Forgotten Books: Renegade - Ramsay Thorne (Lou Cameron)

Not long after Lou Cameron created the Longarm series for Berkley, he began writing the Renegade series for Warner Books under the pseudonym Ramsay Thorne. Unlike Longarm, on which Cameron was one of several rotating authors, he turned out all the Renegade books himself. The series was pretty successful, running for several years. At one time, I had all the books in paperback but never read any of them.

These days, the Renegade series is available under Cameron's real name in e-book editions from Piccadilly Publishing, so when I decided it was finally time for me to sample this series, that's the route I took. And I'm glad I did, because RENEGADE is one of the better books I've read recently.

The time is the early 1890s, the setting Arizona Territory not far from the Mexican border, as the protagonist, Lieutenant Richard Walker, is about to be hanged after a court-martial. Seems he took pity on some Mexican revolutionaries/bandits who were caught on the American side of the border and let them go, and in their escape, a soldier was killed. Walker escapes as well and manages to make it across the border into Mexico, where he's promptly captured by brutal Rurales and faces execution again.

Of course, Walker escapes again, and this time he takes a Maxim gun with him, which helps him come in really handy when he falls in with that same bunch of revolutionaries. He also befriends a French mercenary who has been in Mexico since the time of Maximilian's dictatorship. Walker quickly assumes a leadership role among the revolutionaries and gets a battlefield promotion to captain--Captain Gringo, as he's known by one and all for the rest of the book, as he helps the revolutionaries in their struggle against the notorious El Presidente, Porfirio Diaz.

That pretty much sums up the plot of RENEGADE, which is a very straightforward book. But what makes it worthwhile is the wonderfully profane, crude, politically incorrect voice in which it's written, as Captain Gringo beds just about every woman he meets, mows down scores of Rurales and Federales with the machine gun he carries, and leads a long railroad chase across Mexico as he tries to get himself and his new-found friends safely from the high deserts of the border country to the jungles along the coast. There's a ton of well-written action and some bawdy humor. Sure, most of it is over the top, but that hardly ever bothers me.

The only real flaws in this one are that it's too long and therefore a little repetitive in places, and after everything that's gone before, the last couple of chapters struck me as sort of anti-climactic. But for the most part, RENEGADE is great fun (although probably not something that will be to everyone's taste) and I really enjoyed it. I'm glad the whole series is available as e-books. I may not ever get around to reading all of them, but I have a feeling I'll give it a try.