Forgotten Books: Dreadful Sanctuary -- Eric Frank Russell

This is another of those books that kind of jumped into my hands as I was browsing a used-book store. When I was a kid, Eric Frank Russell was a big favorite of mine. I liked his short stories, and I really liked a couple of his novels, Wasp and The Space Willies. In fact, Wasp was one of my all-time favorites. But somehow I'd missed Dreadful Sanctuary, and I thought it would be fun to read it. After all, it's a sort of blend of a crime novel and science fiction set in the distant future (the 1970s). How could I go wrong?

All too easily, as it turned out.

But first the good stuff: secret societies, private-eyes, lots of shooting, bodies littering the floor. A tough hero. A little romance. When I was a kid, I ate that stuff up. Well, I still do, to tell the truth.

Now the bad stuff. The first problem was the writing style. Style is something that didn't bother me much when I was young. Now, I notice things that I probably took for granted then. Like the fact that people in this novel don't often "say" anything. A few examples from page 51: "he yelped," "he contradicted," "she admired." From page 108: "she diagnosed," "he invited," "he evaded," "she sighed," "she protested," "the pilot checked." And so on. Stuff like that takes me out of the story these days.

And the story, frankly, was just too hard to swallow. 50 years ago, probably not. Now, I couldn't get it down. I didn't like the ending, either. The story was originally published in John W. Campbell's Astounding in the late '40s, and I understand that Russell changed the ending for book publication. I've never read the serial, so I don't know if the original ending was any more satisfying.

I'll bet I'd still like Wasp, so if you want to read something by Russell, read that one, not this one. I had to struggle to finish it.