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.