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LeGrand, Vivian. Vivian LeGrand was created by Eugene Thomas (Chu-Sheng, Mrs. Caywood Weston) and appeared in twenty-five stories in Detective Fiction Weekly and Popular Detective from 1935 to 1938, beginning with “The Lady From Hell” (Detective Fiction Weekly, Jan. 19, 1935).

Vivian LeGrand, “The Lady From Hell,” is a criminal mastermind and adventuress active in the Far East. She is a poisoner, blackmailer, and thief who began her career of crime by poisoning her own father, who beat her. After she escapes from a Turkish prison she leads a life of crime so remarkable and carefully planned out that no evidence is ever found to implicate her.

Red-headed Vivian Legrand was an exotic and breath-taking beauty. She fascinated men, and when they babbled their secrets she bled them of their wealth. The rich and influential of three continents were her victims.

She operated a school that trained blackmailers in the art of extortion. Her agents numbered hundreds, for she forced her victims to ferret out the secrets of their friends, and to pay her in information as well as money. Anybody in contact with the rich might be in Vi Legrand’s pay, and the agents she recruited by blackmail included social leaders and public officials and royalty whom the world believed above suspicion.

The British Secret Service is aware of her crimes, but thanks to her possession of a certain letter, stolen from the safe of the Chief of the British Secret Service in the Far East, they do not pursue her. She is a beautiful redhead with an “exquisitely modeled, exotic face.” She is assisted by Adrian Wylie, and they carry out a vendetta against the Yellow Peril Mandarin Hoang Fi Tu, the “underworld leader of Manila.”

* I'm including the Vivian LeGrand stories in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because they are fun. You can count on one finger the number of pulp series about a female villain protagonist. The Vivian LeGrand stories are it. There were certainly pulp series with female protagonists, and I've listed as many of them in this encyclopedia as I could, but the pulps just didn't run series in which an unabashed female villain was the protagonist. Pulp series in which an unabashed male villain was the protagonist were few and generally didn't last long. The Vivian LeGrand stories lasted for twenty-five stories over four years. So there's a certain historical significance to the LeGrand stories, although it can't be said that they were exactly influential on other writers. That wouldn't matter, not really, if the stories were dull. They aren't, though. LeGrand is a masterful archvillain and adventuress who is gloriously ruthless, and the stories about her make for quite enjoyable reading. 

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