Queen of the Martian Catacombs by Leigh Brackett
Many Sword & Sorcery readers also adore Leigh Brackett. To date, I had only read The Sword of Rhiannon which I enjoyed. As part of a group read in the GR S&S group I'm reading more.
Brackett was a prolific writer, notable known for writing part of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V). In the Queen of the Martian Catacombs, written in 1949 (~30 yrs prior Star War) you can see some overtones. "Eric John Stark" is the hunky rogue, a mercenary for hire with a heart---clearly a Han Solo figure. Women adore him, in this case, a princess causing rebellion Berild (Leia?).
The romance is heavy-handed, but the action and scenery are expertly paced. There is a ton of information provided with just the right amount of words. Even though Stark is the awesome hero you'll still feel that he is in peril, and will even feel for the characters he forms relationships with.
At ~25K words, this is more of a novella than a novel. It is available online via the Gutenberg project, but I enjoyed the paperback; the edition I read was illustrated well.
To boot, there are splendid descriptions that are stunning (bold font is mine).
Excerpt 1:
But Berild had gone a few steps farther. With a hoarse cry, she bent over what had seemed merely a slab of stone fallen from the cliff, and Stark saw that it was a carven pillar, half buried. Now he was able to make out the mounded shape of a ruin, of which only the foundations and a few broken columns were left.
For a long while Berild stood by the pillar, her eyes closed. Stark got the uncanny feeling that she was visualizing the place as it had been, though the wall must have been dust a thousand years ago. Presently she moved. He followed her, and it was strange to see her, on the naked sand, treading the arbitrary patterns of vanished corridors.
Excerpt 2)
Stark saw it rising against the morning sky--a city of gold and marble, high on an island of rose-red coral laid bare by the vanished sea. Sinharat, the Ever-Living.
Yet it had died. As he came closer to it, plodding slowly through the sand, he saw that the place was no more than a beautiful corpse, the lovely towers broken, the roofless palaces open to the sky. Whatever life Kynon and his armies might have foisted upon Sinharat was no more than the fleeting passage of ants across the perfect bones of the dead.
This is great stuff! I'm on to Black Amazon of Mars next.
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