The Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder, by Mike Barry
December, 1974 Berkley Medallion
Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg is so far into the headspace of his characters by this point in the Lone Wolf saga that a high-speed chase with cops can feature lunatic “hero” Burt Wulff ruminating about the rotten core of American society, ultimately acknowledging to himself that it’s “heavy thinking for a speeding chase.”
We pick up shortly after the events of the previous volume, and things are as surreal as ever – no more evident than when Tamara, Wulff’s girl who was introduced in #2: Bay Prowler, is abducted from the home of her parents by goons under the employ of recurring series villain Calabrese; a sequence where Tamara is more baffled than terrified, insisting that she split up with Wulff and has nothing to do with him anymore.
Calabrese meanwhile takes up his own brunt of the inner musings that make up the majority of the narrative of Miami Marauder, and speaking of which, note how once again the titular “marauder,” presumably Wulff himself, sounds more like the name of a serial killer than a mob-buster. This has been such a recurring staple of the series that I figure it’s more of Malzberg’s in-jokery.
Which is not to say The Lone Wolf is similar to The Destroyer; there is no parody here whatsoever, and despite characters marveling over the surreality of things, events are still real enough that they don’t mock them. Tamara herself takes up a lot of the narrative; Malzberg trades off between the musings of her, Wulff, Calabrese, and Wulff’s partner Williams throughout the novel, to the extent that Miami Marauder is even more in the headspace of its characters than the previous books.
And yet while this sort of thing bugs me in other action series novels, in the case of The Lone Wolf I think it only adds to the surreal nature of the series. Or maybe it’s just the quality of Malzberg’s writing. As ever he finds a way to insert bitter griping about a host of random topics, from the poor quality of certain cars (a recurring series element) to how women are both encouraged to and shamed for showing off their bodies.
We even get a peek into the life of truckers; Wulff when we meet him has hitched a ride with a truck driver, Wulff carrying his “bag of shit” with him, ie the heroin shipment he acquired previously, and which Calabrese wants. The surreal texture is present even here, with Wulff and the trucker randomly coming across a guy who has crashed, and Wulff immediately deduces the guy overdosed. Then there’s an equally weird part where the trucker indulges in his casual hookup with a truckstop waitress while Wulff waits at the bar, but Malzberg adds this weird, never-explained layer that the waitress doesn’t seem happy about the arrangement.
Meanwhile we get a lot of scenes of Williams playing poker and kidding about with his own pair of abductors; he’s being held in a house on the outskirts of Miami, and soon Tamara will be brought there, kept in a separate room with her own minders. Calabrese is there as well, nothing like the powerful figure he was when first introduced; he spends the novel bickering with his bodyguard, obsessing over Wulff, and trying to rape Tamara – but not being able to do the deed, given his impotence. I’d say at this point Malzberg has well rammed home the point that Wulff has completely obliterated Calabrese’s masculinity.
There really isn’t much in the way of action. Indeed, Malzberg really spins his wheels until the final quarter. There’s a preposterously-trivial part where Wulff, sneaking into the Fountanbleu hotel in Miami (where Calabrese is staying), comes upon an older married couple, and the wife is drunk, and Wulff helps the husband drag the wife to their room, and there follows a long discussion about a previous Republican convention the husband went to. And it goes on and on, having nothing to do with anything, and Wulff finally realizes he shouldn’t be there and leaves.
We get just as much stuff from Tamara, who at this point is so like Wulff that she keeps reminding herself that she’s “already dead;” she died when she was a speed junkie, and was about to OD before Wulff came upon her in the previous volume. We’re also reminded that her real name is Susan Jenkins, “Tamara” being the name she gave herself when she ran away from home and became a junkie; this furthers the conceit that Tamara is dead, as she now wants to be Susan again – though Malzberg only refers to her as “Tamara” throughout.
Wulff for his part is learning “the pleasures of criminality;” after leaving the trucker and getting in touch with Calabrese, who boasts that he has Williams and Tamara and will trade for one of them in Miami, Wulff steals a car, thinking to himself how easy it is to be a criminal. But then we have another arbitrary musing on the railways that run through the country, and how the trains were once such big business; I found this personally relevant, despite it having nothing to do with the tale at hand, given that I’d recently gone to the Frisco Train Museum as a chaperone on my son’s school trip.
Malzberg works an action scene into the train part, though it too is surreal; Wulff has a couple drinks in the bar, realizes the car is empty, and then further realizes he’s been cornered by a pair of hoods. Despite being unarmed, Wulff manages to (possibly) kill both and flee; Malzberg has it at this point that Wulff is so wanted that criminals come out of the woodwork to collect the bounty on his head, thus there’s no need for the author to have to explain the how and why of it. It’s just another pair of goons who saw Wulff and decided to make a play for that bounty.
Malzberg saves the fireworks for the extended climax, which sees Wulff swimming up to a beach along the Miami coast – a few hundred yards from a resort hotel, we’re told – and evading the fifty or so men Calabrese has waiting for him. Then Calabrese shows up in a ‘copter, Tamara up there with him, and he makes the girl go down to the sand on a rope as everyone watches – and meanwhile Wulff figures this is the perfect time to take possession of the Browning Automatic Rifle that has been set up on the beach.
Oh and also at this time Williams is on the way, having broken free – another surreal and darkly humorous bit, where his abductors-slash-friends say how disappointed they are in Williams that he broke their trust(!), and then Williams himself steals a car…leading to a long exchange with the young couple in it. Just wild and weird stuff, but darkly humorous throughout.
But it all climaxes with this big action scene on the beach, Wulff blowing people away with the BAR and Calabrese arguing with his bodyguard as he makes his escape on the helicopter. But again we are so into Wulff’s thoughts that the action is again more so relayed via thoughts and feelings, to the extent that there’s hardly any gore.
SPOILER ALERT: The biggest outcome of this firefight, and I’m noting here for myself when I finish The Lone Wolf and go back to my reviews to try to make sense out of it all, is that Tamara is gunned down early in the exchange. Curiously, Malzberg never tells us who kills her, and there’s no final scene between her and Wulff; indeed, the two are never even together in Miami Marauder. Tamara is dropped down a rope from the helicopter – after calling out Calabrese as an impotent loser in front of his men, and being slapped around for it – and then she’s on the beach, and then she’s waving toward Wulff, like trying to tell him something, and then she’s gunned down. END SPOILERS.
It seems that this is an accident, though, as it’s the final nail in the coffin of Calabrese’s relationship with his bodyguard – that Calabrese “let this happen” – but even here Malzberg goes for a dark comedy…and I forgot to mention the strange and arbitrary parts where the bodyguard keeps puking in the helicopter. But after this crazy action Miami Marauder drifts to an anticlimactic close; Wulff and Williams talk in the airport bar, where Wulff somehow manages to guilt-trip Williams for giving up the fight, even though Wulff keeps telling him to go, and then Wulff flushes the heroin down the toilet – in other words, he flushes the shit.
MORE SPOILERS: This one has the most bizarre ending ever; Calabrese takes a passenger flight back to Chicago, for once without his men (the majority of them wiped out on the beach by Wulff), and he wakes up from a dream where he’s giving it to Tamara good and proper. Then he orders a drink after arguing with the stewardess, then the plane suddenly “drops in the air,” then the pilot comes on to say drinks are on the house, and due to this Calabrese “knows it’s bad”…and after that we cut to Williams, back in New York and finding out he has a baby son…oh, and then a few days later he realizes that the “plane that went down” is probably the one that Calabrese was on(!). In other words, the huge, ever-building confrontation between Wulff and Calabrese is brushed away in the most brazen deus ex machina possible, and Calabarese (apparently) dies in an airplane crash. END SPOILERS
That’s it for Miami Marauder, and the last we see of Wulff, he’s on his way to Chicago to mete out some payback…unaware that fate (might have) already handled it for him. Overall this was a good one – I’ve enjoyed every volume – but it must be said that Malzberg’s fast writing is slightly getting the better of him, and too much of this one comes off like stalling and arbitrary internal pondering.
