Tue 18 May 2010
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: MIKE BARRY – The Lone Wolf #14: Philadelphia Blowup.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews1 Comment
by Bill Pronzini:
MIKE BARRY – The Lone Wolf #14: Philadelphia Blowup. Berkley, paperback original, 1975.
The success of Don Pendleton’s Executioner series in the early 1970s naturally spawned a host of imitators. Like Mack Bolan, the Executioner, these other rough, tough, and lethal heroes are one-man armies embarked on a personal crusade to destroy the Mafia, the “Communist conspiracy,” or similar organizations/ideologies in the name of justice and/or democracy, and by whatever means necessary.
The Lone Wolf series is one such imitation, and on the surface is solidly in the conventional action/slaughter mold. The lone wolf of the title, ex-New York narcotics cop Burt Wulff, embarks on his one-man vendetta against organized drug traffic in the United States when his girlfriend, Marie Calvante, is found dead of an overdose in a Manhattan brownstone.
His savage quest carries him through fourteen novels — each one set in a different U.S. city, each one dealing with a different arm of the vast drug network — and culminates in a bloodbath in the City of Brotherly Love.
But there is much more to this series than meets the casual eye. “Mike Barry” is a pseudonym of Barry N. Malzberg, a writer of no small talent who specializes in stream-of-consciousness science fiction. Indeed, the Lone Wolf books are essentially plotless, make extensive use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, and are jam-packed with idiosyncratic prose much more suited to a mainstream literary novel than to a paperback paean to violence:
And Burt Wulff is anything but your standard macho hero; he is, in fact, a raving lunatic who, by the last three books in the series — Philadelphia Blowup, in particular — is knocking off people for the sheer soaring pleasure of it: a serial killer as psychotic as Gilles de Rais or Son of Sam. In this respect, then, his saga is both a mockery and a condemnation of the whole Executioner subgenre.
The Lone Wolf novels are not without their flaws, certainly. They were written rapidly and show it; there are any number of factual and geographical errors, and the lack of cohesive plotting makes for a great deal of repetition. Nevertheless, as amazing hybrids of the literary novel and the potboiler, as a saga of one man’s breakdown into psychosis, as an implacable send-up of the Executioner and his ilk, these fourteen books are quite remarkable.
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
May 18th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
This is close to a perfect description of the series. It truly is unique in that it is both written in a totally different style and in a different vein than anything else in the genre and takes the grim logic of the conceit to an end no one else dared.
I can’t think of another series where Dirty Harry turns out to be the Son of Sam, though Sydney Holer’s Nighthawk is screwy as Daffy Duck, writing nasty comments in lipstick on the mirrors of loose women he robbed. The only thing I can compare to these would be if Norvel Page’s Spider had ended up in a strait-jacket, a candidate for a lobotomy.
I’ll confess, it was hard to read this kind of avenger fiction for a while after I finished these. I kept expecting the hero to end up on a couch somewhere complaining how his Oedipus complex made him vulnerable to the attraction of army ordinance.