Lucky for us, many of the men’s adventure series of yesteryear are being re-released as E-Books. Renegade is one of those shoo-in canditates, I thought…and somebody at Piccadilly Publishing evidently agreed with me.

I only read a few paperbacks from later in the series, so this was an opportunity for me to go back and see how it all started without breaking the bank or straining my already-overloaded bookshelves.

Lou Cameron originally wrote these men’s adventures under the pseudonym “Ramsay Thorne.” They are being advertised as westerns now, but that’s not exactly accurate, as they take place in Central and South America during the 1890s. I guess I’d call them “jungle mercenary” adventures.

In this one we meet Dick Walker AKA Captain Gringo as he’s awaiting execution by the US Army. As a commissioned officer, he allowed some prisoners to escape because he thought they were getting a raw deal. That earned Richards himself a raw deal. I found it interesting that he had been assigned to the “Buffalo Soldiers”: the 10th Cavalry–a unit I once researched extensively for a project I may or may not ever undertake.

The Renegade escapes, and almost immediately runs afoul of crooked authorities in Mexico. He also makes acquaintance with Gaston Verrier–a middle aged soldier of Fortune who originally came to Mexico as part of the Foreign Legion. In almost-believable fashion, the two of them team up to survive against bleak odds, and raise a lot of hell along the way. Surprisingly, they part ways before the novel is finished (Gaston is Captain Gringo’s consistent sidekick in the series).

The Renegade series reads almost like a Foreign Legion adventure, only with a XXX rating. And the sex scenes in this book are much raunchier than I remember them being in the later ones I read years ago. Cameron seems to have been more of an “anything goes” perv than I took him for back in the day. I now wonder if he didn’t spend some time in Hollywood adapting screenplays, or some other moral cesspool (Greenwich Village, maybe?) that erased any notion of taboos. But I’m getting ahead of myself here and reacting perhaps as much to #2 in the series as to this one.

The ethnic stereotyping is also much more pronounced than I remember, and occasionally grates.

Based on the typos in the new E-book, I would guess they put the original into digital format by running a scanner over one of the paperbacks, then trusting software to sort out the spelling and punctuation. It’s plenty readable, just annoying if you have OCD concerning syntax…like somebody I know. Ahem.

One asset to reading any of Cameron’s work is the nice little historical and cultural tidbits he mixes in with the plot, whether it be Latin customs or mindset; unexplained natural phenomenon; obscure historical events; or the function and employment of a water cooled machinegun. Though pulpy to the extreme, it can’t fairly be called “mindless entertainment.”