The Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

The Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare, by Mike Barry

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

Boy, the title of this seventh Lone Wolf is no joke; this one’s truly a “nightmare,” even more surreal and fractured than the previous six volumes, with nutjob “hero” Burt Wulff shuffled from one bizarre situation to another with little setup or resolve. In fact he spends the majority of the text being taken into captivity by one group or another, ususally freed by some random act of fate. There is a dreamlike texture to the narrative, to the extent that I wonder if it is intentional on Malzberg’s part, even down to the title of the book, Peruvian Nightmare. 

Malzberg also plays some unusual tricks with time in this one, again furthering the “nightmare” vibe. Events will transpire, then we will go back to how they started, then we will have characters reacting to things that haven’t happened in the narrative yet, only learning later on how those events have occurred. The opening is a case in point: we meet Wulff as he’s being propositioned with an offer to run heroin across the border for a cool two hundred thousand. Wulff, we learn, has been a prisoner in a hotel in Lima, Peru for the past three days – a prisoner of syndicate bigwig Calabrese, who for reasons even Calabarese didn’t understand allowed Wulff to live at the denoument of the previous volume, sending Wulff off to some other country. 

That country has turned out to be Peru, and it won’t be until later in the book that we get the backstory on Wulff’s journey here. The narrative unfolds in such fractured fashion that it takes us a while to even learn the name of the guy looking to hire Wulff here in Peru: he calls himself Stavros, and he owns the hotel Wulff is a prisoner in. Stavros, we learn in the frequent sequences from his perspective, was a Nazi in WWII and now lives in Peru under an assumed Greek name, and he has worked with Calabrese over the years. But Stavros has gotten delusions of grandeur and misses his old days of Nazi power, deciding to start up his own drug line. And he wants Wulff to help him start it. 

So we have a recurring motif picking up from the previous volume: another old man who, for motives of his own, gives Wulff another chance at life. We learn from the many sequences from Calabrese’s point of view that the old Syndicate boss has realized his mistake and now wants Wulff dead – hence, Stavros is saving Wulff from the Calabrese thugs who will be coming for him. But why exactly Stavros would want Wulff, who has dedicated his life to blowing up the drug underworld, to transport pure uncut heroin across the Andes is something Malzberg doesn’t really elaborate on. But then, it’s just another dreamlike quirk in a novel filled with such quirks. 

The Lone Wolf is also a series filled with recurring themes and motifs; one that Barry Malzberg has done in the past, and does three separate times in Peruvian Nightmare alone, is a motif where one character holds a gun on another, and the two trade seemingly-endless “You aren’t going to shoot me/Oh yes I am going to shoot you” dialog, a running gag that always ends with Person B actually pulling the trigger and killing Person A. As mentioned, this happens three times in Peruvian Nightmare: with Calabrese, with Stavros…and with Wulff himself, in a finale sequence which seems to me Malzberg’s final word that his hero is the same as his villains, given that Wulff too toys with and teases his prey before killing him. 

But then, one reader’s “recurring thematic work” could be another reader’s “author lazily repeating himself as he meets his word count.” That accusation could also be levelled at Peruvian Nightmare, particularly given how Malzberg spends the first half of the novel trying to get the story started. We have the open with Wulff being offered the job by Stavros, then we have a flashback to how Wulff began his war on the drug world with overviews of the previous six installments, then we go back to how Wulff got to Peru, then we see how Wulff was initially approached by Stavros for the job. Only then do we pick up from the opening scene, but even then it’s a bumpy ride, with Wulff essentially a McGuffin who is exchanged from one group to another – Calabrese’s men trying to capture him and kill him, Stavros’s men trying to get Wulff up into the mountains so he can acquire the sack of uncut heroin and begin his journey north to transport it across the border. 

Regardless, The Lone Wolf is still a lot of fun, and certainly one of my favorite men’s adventure series, just because it’s so whacky and illogical. Even the action scenes have a strange dreamlike vibe. Like in the bit where we learn how Stavros approached Wulff: Wulff comes back to his hotel room, to find two thugs waiting there for him. They take out their guns, saying how they’re going to kill Wulff – one of the thugs randomly looking down the barrel of his own gun, as if this were a Loony Tunes cartoon or something. It gets even stranger, as Wulff manages to take down both thugs with his bare hands, and steal one of their guns, and meanwhile the two thugs have gotten “tangled” together on Wulff’s bed, and Wulff shoots at “the thing” they have become together, and “it” starts mewling and yelping after Wulff shoots “it.” I mean the entire series is just weird. 

And even after that, only then does Wulff notice that another person is sitting on the bed, this being Stavros; I mean the “little man” has been sitting right there on the bed this whole time, while Wulff was fighting and shooting the two thugs who became one entity after tangling up with each other on the bed, and Wulff only notices the little man is there when the man says something to Wulff. And what the man says is “I like your work,” which is a compliment I could extend to Barry Malzberg himself. It is incredible how out-of-bounds The Lone Wolf is, having nothing in common with the average men’s adventure novel yet somehow being an on-the-level spoof of the entire genre. 

Wulff loses his mojo a bit in this one, sort of shuffling from one incident to another, and another play on the titular “nightmare” is that the air is thin up in the Andes, adding to Wulff’s lack of clear thinking. This elicits another surreal “action scene,” where Wulff is on a bus filled with gasping (and puking) tourists who are trying to adjust to the thin Andean air as the bus takes them to the Incan ruins, and a thug smashes his way onto the bus, trying to shoot Wulff but missing because he too is suffering from the thin oxygen up here. But it’s really like this throughout: Wulff will be on his way somewhere, and someone will come out of the woodwork and try to kill him, and Wulff will manage to turn the tables. But otherwise Wulff himself is not the one who moves the narrative forward; he is cast more into the role of perpetual victim, thrust into one surreal situation after another – which, you guessed it, really plays up on that “nightmare” vibe. 

But this fractured, dreamlike vibe leads to something we’ve never had in The Lone Wolf: an appearance (via flashback) of Wulff’s fiance, whose murder set off Wulff’s war on the mob in the first volume. But even in that initial installment, the girl was dead as soon as the book began, and so far as I can recall we’ve never gotten any flashback material with her…until now. Randomly enough, Malzberg delivers a scene between the two, sixty-seven pages into this seventh volume, a dream sequence in which Wulff flashes back to a time when they discussed how Wulff both hated and loved being a cop, leading to an off-page sex scene. It’s strange that the scene is even here, but again it adds to the strange vibe. Or it’s more indication of Malzberg spinning wheels as he meets that word count; as further indication of this, we even get a ‘Nam flashback this time. 

Speaking of cops, we also have some stuff with Williams, Wulff’s former partner on the force; last we saw Williams, he’d been stabbed by a junkie. Now he’s out of the hospital but he’s still weak, and he wishes he could find Wulff to tell him that he, Wulff, was right – the system doesn’t work, etc. Malzberg as ever finds the opportunity to rant and rave about society in general and random things in particular; Peruvian Nightmare, in fact, features a strange bit where Wulff rages to himself how the shock systems in cars went to hell in the ‘50s…and mind you this ranting and raving occurs during an action scene. There is overall a bitter, dispirited air to The Lone Wolf, but whereas the similarly-downer vibe of Stark made for an equally-dispiriting read, Malzberg is a superior writer and there is more so an air of dark comedy to The Lone Wolf. 

I do get the feeling Malzberg had been to Peru, as he injects what appears to be real-world topical details into the sequences around the Incan ruins. But Mel Crair’s typically-great cover is misleading, as Wulff doesn’t get in a shootout right by the ruins themselves (and there’s no girl whatsoever for Wulff in the novel iself – the one on Crair’s cover doesn’t exist in the book). That said, Wulff does manage to blow up a car during one shootout. Malzberg’s “action scenes” are just as strange as ever, but this time the nihilistic “let’s stare at the corpses and ruminate on life” stuff has been toned down. Instead, the nightmarish effect of taking a life is more pronounced, with Wulff haunted throughot the novel by dreams of men he has killed. 

Not that this lends Wulff any humanity. Indeed, Malzberg seems to be at pains to illustrate how Wulff is just as vile as the “bad guys” he’s after. As mentioned, this is most demonstrated in the finale, in which Wulff taunts a man who is pleading for his life, just as villains Calabrese and Stavros did to their own victims earlier in the novel. The finale of Peruvian Nightmare features yet another of Calabrese’s thugs trying to kill Wulff, but the two end up stalking each other in the pitch-black darkness of a cliff in the Andes. The would-be killer loses his gun and spends a few pages pleading for his life with Wulff, begging that Wulff drop the whole thing and the two work together to survive their situation. But Wulff resolutely responds that he is indeed going to shoot the guy. It’s a bitter scene for sure, particularly given how Wulff, next morning, refuses to “connect” the voice he heard in the darkness with the corpse of the man he now sees…as if Wulff himself cannot face the inhuman killer he has become. One suspects this is the same process Calabrese and Stavros went through in their own journeys to villainhood. 

Even the end of the book rams this home; Wulff comes across an American helicopter pilot and bashes him in the face. “You didn’t have to do that,” whines the pilot, and the reader understands his point; a former Stavros employee, he has no reason to stay in Peru and would have taken Wulff out of the country without being bashed in the face. But then, Wulff states that he had trouble with another helicopter pilot in Cuba, and isn’t about “to make the same mistake” this time. 

Thus Peruvian Nightmare ends, with Wulff presumably on his way back to the United States – and meanwhile the subplot with Calabrese still stands, providing an effective framework into the next volume. Malzberg has developed another theme in that Calabrese seeks to regain his aggressive nature by killing Wulff, leading to a scene where Calabrese bangs his 38 year-old mistress (we’re informed he’s kept her for 15 years) and then starts thinking of Wulff and dreaming of getting hold of him. So yes, yet another dream within Peruvian Nightmare, more evidence of the surreal feeling of the novel – making it up on the fly or not, Barry Malzberg proves again and again in The Lone Wolf that he’s a gifted writer, and I continue to really enjoy this series.