I'm rereading a pulp novel from the 1964 I read a few years ago (well, technically I'm listening to it as a audiobook this time).
Gardner Fox isn't exactly known for his great contributions to literature, though he made substantial contributions to Golden and Silver Age DC Comics. According to Wikipedia, he's co-creator Barbara Gordon, the original Flash, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Doctor Fate, Zatanna and the original Sandman, and he's estimated to have written more than 4,000 comics stories. He also wrote a number of stories for pulp magazine in their heyday, and I feel like his work is always competent, and often above average for their output.
Warrior of Llarn is a Sword & Planet yarn in the vein of Burroughs' Mars and an original paperback, not a fix-up of his older pulp work. Earthman Alan Morgan gets transport to a distant world by means as yet mysterious. He saves a princess and gets involved with a war between two civilizations. The level of technology of the world is a bit higher than Barsoom, and Fox provides a Dune-esque (a year before Dune) explanation for why people with energy weapons might still use swords. Like Fox's earlier Adam Strange stories for DC, the planet has suffered a nuclear war in the past, which is the cause of its strange creatures and current lower level of civilization. Fox's story is old fashion, even quaint in many ways, but he's accomplished at delivering the goods. Whatever the books faults, it's not boring.
Fox wrote a sequel, Thief of Llarn, which, if memory serves, is a bit better than the first.
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