The Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder

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.

The Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust

The Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust, by Mike Barry

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

First of all, apologies for missing last week’s post; super busy lately. Now let’s get to the latest volume of The Lone Wolf…surprised to see it’s nearly been a year since I read the previous volume. Time’s really flying lately! But it seems as if Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg also needed a breather, as Los Angeles Holocaust is stuck in a sort of holding pattern throughout, Malzberg developing and expanding on a new theme: that lunatic “hero” Burt Wulff has lost his mojo and knows he has become just as vile as the criminals he’s sworn to take down. 

First of all, Mel Crair’s typically-great cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of the book. While the action does occur in Los Angeles, Hollywood is not part of the setup and there is no part where Wulff shoots at someone on a movie stage, or whatever action Crair is depicting. Indeed, this volume could just as easily be set anywhere else in the United States; Los Angeles and its surroundings only slightly play into the narrative, with Wulff spending the majority of his time staying in a low-rent trailer park. 

We pick up just a few days after the previous volume…and, surprisingly, Wulff’s gotten laid in the interim. This courtesy Tamara, the hotstuff college-aged former junkie who first appeared in the second volume and then again in the fourth volume. Malzberg opens en media res with Wulff and Tamara already shacked up in a Los Angeles hotel room, where Wulff has spent the last “twelve hours fucking the shit out of her.” But Malzberg is never one for exploitation in this series – we are too locked in Wulff’s nihilistic thoughts for such stuff – and Tamara does not contribute much to the novel; indeed, she’s gone in just a few pages. 

Tamara’s main function is to set up the theme Malzberg will dwell on throughout the entirety of Los Angeles Holocaust: that Wulff has lost it. And it’s not just Wulff who is experiencing this – Williams, Wulff’s former partner on the NYPD, also realizes he’s lost it in the interminable sections from his point of view, and also Calabrese, the main series villain (ever since his debut in the sixth volume), worries over how he has lost it in his interminable sequences. 

This makes the setup of the novel a little shaky; Wulff is, for the first time in the series, worried that he’s “in over his head” now that Calabrese wants him – or, “the whole world is out to get him,” as Williams sees it. But in reality Calabrese just sits around in his office in Chicago and mulls over how he’s off his game, over seventy and losing his edge, and he dithers with various killers who go off to hunt down Wulff. 

Yet meanwhile there are all these disconnected action scenes where random people come after Wulff or Williams, with no setup or resolution on who they are; again, as I’ve mentioned a million times already in these reviews, just furthering the surreal conceit of The Lone Wolf. Like for example, the book opens with some random guy knocking on Wulff’s hotel room in L.A., and Wulff drops to the ground as a precaution, and the dude takes a shot at him, and Wulff blows him away – but who this guy is, how he even found Wulff in his hotel, is never explained. 

There’s an even crazier part midway through where Williams is hauling a trailer full of carbines and whatnot to Los Angeles to join Wulff in his fight, the black cop having decided to quit the force and help out his former colleague. These guys pull him over and a shootout ensues, and only later in the book does Williams realize he has no idea who those guys even were, and finally convinces himself that they were modern versions of highway robbers, just a random vehicular mugging on the interstate! 

But again, this crazy shit is exactly what I like about The Lone Wolf. And also I’m happy to report that the morbid obsession with fresh corpses has returned; there’s an extended scene in particular where Wulff has gunned a dude down and stands there over his corpse, ruminating, noting how the expression changes after death, comparing his own mental outlook with the corpse’s, and on and on – I mean, safe to say, we aren’t talking Mack Bolan, here. Burt Wulff is damaged to the core, and this damage permeates the narrative itself, and honestly I dig it a lot. 

Tamara does not dig it, though; she tells Wulff that he is not the man she met, months ago, the man who saved her from the heroin addiction. She says back then his vendetta seemed just, or at least she believed it was, but now she can tell that Wulff “likes it,” that he’s become just as evil and merciless as the mobsters he kills. Continuing with the surrealism, Tamara puts on her clothes and walks out of the hotel, telling Wulff so long, and Wulff just stands there, worrying that some other killer might be out there, or an ambush or something…and then after a while he’s somehow certain that Tamara has made it through without problem, and is safe! 

Malzberg is so focused on the mental facet that he sets up subplots and drops them without warning; we get a sort of “Captain America and The Falcon” angle, or at least the promise of one, when Wulff calls Williams, tells him he’s in over his head, that he needs help, and after a moment’s decision Williams decides to go out to LA to help Wulff in his blood-quest. We’re also told that Williams’s wife has left him – and she’s about to give birth to a son, too – and Williams just figures this is the perfect opportunity to go start killing mobsters. 

I was wondering if this would be the new setup for the series, Wulff and Williams taking on the syndicate as a team, but humorously enough, Malzberg does nothing with it, and indeed within a few chapters Wulff and Williams are at each other’s throat (literally), and they decide to once again go their separate ways. I almost wonder if Malzberg had seen the recent Hickey & Boggs, which also paired white and black heroes; in addition to the Los Angeles setting in general, there’s also a part where Wulff and Williams go to a stadium, and a thug starts to trail them, which kind of reminded me of a similar sequence in Hickey & Boggs. 

While Los Angeles and its environs is not really brought to life, it is the subject of Wulff’s – which is to say Malzberg’s – acerbic ruminations, ie, “Los Angeles was a state of mind…a severely deranged mind,” and etc. But as mentioned most focus is placed on a hole-in-the-wall trailer park Wulff stays in, where he encounters suspicious locals who seem more like rednecks from the country. 

But then, these books could really take place anywhere; the true locale of The Lone Wolf is Burt Wulff’s mental landscape, which is where we stay for the majority of each volume’s narrative. This time Malzberg expands by taking us into the mental landscapes of Williams and Calabrese’s as well, but their musings are all so similar that it could be the same character. Williams in particular has gone from the guy who believed in the system to a man ready to blow away crooks alongside Wulff, so his scenes read almost identically to Wulff’s, only with periodic asides on what it means to be black in the United States (though Malzberg does not play up the race angle too much). 

Wulff though is still the star, and frequently in Los Angeles Holocaust he comes to the conclusion that he has become vile and cruel; after gunning down the dude in his hotel room in the book’s opening, he wonders why he doesn’t “lay down beside him.” This will be dwelt upon throughout the novel, and Malzberg makes it clear – as if he hasn’t already – that Burt Wulff is not a hero for the reader to root for. 

The recurring theme of “in too deep” is expanded to even a fourth character: a one-off guy called Billings, a freelancer here in Los Angeles to get the bounty on Wulff, but instead decides to steal the two million dollars worth of heroin from Wulff to sell for his own profit. In doing so, Billings realizes he will incur the wrath of Calabrese…but, after committing himself to it, he realizes he’s now in too deep and cannot go back to the way things were. 

Action has never been a focus of The Lone Wolf, despite which Malzberg has often turned in some genuinely thrilling sequences. Unfortunately this time it’s rather tepid; Williams gets in that interstate shootout, and then later in the book there’s a bit where Billings and two others ambush Wulff and Williams at the trailer park – even lobbing grenades at them. But even here Malzberg is more concerned with the mental musings of the characters, with them ruminating on things even as the bullets are flying. 

Malzberg also has a gift for unusual characters; there’s a part midway through that could almost come from a Parker novel, where Williams buys guns from a Harlem-based preacher. This guy has an arsenal beneath his place, and he has a running monologue that sparkles with more personality than Wulff and Williams put together. 

Otherwise, Los Angeles Holocaust really doesn’t move the needle. Wulff is in the same place as when we met him, still with the two million dollars worth of heroin and still alone. The whole “let’s team up with Williams” thing is brushed under the carpet, as if Malzberg has changed his mind halfway through writing the book. That said, this one ends with a cliffhanger, with Calabrese getting Wulff in a compromising position…and setting up their long-awaited final matchup. 

Oddly enough, Los Angeles Holocaust implies that Wulff will likely be headed to Chicago…but the next volume occurs in Miami! So either something else comes up, or he really took a wrong turn in Albuquerque.

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.

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.

The Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit

The Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit, by Mike Barry

March, 1974  Berkley Medallion Books

Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg ventures even further into stream-of-conscious territory with this fifth volume of The Lone Wolf, which per series template begins immediately after the events of the previous volume. As we’ll recall, Martin (or Burt, we haven’t figured it out yet) Wulff has just gotten on a plane bound for New York, a valise with “a million dollars worth of shit” (aka uncut heroin) with him. 

As Havana Hit opens, the plane has redirected as the result of a hijacking. While initially I thought this was a coincidence, at length Wulff realizes that the hijacking has occurred because of him. Or, rather, because of the valise. Like the previous valise of heroin Wulff toted around in the earliest volumes, this one is a MaGuffin in the true sense; it moves the plot along because everyone wants it, but otherwise it has no real bearing on anything. And as mentioned it’s interchangeable with the prevoius valise of heroin, which Wulff tossed in a lake in Boston. 

I do like The Lone Wolf, but I’m finding myself more interested in what is going on in Barry Malzberg’s head than I am in what’s atually happening in the books. And there’s no question what’s going on in Malzberg’s head, as this time he retreats even further into his own headspace, doling out incessant observations on society, crime, Cuba, trust between colleagues, and what have you. I mean in no way whatsoever could you ever confuse this series with The Executioner. There is a strange, surreal texture to Lone Wolf that is similar to The Butcher in how it all comes off like the events of a dream. Wulff is our guide through the dream, making things happen, as ever his mere presence somehow affecting reality – nowhere more apparent than in this opening, where a plane filled with people is hijacked merely so the Syndicate can get their clutches on Wulff. 

This is the least action-centric installment yet. Not that the previous ones were action blockbusters, but Havana Hit is so confined to Wulff’s mental musings that the action comes off as a distraction. Adding to the weird vibe of the series is the fixation on death. There might be gore in other men’s adventure novels of the day, but generally the victim is forgotten about after we’ve been told how his head’s exploded and his brains have burst out. Not so here. When Wulff or someone else shoots a guy Malzberg will keep going back to him, focusing on the corpse, how it changes appearance in its postortem state, the killer thinking again of how easily life is stamped out and how death equals us all out, etc. In a way it’s so overdone that it made me think of the MST3K episode Night Of The Blood Beast, where the characters kept obsessing over the corpse of an astronaut and Mike Nelson quipped, “I’ve never seen a man so dead!” 

Well anyway, Malzberg’s clearly winging it this time. This has been apparent in previous volumes but this time it’s especially pronounced. It is clear that Malzberg just sits down at his typewriter and writes, and what comes out is what gets printed. There is no editing to take out any chaff; Malzberg-via-Wulff will wax morbidly about mundane things for pages and pages at times. The observant reader can even detect Malzberg pushing himself at times to get back to the plot – there are parts where Malzberg literally commands himself to get back on-track so far as the story goes. But as mentioned I kind of enjoy this aspect because I like to see the feverish mind of a writer at work. 

All of which is to say the plot of Havana Hit is pretty thin. In a nutshell, Wulff’s plane is hijacked, the hijackers take it to Cuba, and the passengers are anticlimactically let go (off page) and Wulff finds out the entire thing was orchestrated just to get hold of him. Meanwhile Delgado, a sadistic Cuban military official whose sadism is a gauze for the cowardice he displayed back in the ‘50s as one of Castro’s flunkies in the mountains, brutally kills off the hijackers for bringing this problem to them. As mentioned though Malzberg has no grand plan when he starts writing, thus as the novel progresses Delgado is retconned into being a Syndicate man himself, even though in his intro he hates the hijackers for being so stupid as to believe they would have friends here in Cuba. It’s all very hazy because it’s so underdeveloped. 

As for Wulff, he manages to free himself in one of the novel’s few action scenes. Taken off in a helicopter, supposedly to freedom, Wulff realizes it’s really a hit and as ever takes matters into his own hands. In this way he meets Stevens, an American expat currently working for the Cubans as a helicopter pilot. Stevens factors heavily in the second half of the novel, serving as a meek counterpoint to Wulff; whereas Wulff takes life by the reigns and makes things happen, Stevens has spent his life running from responsibility. But even in this characterization Barry Malzberg can’t stay consistent; Stevens will periodically change from resigned to inspired, whichever benefits the current whims of the plot. 

What it really comes down to is a lot of mordant commentary on Cuba. Havana Hit offers interesting period commentary in that the Castro regime is fairly new to power and, in Wulff’s eyes, Cuba had almost become an American annex during the previous regime – every native he meets speaks English and acts like an American. There’s also a lot of musing on Stevens’s lack of resolve and how it “bleeds” into Wulff, making him in danger of losing his killer drive or somesuch. To tell the truth it’s all very weird and as ever things just play out as if it’s all a dream. I mean Stevens, despite spending his life not wanting to get involved, decides to go confront Delgado with Wulff, and even though the two of them only have old revolvers the ensuing firefight is so apocalyptic that the second floor of a building explodes. 

Another recurring schtick of The Lone Wolf is that a secondary “main villain” is revealed in the final pages. The same holds true here, with Delgado, built up as the main villain in the first third of the book, unceremoniously replaced by a new guy who works in the Intelligence division of the Cuban military. But it all comes down to that damn valise of heroin, which everyone wants, but no one more so than Wulff himself. So we have yet another recurring schtick of a finale where Wulff takes on everyone – including supposed comrades – to retain possession of “his property.” 

While enjoyable just for the second-hand buzz of the whole surreal aspect, Havana Hit is really a sort of stumble in the series; I suspect you could just skip it altogether and not even miss anything. For by novel’s end Wulff is once again airborne, headed back for the US with his valise of heroin, which is exactly how the previous volume ended. But judging from the title of the next installment, it looks like Wulff ends up in Chicago instead of his desired destination of New York.

The Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

The Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker, by Mike Barry

January, 1974  Berkley Medallion Books

Years ago Marty McKee sent me the entire run of The Lone Wolf, telling me how much he thought I’d enjoy the series. I’m sorry again that I took so long to heed Marty’s advice, as I do indeed enjoy this series – so much so that, even though crazed hero Burt Wulff spends the majority of Desert Stalker merely sitting in a hotel room, I found myself so caught up in it that I sped through the novel in no time. 

In my review of the previous volume I noted Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg’s “Notes On The Lone Wolf” essay from 1990, in which Malzberg stated that he took a publisher-mandated break between that volume and this one, and Malzberg felt it caused him to lose some of the narrative momentum. That did not seem very evident to me. Desert Stalker burns with that same weird, neurotic fire as the first three books. And once again Malzberg subtly displays the coolest conceit of The Lone Wolf: that Wulff’s presence is so disruptive he affects the reality of those he enocunters, to the point that they wonder if they are dreaming. 

While the “Conlan” name goofs don’t appear this time, there does seem to be some confusion on the first name: is it Martin or is it Burt? They’re both used in the book; the novel opens with an underworld communique in which “Martin Wulff” and his war on the mob is discussed – a communique that makes it clear that the Mafia had nothing whatsoever to do with the OD death of Wulff’s girlfriend in the first volume. In other words, Wulff’s war on the Mafia has started on false premises…yet, the communique notes, Wulff’s learning of this would probably have no impact on his war. He is committed to it, and is clearly insane. But on the back cover we are told it’s Burt Wulff, so either it’s more copyediting gaffes or he goes by the nickname Burt. Maybe the first volume spelled this out and I’ve just forgotten. 

Malzberg also maintains the pace of the previous books, with Desert Stalker opening pretty much immediately after Boston Avenger. Wulff drives direct to New York from Boston, his first time there since the first volume. He visits Williams, his partner from the opening pages of that first volume, and we get a lot of not-safe-for-today observations on blacks from Wulff/the narrative: “There was hatred one inch below the surface of any black man.” Malzberg treads this strange ground where Williams and Wulff have a sort of surly relationship, with Wulff thinking that Williams plans to use Wulff as a blunt instrument to kill criminals – and meanwhile Williams is still just a patrolman, so it isn’t like he’s some higher-up who can use his resoruces to fuel a secret war, a la the guy in Death Wish 3. 

Regardless, Williams essentially gives Wulff his mission this time. Impressed with the amount of damage Wulff has done so quickly, Williams tells Wulff that maybe he should look into Bill Stone, a lieutenant in the NYPD who “bugged out” with “a million dollars worth of shit” from the evidence room – a plot similar to Inside Job. However, this plot will prove to be a nonentity, as if Malzberg loses interest in it as he writes. Stone is set up as being a sort of reflection of Wulff – in fact Williams says that it was speculated that Wulff and Stone were working together, given that they both “bugged out” around the same time – but as it turns out, Stone only features in the novel for a single chapter. 

Instead, the brunt of Desert Stalker is composed of Burt/Martin Wulff barricading himself inside a plush penthouse suite in a hotel in Las Vegas. For that is where Stone has fled, per Williams’s intel, and after a night’s sleep Wulff hauls ass for Las Vegas. That surreal vibe of his enemies always surrounding him is also retained, with Wulff attacked along a desert road. Malzberg delivers effective action scenes in that they certainly have plentiful violence and gore, but as is typical he hasn’t done much research on firearms. Most notably, Wulff’s gun is refered to as a “revolver,” but Malzberg will write stuff like, “Wulff took out his revolver, put in a full clip.” I overlooked such mistakes, though, as the atmosphere and surreal vibe of the series is superior to any sort of firearm accuracy: 

Despite the psycho-surreal vibe, Malzberg still delivers action scenes. But as ever the series has more in common with the mainstream crime thrillers of the era than it does The Executioner. Whereas Mack Bolan would carefully plan his assault on the Vegas mob, Wulff as ever just bulls his way through without much of a plan. In fact he just walks into the casino-hotel Stone is reportedly staying in, knowing that he’ll immediately be spotted. Malzberg delivers his patented dark humor as Wulff shows absolutely no fear of the two thugs who come to collect him, much to their confusion – again, he is such a supernatural force that “normal people” don’t know how to react. This leads to some crazy stuff where Wulff, presumably the target, takes charge of the situation, escorts the thugs up to the big boss’s room, and proceeds to argue with everyone. 

Vinelli is the big boss, and as seen in the excerpt above he quickly suffers at the “revolver” of Wulff. But like Stone, Vinelli initially comes off as more of a presence than he ultimately will be; one of the few problems I had with Desert Stalker is that a profusion of “big bosses” kept appearing on the scene. It’s not a big deal, though, and just more indication that Wulff himself is the true “big bad” of the series; even the top Mafia boss is stupefied by him. But after shooting Vinelli, Wulff drags his bleeding form into Vinelli’s room and spends pretty much the rest of the novel there. It sounds lame I know, but man it’s filled with such dark humor and just plain weirdness that I found myself loving it. 

Malzberg frequently refers to previous volumes, and suprisingly Wulff even makes a phone call to Tamara, aka Louise, the babe he scored with in the second volume. This is an affecting scene that doesn’t get too sappy, but it’s made clear that Wulff feels something for Tamara. In fact it is she who makes him realize that he now wants to live, to “come back” to the real world…even though he still thinks of himself as “a dead man.” Wulff makes the call while the various Vegas forces are converging on his penthouse suite, and truth be told the inevitable action scene also is not in the realm of The Executioner. Guys just come in through the window and try to barge down the door, and Wulff shoots them. Again, it’s the twisted vibe that stands out, like the ultra-bizarre metaphor Malzberg uses to describe a collapsing hotel: 

Malzberg continues the schtick of having the volumes bleed into one another; Desert Stalker ends with Wulff getting on an airplane, ready to head for his next destination to kill more mobsters. Despite Malzberg’s reservations about any loss of momentum in his 1990 essay on the series, I have to say that this one was just as enjoyable as the previous three.

The Lone Wolf #3: Boston Avenger

The Lone Wolf #3: Boston Avenger, by Mike Barry

October, 1973  Berkley Medallion Books

Opening 36 hours after the previous volume, this third installment of The Lone Wolf finds our deranged hero Burt Wulff in Boston, having driven here nonstop after the apocaylptic climax of the previous book. Wulff’s got a suitcase with a “quarter million dollars of junk” in the backseat, and he’s brought it here to Boston because this is where he’s learned the heroin was destined to be shipped before he intercepted it. But promptly the heroin will be intercepted from him, and Wulff will spend a large portion of the narrative trying to get it back. Meanwhile we readers will learn that it’s nearly impossible to sell this particular case of heroin, as it travels like a narcotic version of The Monkey’s Paw from one ill-fated character to another. 

The title phrase is never mentioned in the novel, but we’ll recall that Wulff’s girl in the previous book referred to Wulff as “Avenger,” so I’m assuming Boston Avenger is a play on that. Or it’s a total coincidence. Because the girl isn’t even mentioned and only thought of in passing. Rather, Wulff spends a large portion of Boston Avenger, which occurs over just two days, trying to get his mojo back. While he kicked some serious ass in the previous two books, this time he’s often caught unawares, and basically has to give himself a pep talk to get back into the action. (“He was the Wolf again, and he was in the game to win.”) 

First though a behind-the-scenes note: I’ve since read “Some Notes On The Lone Wolf,” an essay included in Malzberg’s 1990 anthology Breakfast In The Ruins. In this pithy, entertaining piece Malzberg (aka “Mike Barry”) answers a question I’ve had: why Wulff’s name sometimes changes to “Conlan.” This is because Wulff’s original name was “Wulff Conlan,” and this is how Malzberg referred to the character in this first three novels, which he wrote within the span of a few weeks. However with the third volume, ie this one, he got a request from his agent to temporarily halt on the project, even though he’d been hired “to produce 10 books within less than a year.” 

For one, the character’s name would have to change: the last name of the series’s publisher happened to be Conlan, something Malzberg states he was unaware of. Also, Berkley wasn’t thrilled with how Wulff Conlan’s victims “were real people with real viewpoints who seemed to undergo real pain when they were killed, which was quite frequently.” But then Malzberg got the go-ahead to continue and write the fourth volume, only he’d need to start referring to the character as Burt Wulff, not Wulff Conlan. The Berkley copyeditors did a better job of correcting Malzberg’s manuscript this time than last; there’s only one “Conlan” slip, on page 49. Malzberg in his 1990 essay regrets that the temporary halt took a bit of the wind out of his sails, but notes that he was able to push on – and even turn in a few additional volumes outside of the original contract. The short piece, while humorous, is really more concerned with Malzberg’s satisfaction with himself that he was able to turn something out so quickly, despite having no background in the genre; he states that for research he read The Executioner #7, which he found to be “pretty bad, mechanical, and lifeless.” (I actually rank that seventh Bolan novel as one of my favorites yet in the series!) 

But even if Malzberg did rush through the series, he was still a quality writer, and it’s my belief that the talent of a quality writer will be evident even in a rushed work. This to me is most demonstrated through the understated theme that runs through Boston Avenger: the theme of control. Whether intentionally or not, Malzberg in this volume spins a thematic thread that Wulff and the Boston mobsters he is up against are constantly striving for self-control. Malzberg doesn’t bash us over the head with it, either; but it’s there if you look for it. Those who lose control die, of course, this being an action-centered genre. And Wulff must learn to regain control of his “wolf” instincts to “win the game.” 

He doesn’t have it at the start, though. Wulff, after barreling cross-country with the heroin, loses the case mere seconds after arriving in Boston. He pulls into a toll both and it turns out to be a mob trap. Again, Wulff’s enemies always surround and outmaneuver him. But Malzberg does himself a disservice here, because Wulff is caught cold and only saved from death through happenstance: a motorist pulls up behind him, despite it being so early in the morning, and starts honking his horn. So the two thugs just take off with the case, unwilling to kill Wulff in front of witnesses: “That’s not in the contract.”  Wulff will spend the rest of the novel fighting to get it back. 

Malzberg again opens up the narrative by focusing on one-off characters, but whereas this comes off like padding in other series novels, here it’s actually entertaining. No doubt because, per the publisher’s complaints, these characters come off like “real people” who feel “real pain.” Actually you could take Wulff out of the equation and Boston Avenger would be like the average crime novel of the day. The plot focuses on that case of heroin and the various members of the Boston underworld who try to acquire it and sell its contents. But then, The Lone Wolf is like The Liquidator in that it comes off more like a crime series than a men’s adventure series, heavier on vibe than on action setpieces like in The Executioner and such. Also like The Liquidator, it captures the feel of the era, and would be highly recommended for anyone who enjoys ‘70s crime fiction (which in my opinion was the best era for crime novels and movies). 

The two thugs who took Wulff’s case, Paul and Mac, are two of the one-off characters who comrpise a lot of the narrative. They work for Boston mob boss Cicchini, who wants the heroin and wants Wulff dead. Instead, these two decide to make off with the heroin on their own and sell it. This brings us to the one-off character who will take up the most of the narrative: Sands, an assistant professor at Harvard who happens to be “the biggest pusher on the East Coast.” As Marty McKee notes, Malzberg does page-fill a bit with Sands and his wife, but at the same time Malzberg’s writing is so enjoyable that I didn’t mind it. Regardless, we get a lot on how Sands, a college prof in his 30s who married one of his students, has fallen out of love with the girl and how she’s always threatening to leave him. This particular subplot leads to a crazed payoff that packs even more of a punch in our #metoo era, when Sands beats the living shit out of his wife when she makes the latest threat to leave him. 

But then as ever there is a skewed, dark vibe that runs through The Lone Wolf. Actually it’s darkly humorous. This is typically relayed in the motif I’ve noted before: that Wulff is so crazy that he affects the reality of anyone he encounters. Another recurring theme is characters being unable to believe what is happening to them, particularly when they are dying as a result of Wulff. It almost gives the impression that Wulff isn’t just a lone wolf vigilante, but also a sort of cosmic presence. Malzberg also injects his dark comedy into unexpected moments, like when the heroin-snatching thugs Paul and Mac, apropos of nothing, start speeding at 80 miles an hour down some road, even though they’re criminals with loaded guns, and they get in a car wreck when the cops give chase – and the car’s life passes before its eyes: 

Paul and Mac crash because they panic and fire at the cops while speeding along a darkened road. In other words, they lose control. Malzberg plays up this theme later in the book, when Wulff himself gets in a car chase, one even more tension-wracking than Paul and Mac’s…but Wulff never loses control. In fact, he becomes a stone-cold badass, “the Wolf,” and he pulls off one hell of a crazy feat. Basically he heists the heroin case from the cops, who have acquired it via unexpected plot developments. In what would have been considered one of the highlights of ‘70s crime fiction if it had appeared in a mainstream publication instead of under-the-radar series fiction, Wulff heads off an entourage of police cars that’s transporting the junk to headquarters. Taking advantage of the thick downtown Boston traffic, Wulff grabs the heroin and drives on sidewalks and oncoming traffic as he evades his pursuers, all of whom are shooting at him. He does crash a few cars, but doesn’t kill any cops, something he can’t bring himself to do (yet!). It’s a crazy sequence and the definite highlight of Boston Avenger. 

Meanwhile mob boss Cicchini has his own subplot. He’s run his territory to perfection over the decades…all as a result of his ironclad self-control. Control which, per the novel’s theme, begins to slip now that Wulff is in town. There are periodic bits where Cicchini consciously struggles to regain his control, pushed to the maddened brink by current developments. But Malzberg has a gift for unexpected plot development; Cicchini causes a lot of his own misfortune when he sends his boys to collect Wulff – another moment where our hero is caught completely unawares and could easily be killed, if not for the contrivances of the plot – and makes Wulff an offer. For reasons Malzberg never makes clear, Cicchini doesn’t want to approach Sands himself – the Harvard professor who has gained control of the case – and thus hires Wulff for the job, even giving him a souped-up car. This is the car Wulff uses in his thrilling heist sequence, which also happens to be the moment in the novel where Wulff again becomes “the Wolf” and regains his mojo. 

Malzberg also gives what seems to be a capoff on the mystery which was introduced in the first volume: what happened to Wulff’s fiance, who died of an OD. Wulff’s certain the Mafia killed her, but Cicchini swears up and down that the Mafia had nothing to do with it; he himself has personally researched the case. As ever though, Wulff clams up and won’t hear any talk about his dead woman. Later in the book he reflects to himself that maybe Cicchini was right. Originally I thought we’d have a twist reveal that Wulff killed her, but we’ll see; it’s possible Malzberg will just drop the entire mystery angle and leave it as what it is: Wulff’s a psychotic bastard in a one-man war against the Mafia. 

And once again Wulff does most of his fighting with a .38 revolver, though he’s still carrying around the “machine gun” he picked up in the previous book. Malzberg’s yet to tell us what kind of machine gun it even is, though this time he informs us it’s similar to the BAR Wulff used in ‘Nam. Action isn’t as frequent in Boston Avenger, though. This is not to say the novel is boring. The characterization is gripping, as is the thematic work, and it builds to a thrilling climax as Wulff regains control of the case and squares things up with the Boston mob. Malzberg also delivers a climactic gunfight, one which again dispenses with realism; it features Wulff blasting away at Cicchini and his enforcers in an apartment, and the cops never show up despite what would have to be an incredible din. Even here though Malzberg imbues the scene with the sureal edge that has become customary of the series: 

Per his 1990 essay, Malzberg was aware from the beginning that Wulff was nuts; for that matter, Malzberg saw that Mack Bolan was nuts, too. This psychosis becomes increasingly evident; the finale features Wulff beating to hamburger one of the one-off characters, but realizing that “there is no retaliation” against the underworld. For, once Wulff has dispensed justice, his mobster and drug-dealing prey are reduced to “only victims,” and Wulff realizes here that he can never fully achieve vengeance. Also, he realizes that if you were to kill one Cicchini, at least three more would immediately take his place. This creates a sort of fatalism in Wulff, or perhaps I should say it furthers Wulff’s fatalism, for again he thinks of himself as a “dead man.” And it is with this fatalism that we leave him with; that is, after a climax that’s reminsicent of the last scene in the first Dirty Harry film, only with a case of heroin replacing a police badge. 

Unlike the previous two, this installment doesn’t end with a setup for the next volume. Per Malzberg’s essay, he came to a temporary halt at this point in the series, which he felt caused him to lose a little headway. But given the speed with which he wrote these books, they almost come off like one very long novel. Also in the essay Malzberg states that he hasn’t seen any money from the series since the late ‘70s; the essay was published in 1990, and I haven’t seen any indication that The Lone Wolf has since been reprinted. What would be cool is if some enterprising modern publisher were to acquire the rights and reprint the entire 14-volume series as one massive omnibus, so that it could be read as a single novel. Plus of course a new intro from Malzberg; it would be nice to see what he thinks of the series now, given that even in the 1990 essay he already felt far removed from it.

The Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler

The Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler, by Mike Barry

October, 1973  Berkley Medallion Books

Burt Wulff returns in the second installment of The Lone Wolf, and this one’s just as surreal and wild as the first volume. I’m only two volumes in, but I’m ready to put Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg’s series up on the same twisted pedestal as Hal Bennett’s Justin Perry: The Assassin. Now, The Lone Wolf isn’t that weird, at least not yet, but it’s similar in that it comes from the mind of a gifted writer who has an unusual perspective. The entirety of Bay Prowler almost seems to be a fever dream. Speaking of which, the title alone is a clue that this series is a bit wacky; I mean “Bay Prowler” sounds like a serial killer, but it actually refers to our hero. 

And since I’m in a “speaking of which” kind of mood – speaking of which, Marty McKee notes that Wulff’s first name changes in later volumes. Well, that “name uncertainty” is already here in the second volume. Twice in Bay Prowler, on pages 97 and 170, Wulff is mistakenly referred to as “Conlan.” This is in the narrative, not in dialog or anything – it’s Malzberg clearly forgetting the name of his hero. I’m not very familiar with Malzberg’s work, so maybe there was a “Conlan” in something else he wrote, or maybe it was his original name for Wulff. Who knows. This would seem to confirm the comment Stephen Mertz left for my review of the first volume; per Stephen, Malzberg wrote about the Lone Wolf series in one of his nonfiction books, saying that he’d written the fourteen volumes in a hurry, thus the sloppiness. This essay appears in Malzberg’s collection Breakfast In The Ruins, which I currently have on the way to me thanks to my good friends in Interlibrary Loan. 

I still see a lot of parallels between The Lone Wolf and The Vigilante. And, just like that later Robert Lory series, this one seems to occur over a short span of time; we learn that it’s just a few days after the first volume – long enough for Wulff to drive from New York to San Francisco – and Malzberg hits the ground running with our hero blowing away a heroin dealer in the first few pages. This opening sequence gives us a taste of what’s to come; the writing is just “different” than the genre norm…literary, but not in the somewhat-stuffy Manning Lee Stokes sense, but definitely above what you’d usually encounter. But there’s just a strange vibe to it, and it’s not just because of Wulff’s fatalism. We know from the first volume that he considers himself a dead man, and that’s focused on here as well, and this adds an entertaining vibe to the series in which Wulff just bluffs himself into impossible situations but somehow manages to survive. 

As I say, there is a dreamlike quality to the books. And indeed, this opening sequence has Wulff meeting a “regular” person, a pretty young girl hooked on speed named Tamara, and she seems to speak for reality in the book, constantly commenting on how crazy everything has become now that Wulff’s arrived on the scene. You know as I typed this I think I realized what exactly makes this series feel different – Wulff as we know is determined to kill the heroin trade, and he’s against all drugs. Yet Malzberg, whether from personal experience or interest I can’t say, taps into the mindset of the drug addicts Wulff encounters; here in the opening, when Wulff comes upon a near-OD’d Tamara in a flophouse and Tamara’s dealer comes in and Wulff shoots him, the majority of the scene is written from Tamara’s skewed perspective, of her being “trapped in the nightmare.” 

This vibe permeates the book…that, and a cynicism that makes the hero of Operation Hang Ten come off like Stuart Smalley in comparison. But whereas the griping in the Operation Hang Ten books is more from a jaded hipster perspective, the poisonous ruminations throughout The Lone Wolf come from a deeper and darker place. I mean Wulff is burned out, and he doesn’t lie when he says he’s already dead. Crazily enough, we learn here that he’s only 32. I say “only” because I’m like 15 years older than him, but still…there’s a hardbitten callousness to Wulff that is beyond his years. And again, it stems from the murder of his fiance, which occurred before the events of the first book even started…and which aren’t covered at all, this time. I was hoping there’d be some “big reveal” about his fiance’s death, which the first book seemed to hint at, but so far as this volume goes it’s all over and done with. 

Instead, the theme of Bay Prowler is how Tamara ultimately makes Wulff “feel again.” Yet another of those female characters who only exist in crime fiction (which The Lone Wolf certainly is – it’s definitely more Parker than The Executioner), Tamara is a hotstuff blonde who instantly takes to Wulff, and is there to offer him all the solace and healing he could need…even if he doesn’t want it. I got some humor out of how Tamara kept calling Wulff “Avenger,” her name for a mythical figure she’s fantasized about since she was a kid. Actually it’s not really “humorous,” not sure why I said that…just interesting, I guess, given that there was a later men’s adventure hero, also obsessed with stopping drug-dealers, called The Avenger. 

Wulff, against his better instincts, finds himself trying to help Tamara recover from her near-OD. He drops her off in an apartment and, uncertain why, even checks on her later. She is presumably the inspiration for the “red-haired companion with deep cleavage” (per Marty McKee) on Mel Crair’s typically-awesome cover, however Tamara is a blonde and we’re specifically informed she has small breasts. We get detailed info on them later in the book, when the expected sex scene occurs; Malzberg, bless him, doesn’t shy from any sleazy details, giving us pervy readers all we could want. But this sequence too seems to be filtered through that same skewed style…and besides, Malzberg’s tongue seems to be in his cheek, as the dialog here, which is separated by a lot of explicit detail, amounts to a lot of “It’s all right/It isn’t all right” bantering. Speaking of which (there I go again), Tamara’s dialog at the end is especially humorous, “That was the first time I’ve come in months, do you know that?” 

This scene leads to an even more surreal bit where a few guys storm in on the post-coital bliss (Wulff is forever being snuck-attack…and, compounding the surreality, it’s never explained how anyone ever finds him) and Wulff, of course, manages to get the upper hand despite the odds. But one guy manages to put a gun on Tamara’s head, meanwhile screaming “You son of a bitch!” at Wulff because he’s been shot in the leg. This is another example of how these characters, like Tamara, seem completely out of sorts, as if Wulff’s mere presence has thrown a monkeywrench in their entire worldview. It goes without saying that Wulff manages to get the upper hand here, too. Not to beat this dead horse, but again it’s like a dream, like it’s all Wulff’s dream, and he always manages to come out unscathed no matter what happens. Really though it’s the increasing madness of this injured, would-be assassin that adds an extra weird layer to the scene. 

Another bizarre scene that indicates The Lone Wolf couldn’t be confused with Ed McBain is when Wulff, again, gets the upper hand on another pair of would-be assassins. This bit, which occurs earlier in the book, is another instance where these guys find Wulff, with absolutely no explanation of how they’ve done so. Humorously, one of them’s built up early in the book as a super tough guy who carries a “luger” and drives a car that’s like an armored tank. But none of that’s actually demonstrated in the novel itself. Instead Wulff gets this guy, who instantly turns into a sniveling coward, and makes him drive a car over the Golden Gate Bridge and on into Sausalito. This scene just keeps going and going, and there’s just a weird vibe to it, especially given that you start feeling bad for the would-be assassin, who soon pleads for his life to no avail. But it’s another demonstration of how Wulff isn’t your typical men’s adventure hero…he is in many ways worse than the villains he’s sworn to destroy. 

As with the previous book, the novel occurs in a world in which reality hangs in the balance, with society in an almost pre-apocalyptic state. This bit here, where Wulff extermintes his would-be killer, is a case in point: Wulff has the man pull off into a residential area, then has the man get out of the car and stand there, so Wulff can blow him away – heedless of any passing cars. For, as Wulff demonstrates, no one gives a damn. This theme, of society falling apart, is carried through Bay Prowler, not only in Wulff’s bitter ruminations on the shitty state of the world but also in how the plot unfolds. Like for example when Wulff gears up for the big hit at novel’s end. He calls up his only friend, his rookie cop partner from the first volume, and gets info on where he can buy illegal arms here in San Francisco. This takes him to a shop where the proprietor sells his illegal stock practically in the open, with no fear of reprisal; it’s Wulff’s certainty that the cops themselves are his customers. 

But as Zwolf stated, “Malzberg apparently has no knowledge of weapons at all, referring to guns as ‘point thirty-eights’ and ‘point forty-fives’ and thinking grenades are a whole lot more powerful than they are.” For that matter, Wulff gets a “machine gun” from the underground weapons store, and this is all Malzberg ever refers to it as. Zwolf was definitely correct on the grenades, too; the finale sees Wulff using a seemingly endless supply of them to blow up a ship that’s bringing in heroin. These grenades are almost like miniature atom bombs, blasting the ship apart. And Wulff mows down a hundred men in this finale without breaking a sweat; he figures more stooges will make things easier than fewer stooges, and proves his point posthaste, lobbing some of his superpowered grenades and blasting away with his machine gun. And as Zwolf again so aptly put it, “When [Wulff] has to go through their 100-man army it’s so easy for him that he literally worries more about catching bronchitis from the cold air than getting shot.” 

I’m sure you’ve already beaten me to it, but all of this – wait for it – only adds to the dreamlike quality of the book. And I have to say, I really enjoyed this bizarre, somewhat surreal spin on the crime genre. The only thing that undermines Bay Prowler is that it’s a bit too long for its own good, coming in at 192 pages. And Malzberg has trouble filling the pages, even serving up egregious chapters from the points of view of various one-off Mafia characters. He does excel at unexpected characterization, though; the storyline with Tamara is one of the highlights of the novel, delivering a nicely sentimental touch; the only light in the overly dark world of The Lone Wolf. I was especially surprised at the finale, which sees Wulff staying true to his promise and calling Tamara, who has returned to her previous life, to tell her goodbye. She asks him multiple times if she’ll see him again, to which Wulff responds “I don’t know.” I doubt though that we’ll ever see Tamara (whose real name, she reveals, is Betty) again. 

Malzberg has a neat gimmick of tying the installments together; the first book ended with Wulff killing a Mafia stooge who had an attache case filled with insider info. Wulff used this info to go to San Francisco, where he learned a big heroin shipment was coming in. And, upon stealing said heroin shipment, Wulff’s now learned that it was bound for Boston. So Bay Prowler ends with our demented hero on the way to Boston to stir up more trouble for the drug-pushers of the Mafia. I look forward to it.