Michael Sloan Books in Order

If you want Robert McCall from the beginning: The Equalizer → Killed in Action → Equalizer: Requiem
If you want the highest-stakes espionage story: Killed in Action → Equalizer: Requiem
If you want Sloan's behind-the-scenes career story: One More Thing, Sir...
If you want a warmer family fantasy: Lost In Christmas

Michael Sloan was born in New York City on October 14, 1946, into a family that already lived and breathed the stage. His parents, Paula Stone and Michael Sloane, produced Broadway shows, his grandfather Fred Stone created the Scarecrow on Broadway, and Sloan spent part of his early life in London, growing up around theatre, television, and everyday storytelling.

Stories were the family trade, and he picked it up young.

Sloan later said he wanted to be a novelist from about age twelve. As a teenager he wrote long adventure stories about a private detective named Mike Storm, learning by doing how to build plots, cliffhangers, and big reversals. That taste for action, danger, and moral pressure never really left him.

The big turning point came while he was living in London and trying to break in. During a visit to Los Angeles, he showed an agent his idea for a Columbo episode about a magician who kills a blackmailer. The agent passed it along, producer Peter S. Fischer liked it, and Sloan wound up writing the teleplay from England. That sale got him in the door, and when he returned to the United States in 1974, television became his working life.

From there his credits started stacking up fast. He wrote and produced for McCloud, Quincy, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, Battlestar Galactica, B.J. and the Bear, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, among many others. He earned an Emmy nomination for Quincy, wrote The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E., and later created Mystery Woman for Hallmark. He also kept one foot in theatre, with his thriller play Underground reaching Toronto and London's West End.

He stayed busy for decades.

The project most tied to his name is The Equalizer, which he co-created with Richard Lindheim. Sloan later helped produce the Denzel Washington films and then returned to Robert McCall in prose with the novels The Equalizer, Killed in Action, and Equalizer: Requiem. Those books carry a lot of what readers liked in his screen work: fast setups, clean momentum, tough action, and a lead character who is dangerous but deeply interested in protecting people who have nowhere else to go.

He also liked changing tone when the story called for it. In his memoir One More Thing, Sir..., he looked back on television and film from the inside, with stories about pitch meetings, sets, rewrites, and the odd turns of a long production career. With Lost In Christmas, he went another way entirely, writing a family holiday fantasy about the Karollers, a New York family who slip into a strange world of Christmas cards on the eve of a breakup. Even in that gentler mode, he was still writing about people under pressure, trying to find their way back to each other.

Across his work, a few patterns keep showing up. Sloan liked capable people in hard corners, old secrets, damaged institutions, and families under strain. Whether he was writing about spies, detectives, or parents and children, he usually kept the language direct and the stakes personal.

Off the page, his life stayed close to the business that first shaped him. He married actress Melissa Sue Anderson in 1990, and they had two children, Piper and Griffin. Family remembrances after his death in August 2025 described a man who loved Broadway, dogs, beach walks, and a good adventure novel, which feels pretty consistent with the work he left behind.