rises, published to acclaim in 1926. The stories in Men Without Women mostly don’t include women, though “Hills Like White Elephants” is all about a couple skirting around the issue of abortion, and “A Canary for One” involves two women and a man. One story, “Today is Friday,” was written as a play, though modified in this audiobook for ease of listening and omitting the play format’s naming of each character’s lines. This story is written as if Roman soldiers spoke in American dialects and accents and narrated accordingly.  Modern listeners may be jarred by the use of the “N word” in “The Killers,” and to a much lesser extent in “Fifty Grand.” As offensive as the term was then and is now, the term gives added insight into the social structures and attitudes of a century ago.

In all the stories, we find Hemingway’s groundbreaking spare style of writing that, with a few words, paint vibrant pictures and symbols for readers and listeners. Some stories are about striving against the odds, though you’re left to wonder if the character isn’t just blind to his own limitations. Many stories end ambiguously, unresolved. Whether the topic is bullfighting, prizefighting, or gangsters on the hunt, all carry the author’s psychic and physical scars from World War I. Hemingway himself had been seriously wounded in 1918 in Italy during his Army service there.

All the stories address issues faced by the “Lost Generation” that he was part of. Those were men for whom faith in the world was shattered by the Great War. From the experience, they wander, wonder, and struggle, flawed and damaged people, still taking on the world as best they can, but with flaws and weaknesses evident to all but themselves. That approach and that style were groundbreaking in the 1920s, after decades of wordy writing. And, they have stood the test of time, sometimes bringing us up short to realize the world as it is.

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Nella Braddy (1894-1973), a pioneer among female editors, compiled this seven-story collection and published Masterpieces of Adventure: Tales of the Sea and Sky in 1921. It features seven authors: Frank Norris, W. Clark Russell, Major General E.D. Swinton, Donn Byrne, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Guy de Maupassant, and Edgar Allan Poe.

A century since publication, we can perhaps have a new appreciation for tales of the sea (on ships both wrecked and abandoned, in lighthouses and with ferocious currents) and the sky (with warfare in dirigibles and using balloons). Tales are told with the descriptive language used in ways modern audiences may not be used to. But remember, readers a century ago still moved at a pace much slower and even more contemplative than our modern hectic, digital overloaded life allows us. Still, these stories have an impact and a succinct style of the short story.

Braddy went on to write and edit more articles and books, including a total of four in the Masterpieces of Adventure series; one focused on Helen Keller’s break-through teacher, Anna Sullivan Macy; and a biography of Rudyard Kipling.

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Nella Braddy (1894-1973), a pioneer among female editors, compiled this eight-story collection and published Masterpieces of Adventure: Adventures Within Walls in 1922. It features eight authors: Robert Louis Stevenson, O. Henry, Washington Irving, Anton Chekhov, Honoré de Balzac, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, and Leonidas Andreiyeff – all giants of writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

A century since publication, we can perhaps have a new appreciation for what it means to take refuge within walls.

Braddy went on to write and edit more articles and books, including two more in the Masterpieces of Adventure series; one focused on Helen Keller’s breakthrough teacher, Anna Sullivan Macy, and a biography of Rudyard Kipling.

Once inside Adventures Within Walls, though, listeners hear sagas of confinement, with walls providing both shelter and imprisonment.

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Nella Braddy (1894-1973), a pioneer among female editors, compiled this seven-story collection, and published Masterpieces of Adventure: Stories of Desert Places in 1922. It features seven authors: Edgerton Castle, Stephen Crane, Selma Lagerlöf, Bret Harte, Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, and W. H. Hudson. It’s a stellar group.

Braddy went on to write and edit more articles and books, including two more in the Masterpieces of Adventure series; one focused on Helen Keller’s breakthrough teacher, Anna Sullivan Macy; and a biography of Rudyard Kipling.

Once inside Stories of Desert Places, though, listeners will soon realize that Braddy treats the idea of “desert” very loosely. Perhaps it’s about what’s in a protagonist’s mind or heart, rather than the actual setting of the story that Braddy felt evoked the idea of “desert”.

It’s left to us to find the “desert” – physical or metaphorical – of an eastern European castle on a snowy night, somewhere in the American West, Norway, early-day California, a rainy night in England, in Texas near the Rio Grande, and Argentina. In these stories, people strive, often foolishly, and yet they persevere in unexpected ways.

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When Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) published Three Stories and 10 Poems in 1923, he was 24, a wounded veteran of the Great War, and still three years away from publishing his debut novel (The Sun Also Rises). So the “3 Stories” give us a unique look into Hemingway’s developing writing skills and his very particular areas of creative interest.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, to a physician father and musician mother, Hemingway by his teens had already been a reporter. Then, at age 18, he drove an ambulance on the Italian front in World War I, where he was seriously wounded. Before he returned home in 1919, he’d fallen in love with a Red Cross nurse who later left him for another man. That experience affected his future relationships with women and each of his four wives.

In September 1919, he went on a fishing and camping trip in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The following year he returned to Michigan for a time. These trips and his feelings about women likely are in the mental mix for the story “Up in Michigan”.

After marrying for the first time in 1921, Hemingway lived in Paris where he developed his writing style under the influence of an ex-patriot American community of writers there. He also began a pattern of leaving his wives before they could leave him. His attitudes about marriage and women, and his experiences in Italy play out in “Out of Season”.

“My Old Man” is set first in Italy and then in Paris and focuses on a loved and attentive father, who yet may play beyond the rules. All three of these stories seem well seasoned with autobiographical inspiration.

The 10 poems run the gamut of Hemingway’s interests and experiences at the time, from soldiering to the sea to suicide (which Hemingway ultimately chose to end his own life, four decades later).

Enjoy this short trip into the life of the young Hemingway, where the past becomes the prologue for the life of the writer to come.

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In this story, we hear Adam trying to work out what the “new creature with long hair” is all about. She names things, much to Adam’s annoyance. She follows him around. Then suddenly, there’s another creature, which eventually Adam decides is his son Cain. It’s all about confusion and curiosity, and finally, love for Eve.

The innocent lark of the first story was joined in 1905 with a more wistful tale, “Eve’s Diary”. Twain’s personal life had been turned upside down by Livy’s death in 1904. While the humor of the first Adam story comes through, the Eve tale is, at its heart, a sweet eulogy from an aching heart, exemplified by the Eve story’s closing line, “Wherever she was, there was Eden.”

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Truly knowing who she was would affect solving her murder: was the murderer an anarchist bent on revenge, a rich American who believes he was her fiancé, or, as Winter comes to suspect, someone much closer, namely his own right-hand man, Detective Inspector Furneaux? With everyone involved working at cross-purposes, even within Scotland Yard, Winter had his work cut out for him as he seeks justice.

The author, Louis Tracy (1863-1928), was a British journalist who used the pseudonyms Gordon Holmes (as he did for The De Bercy Affair) and Robert Fraser.

The De Bercy Affair was published in 1910 as a serial in Gunter’s Magazine, later renamed the New Magazine.

The story also appears in October 1910 as a book, illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy, and published by Edward J. Clode of New York.

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This audiobook focuses on Kipling’s time in the West on that trip, using an excerpt of From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel, published most recently in 1913. The excerpt includes letters 22-32. Kipling reveals a wit and sarcasm, pointing out American foibles. The mix of what Kipling likes and dislikes show us imperial and racist attitudes all too common in Kipling’s day. But we also get a unique insight into the earliest days of the cities he visited and of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. Through Kipling we can hear the voices of 19th century Americans.

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