Lou Cameron

Lou Cameron (June 20, 1924 – November 25, 2010) was an American novelist [1] and a comic book creator. He was born in San Francisco in 1924 to Lou Cameron Sr. and Ruth Marvin Cameron, a vaudeville comedian and his vocalist wife. Cameron served in Europe during World War II in the U.S. Army's 2nd Armored Division ("Hell On Wheels"). Before becoming a writer, Cameron illustrated comics such as Classics Illustrated and miscellaneous horror comics. One of his first written stories, "The Last G.I.," is a science fiction story about American soldiers struggling to survive in a nuclear battlefield. It appeared in Real War (volume 2 number 2, October 1958).

His work usually boasted muscular, no-nonsense prose through a prism of wry cynicism, sharp observation, and a signature combination of gusto with pulp-style gritty realism; he was also expert at devising unexpected, 11th hour plot twists. Fantastically versatile and prolific, his work ran the gamut in quality from inspired to for-the-buck cheap sensationalism. But his imprimatur remained individual and unmistakable.

The film to book adaptations he wrote include None but the Brave (based on the anti-war film directed by and starring Frank Sinatra), California Split (based on the Joseph Walsh screenplay for the Robert Altman film starring Elliott Gould and George Segal), Sky Riders (based on the adventure film starring James Coburn, Robert Culp and Susannah York), Hannibal Brooks (based on the film written by the team of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais for the Michael Winner film starring Oliver Reed and Michael J. Pollard), and an epic volume based on a number of scripts for the award winning CBS miniseries How the West Was Won that starred James Arness (not to be confused with the novelization by Louis L'Amour of the identically titled feature film, although the TV series was loosely based on that film).

He also wrote two novels based on TV series: an original, The Outsider, based on the Private Eye series created by Roy Huggins and starring Darren McGavin; and "A Praying Mantis Kills", one of the novelizations of the Kung Fu television series, under the "house name" (shared pseudonym provided by the publisher) "Howard Lee". (The three other books in that series were written, also as Howard Lee, by Barry N. Maltzberg and Ron Goulart.) Alone among Cameron's tie-ins, "The Outsider" is written in the first person, from the POV of its main character, P.I. David Ross. Though that perspective is naturally derived from the main character's voice-over commentary in the episodes, Cameron often employed first person narrative in his original novels, particularly the earlier (1960-1970) standalone works, such as "The Empty Quarter", "Angel's Flight", "The Good Guy" and "The Amphorae Pirates".

His most ambiguous credit is on the 1965 paperback movie tie-in edition of Morituri. This, its only-ever English-language edition (originally written in German, the novel was a bestseller in Europe), has a title page crediting the novel to W.J. Lueddecke and the translation to H. S. Noerdlinger, adding "edited for Gold Medal Books by Lou Cameron." And opposite this page is a (probably contractual) movie credits page containing the by-line Screenplay by Daniel Taradash. The provenance of Cameron's credit can only be guessed at, but it's an obvious open identification of a ghostwriter. The most likely scenario is that the translation was commissioned for the filmmakers, but deemed unpublishable when the deal for the tie in edition was made, so the editor turned to Cameron, war novels a specialty, to turn it into readable English. How much he simply reworked the translation vs. how much he literally rewrote the book (and how free a hand he was given) is unknown, but the presence and position of the screenwriter's credit along with the others, raises the possibility that Cameron's draft may tacitly have been based also or entirely on the screenplay. Another oddity: the copyright is assigned to the publisher, not the author of the German original. All that's unequivocal is that the prose is rendered with the unmistakable Cameron imprimatur.

Cameron also created the character Longarm under the housename "Tabor Evans" and wrote at least 52 of the more-than-400 books in the series. He wrote the Renegade series as "Ramsay Thorne", and the Stringer series under his own name. He also wrote at least one Easy Company novel as "John Wesley Howard", In 2004, his novel The Subway Stalker was adapted to film by French director Jean-Pierre Mocky as Le Furet.

He has received awards for his Western writings, such as the Golden Spur for The Spirit Horses. He wrote an estimated 300 novels. The lists below are compiled from copyright records at the Library of Congress.

Novels

as Lou Cameron

Stringer series

as Justin Adams

as Julie Cameron

as Tabor Evans

as John Wesley Howard

as Howard Lee

as Mary Manning

as Ramsay Thorne

References

  1. ↑ WorldCat author listing

External links