Book Review: Legionnaire from Texas

Legionnaire from Texas by Gordon Landsborough
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a reprint of a 1950s novella that was recently released by Piccadilly Publishing. The publisher specializes in old and new action tales, what used to be called "Men's Adventure Fiction."
And that's what you get here. A hard-bitten man from Texas joins the French Foreign Legion for mysterious reasons, and fights Arabs in North Africa while all the time trying to get something else done. . .
The story is well-written and fast-paced, as you'd expect from this kind of book. Landsborough wrote a lot along these lines and knows how to spin a good yarn.
There were some hiccups along the way, though. The story takes place just after World War Two, yet the Legionnaires are still using the Lebel Model 1886 rifle. I'm not sure that's accurate. Also, I found the characters to be a bit cardboardy. Perhaps they develop further in the series. In addition, this is not a complete tale, having a rather abrupt ending.
In the Smashwords edition I bought there were huge numbers of formatting errors. Paragraphs kept alternating in font size and there was a lot of missing punctuation, especially periods. Perhaps this was from scanning from an old pulp magazine. Whatever the reason, someone needs to proofread the ebook before clicking publish.
I'm intrigued with Piccadilly's line of books and have bought a few more. I don't think I'll continue with the Legionnaire series, however.

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