I play the game of choosing an actor to play the characters in certain books...casting the movie it is called. I can now picture Lewis Collins who played Bodie in The Professionals in the UK in 1978-82 as Earl Dumarest right down to his choice of gray leather and high necked tops. This one was particularly good. A strong, detailed story with believable, if unpleasant, characters. ( )

In Zenya, Our Hero, Dumarest, meets a beautiful girl in a library to lures him with the idea that her wealthy father may know something of the location of his homeworld, the fabled Terra. But it is, of course, a trap, and the wealthy-but-crazed man simply traps him into going and finding a wayward relative on another planet. Meanwhile, two beautiful women of the family fight over Dumarest... OK, but ends with an extremely non-PC and feeble justification for colonialism.. ( )

For my money, the Dumarest Saga of E.C. Tubb ranks up there as one of the best science fiction series written in English.

Set in the far distant future, when mankind has spread across the galaxy, they feature the inimitable Earl Dumarest, a man with lightning fast reflexes who is forever trying to find the home world he fled as a child and has long since lost: Earth.

The galaxy he travels through is a hard, deadly place for a man with no affiliations and little money. Tubb pulls no punches in his depictions of the many harsh, hellish worlds and people whom Dumarest encounters, and invariably survives, if only just, during his quest.

Perhaps one of the best things about this series (which consists of some 32 books) is that each book is short, with no unnecessary padding; they're generally between 150 and 190 pages long. So they're a reasonably quick read, too.

I recommend reading all books in the series, preferably in the intended order. If you can, though, avoid the Arrow Books editions - the cover illustrations are, to put it simply, the pits. The artists clearly had never read the books, or if they did, didn't bother to note down a lot of details about the scenes they chose to portray in these illustrations, e.g. clothing, weaponry, etc. Shame on Arrow Books for using such second-class amateurs.

Did I mention? Unlike the seemingly interminable Wheel of Time series of Robert Jordan, or the never-ending Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson - both of which I find way too verbose, i.e. a lot of words pass by without very much happening - the Dumarest Saga has an actual ending - in volume 32, The Return, Dumarest finds his way home! ( )