The Destroying Angel
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Casual readers who enjoy old-fashioned adventure, detective, and suspense fiction
- Enthusiasts studying early twentieth-century American popular fiction and mass reading
- Intermediate to advanced English learners who want public-domain English novels for extensive reading practice
Not a good fit for
- Serious fiction readers seeking deep literary themes and complex character psychology
- Beginners with little patience for old-fashioned English expressions and period background
Reading tips
- Proceed chapter by chapter, pausing briefly at the end of each to review character relationships and suspense threads.
- When you meet unfamiliar expressions, guess from context first and look words up after finishing the chapter.
- Compare it with other American popular novels of the same period to observe similarities and differences in themes and narrative conventions.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
What kind of novel is this book?
How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for beginners?
Why choose the public-domain ebook edition?
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About the author
Louis Joseph Vance (1879–1933) was an American writer of popular fiction in the early twentieth century. Public information about his life is limited, but the fifteen works by him held in the collection give a sense of his writing. He was skilled at tightly plotted adventure and detective novels, often featuring secret organizations, disguised identities, stolen treasures, and clever lone-wolf figures. The Lone Wolf Returns and The False Faces revolve around the character of the Lone Wolf, showing his ability to create serial characters, while The Destroying Angel, The Black Bag, and The Brass Bowl drive their stories through suspense and pursuit. His novels emphasize pace and entertainment; his characters are drawn into intrigue and danger, with frequent twists, making them suited to popular reading. Some of his works were adapted for film and television, giving him a degree of influence on early popular adventure literature.
