The Dirdir by Jack Vance

The Dirdir is the third of the four "Tschai" novels [1], telling the continuous story of an Earthman named Adam Reith who landed on that planet, the sole survivor of an exploration vessel, and his attempts to get  off it and tell his superiors back home about this big world filled with hostile aliens.

I say "hostile," but they're not actually hostile to Earth. As far as Reith and the reader knows, they don't even know Earth exists. And they're only intermittently - albeit intermittently over the past several thousand years, which shows some serious stubbornness - hostile to each other. But the three intelligent alien races that successively invaded this planet, long ago - the Chasch, the Wankh, and the Dirdir - all have enslaved or indoctrinated then selectively bred humans to serve them, so one or more of them did have contact with Earth, some time in the dim past. And the three races from off-planet presumably still exist in their original spacefaring polities, somewhere out there, too.

This is all set in the medium future, probably early in the expansion of Vance's Oikumene or Gaean Reach universe - I believe there are arguments that those are, or are not, in the same timeline, and I take no position on the matter here - in the usual mid-century SF future, full of strong men in metal phalluses proudly thrusting into the void with minimal computational power and maximum gumption. Vance, as always, has a more sophisticated and complex version of that concept, but this series is still towards the basic-adventure level, all about This One Guy, the adventures of his smart brain and mighty thews, and how he wins out for Earthmen in the end. (And it is all "men," it's that era of SF so the word "human" is used rarely if ever and women are furniture or plot tokens or background details most of the time.)

The first two books were City of the Chasch, in which Reith recuperated from the crash, gathered a couple of unlikely allies, and made his first attempt to get a spaceship; and Servants of the Wankh, in which he and those allies ventured to the other side of the world to return a "princess" in hopes her people would help with the spaceship, and then instead tried to steal a ship from another alien race.

Reith is still trying to get a spaceship, and, this time around, he figures he can more or less buy one, at the Dirdir shipyards in their city of Hei. This is, of course, back in the other hemisphere - but far south - so Reith and team have to undertake a long journey, though it doesn't take as much time in this book as the similar trip did in Wankh. Reith plans a high-risk but ironically satisfying way of amassing the funds to cover ship construction, then heads to the Dirdirman city near Hei and enlists a shady businessman to do the actual (probably illegal) construction. That does not go to plan, for mostly shady-businessman reasons, but Reith does end the novel in possession of both a half-built ship and that shady businessman to complete it.

Don't read this book as a standalone; it would probably work that way - Vance is crisp and descriptive, and the plot is not overly complex - but you would be coming in very much in the middle. All four novels are short and zippy, in that mid-century adventure-SF style, enlivened by Vance's clear-eyed descriptions and wry thoughts along the way. This is Vance in mostly restrained, straightforward mode, so the series as a whole is a decent introduction to Vance for anyone who likes SF adventure. 

[1] All four are available in the omnibus Planet of Adventure, which is how I'm reading them. I recommend it.