The Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter

The Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter, by Mike Barry

May, 1974  Berkley Medallion

The Lone Wolf series continues to impress, if for no other reason than the strange vibe Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg brings to the tale. Not to mention the clear fact that he’s winging his way through the narrative. In a way this brings the reader into the creative process, as it’s almost as if you and Malzberg are fguring out where the story is going at the same time. 

As I was reading Chicago Slaughter it occurred to me why I rate The Lone Wolf so highly: I have no idea what’s going to happen next. With one of Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels, for example, you pretty much know exactly what’s going to happen; each installment follows the same overall pattern, and only in the particulars might there be any surprises. Or more pointedly, in one of James Dockery’s The Butcher novels, there’s no surprise whatsoever, as each volume is essentially a rewrite of the one that came before: if you’ve read one Dockery Butcher, you’ve read them all. 

But man, this does not hold true for Barry Malzberg’s The Lone Wolf. There is no telling where the plot will go or what the characters will do. While you’d expect this would bring more “realism” to the tale, it only serves to make the series even more surreal, at least when compared to other men’s adventure novels. Malzberg, clearly unaware of any “rules” for this genre, will do what he pleases – for example, if some new tough professional assassin is introduced to the tale, don’t make the assumption that this guy will eventually tangle with “hero” Burt Wulff, as would happen if such a character were to be introduced in an Executioner novel. Instead, some other random element or character might interfere with this typical format, meaning there might not even be a confrontation with Wulff at all. In a way of course it’s anticlimatic, but at the same time it’s cool because it makes the series so unpredictable. 

For once there’s no direct pickup from the previous volume, but this is still a continuity-heavy series. Last we saw Wulff he was headed out of Cuba; when we meet up with him in Chicago Slaughter he’s just come into New York, and it’s a few days or so after the climax of the previous book. His goal is to shove the suitcase of heroin he’s been toting around “in the face” of Williams, Wulff’s former partner on the NYPD. Malzberg has introduced this conceit that Williams, to Wulff, represents “the System,” and Wulff’s goal is to show Williams how corrupt and unworkable the system is. But this theme really only exists in Wulff’s own deranged mind, as we learn from the frequent sequences from Williams’s perspective that Williams too questions the system, and spends the entirety of Chicago Slaughter recuperating in the hospital from a stabbing he endured (courtesy a black drug dealer) in the opening pages of the book. 

Wulff too does some serious pondering throughout Chicago Slaughter. A recurring sentiment in the series has been Wulff’s “I’m aleady dead” line, but in this one he starts to wonder whether he really is ready to die. He also becomes “sick” of his one-man war on the syndicate, due to the “ugliness” of the death he leaves in his wake everywhere he goes. Once again Malzberg truly brings a morbid tonality to the series, with that same ghoulish focus on recently-dead victims of Wulff:

The manner of that way in which a man gave up life was some comment on how he had held onto it during his time, and Versallo had wanted very much to live.  Now, lying still in the posture of death the mouth had fallen open, rigidified into a pained bark of dismay and horror as if Versallo had caught some glimpse of the actual form of death during his passage and had screamed out against it, was maintaining that scream evey now.  A mystery, Wulff though, a mystery -- life, death, the intertwining of the two, none of it ever to be understood; and yet men attempted to control death in the way that they did, inflicting it, holding it off because only that gave them a feeling of immortality.

Or an earlier part, where Wulff shoots a guy and we are informed that “He died as if he had been practicing it alone in bed a long time.” It probably says more about me than Malzberg when I admit that stuff like this has me laughing out loud as I read it. Really this series is either a darkly comic masterpiece or just a depraved tale for depraved minds. Speaking of which Wulff – and I guess Malzberg – crosses a line this time that isn’t too commonly crossed in the world of men’s adventure: Wulff kills a few members of law enforcement. Not dirty ones, either (or at least if they are, we aren’t told so); just guys who are attempting to bring him in. Generally these lone wolf heroes refrain from killing cops, but Wulff flat-out murders these guys, gunning them down in cold blood. Later on he realizes he could’ve let them live, but essentially shrugs it off. Still, these murders gradually make Wulff question himself and his vendetta, but more importantly these murders have the reader questioning what kind of a hero Burt Wulff really is. (Spoiler alert: He isn’t a hero at all, but that’s been clear since the start of the series.) 

The metaphysical vibe I love so much about The Lone Wolf is still here; another conceit is that bigwigs in the criminal underworld will throw themselves at Wulff, arrogantly assuming they’ll be able to break him…but of course they end up themselves broken. This happens a few tines in Chicago Slaughter, the first with a Mafia executive who tries and fails to defeat Wulff’s will, and then toward the end with an even higher-level executive who think he has defeated Wulff’s will – but only manages to have him escorted out of the country. This conceit adds to the dreamlike quality of the series; the impression is almost that Wulff is a supernatural presence. 

Mel Crair’s typically-great cover is misleading, as once again there’s no female character in this volume…for Wulff, at least. The sleaze quotient is filled by a random busty secretary in the employ of one of the Syndicate executives Wulff goes up against. The sex scene between these two is pretty bonkers:

He locked the door and checking his watch decided that he could give her ten minutes.  Ten minutes was more than enough for what he needed; he banged the shit out of her, working her up and down, and demanded that she finish him off with her mouth.  She balked, one timid peep of resistance, but he gave her the look and repeated the demand and she went at it without another word.  Drained him dry.  Drained him fucking dry.  He came in her mouth gasping, groaning, beating on the slick surfaces of the couch like a butterfly, forgetting for the moment that he was fifty-three years old, that he was hooked up to his neck, that most of the time he had trouble coming, that he had kicked horse five years ago and there had truly never been a period of more than an hour since then when he had not been in agony for it...forgot all of this beating and screaming against the couch, coming into her mouth and she held it there when he had finished, her cheeks bloated until at a look from him she swallowed all of it with a gasp.  Thought she she would be able to ditch his seed in some toilet but no one was going to get away with that.  

The construction of the plot is also “spur of the moment;” as mentioned Wulff when we meet him is in New York, even though “Chicago” is in the book’s title. And in fact the first chapter implies that the book will be set in New York, featuring an evocative opening of Williams, undercover in Harlem, being stabbed. But when Wulff hears of a Federal prosecutor who is taking on the drug world in Chicago, he decides to just go there and take this guy the valise with a million dollars worth of “shit.” Though just as often it’s referred to as “two million dollars worth of shit.” Again, the series is pretty loosy-goosy with facts and elements of realism; despite getting hold of a revolver late in the book, Wulff still hunts for “clips” for it. Oh and the action scenes, despite being relatively smallscale – ie, Wulff just shooting a couple people – are still apocalyptic. In this one Wulff manages to burn down a building, unaware that he’s even done so until after the fact; even he is awed by his supernatural qualities. 

But the Federal prosecutor thing isn’t much dwelt upon; instead, Wulff gets caught (another recurring conceit of the series) and taken into the presence of one of those Mafia bigwigs. After this Wulff is caught again, but this part is super random, seeing as it does Wulff getting into some road rage on the parkway with another motorist, one who runs Wulff off the road(!). After this Wulff turns himself over to the Chicago cops – lots of stuff here about how brutal and simple-minded Chicago cops are – and later on he’s taken into the presence of yet another Mafia bigwig. Indeed, Malzberg has spun so many wheels that by novel’s end he just barely remembers the entire “Federal prosecutor” subplot, and quickly brushes it off with some dialog. 

As for that second Mafia bigwig, his name is Calabrese and Wulff senses that he’s the most senior underworld boss Wulff has yet encountered. Such a boss that Calabrese, an old man, essentially tells Wulff that he, Wulff, is really nothing more than something “interesting to think about,” and decides to let him live…for reasons that have more to do with how Wulff brings excitement to an old man’s life. Or something. At any rate Chicago Slaughter ends with Wulff about to be escorted by Calabrese’s men to someplace outside the United States, where I suppose Calabrese intends Wulff to stew for a while until the old man calls for him – I’m really not sure, but the entire thing, not to mention Wulff’s blasé reaction to it all, just makes the entire scenario seem all the more surreal. 

Like I’ve said many times before, it’s totally unlike typical genre entries like The Executioner or The Penetrator, but The Lone Wolf really is one of my favorite series, and I’m having a great time reading it.