Solar Pons

Solar Pons is a fictional detective created by August Derleth as a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

Approach

On hearing that he had no plans to write more Holmes stories, the young Derleth wrote to Conan Doyle, asking permission to take over the job. Conan Doyle graciously declined the offer, but Derleth, despite having never been to London, set about finding a name that was syllabically reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, and wrote his first set of pastiches. He was to go on to write more stories about Pons than Conan Doyle did about Holmes.

Character model

Pons is quite openly a pastiche of Holmes; the first book about Solar Pons was in fact titled In Re: Sherlock Holmes. The similarities can hardly be missed: Like Holmes, Solar Pons has prodigious powers of observation and deduction, who can astound his companions by telling them minute details about people he has only just met, details that he proves to have deduced in seconds of observation. Where Holmes's stories are narrated by his companion Dr. John H. Watson, the Pons stories are narrated by Dr. Lyndon Parker; the two share lodgings not at 221B Baker Street but at 7B Praed Street, whereas their landlady is not Mrs. Hudson but Mrs. Johnson. Where Sherlock Holmes has an elder brother Mycroft Holmes of even greater gifts, Solar Pons has a brother Bancroft to fill the same role.

It cannot be said, however, that Solar Pons is merely Sherlock Holmes with the name changed, for the important reason that Sherlock Holmes also exists in Pons' world: Pons and Parker are aware of the famous detective and hold him in high regard, but whereas Holmes' adventures took place primarily in the 1880s and 1890s, Pons and Parker live in the 1920s and 1930s (when Derleth began writing the Pons stories.) Pons fans also regard Derleth as having given Pons his own distinctly different personality, far less melancholy and brooding than Holmes'.

The Pons stories also cross over, at times, with the writings of others, such as Derleth's literary correspondent H. P. Lovecraft in 'The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders', and Fu Manchu author Sax Rohmer.

The tales in the Pontine canon (as the collected works are known) can be broadly divided into two classes, the straight and the humorous, the straight being more or less straightforward tales of detection in the classic Holmesian mode, while the others—a minority—have some gentle fun, most notably by involving fictional characters from outside either canon (most notably Dr. Fu Manchu, who recurs); perhaps the most outstanding example is "The Adventure of the Orient Express", in which we encounter, among others, very thinly disguised versions of Ashenden, Hercule Poirot, and The Saint.

Several of the Pontine tales have titles taken from the famous "unrecorded" cases of Holmes which Watson often alluded to, including the matters of Ricoletti of the club foot (and his abominable wife), the aluminium crutch, the Black Cardinal, and that of the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant. Others of the canon are riffs on Holmesian tales, such as "The Adventure of the Tottenham Werewolf" paralleling (in some ways) Holmes' case of the Sussex Vampire.

Legacy

After Derleth's death in 1971, further stories about the character have been written by the author Basil Copper.

There is a dedicated Pontine web site, Praed Street; other Pontine pages of interest include the Solar Pons article at that other wiki, and a concise bibliography of the canon, which includes more stories than Doyle ever wrote about Holmes (all are short stories save one novel, Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey).

A society, The Praed Street Irregulars (PSI), is dedicated to Solar Pons. The Irregulars were founded by Luther Norris in 1966 in the style of the better-known Baker Street Irregulars. A branch, The London Solar Pons Society, was established in England headed by Roger Johnson. The PSI produced a newsletter, the Pontine Dossier, which ceased publication in 1977.

Though it is not formally associated with the Praed Street Irregulars, publication of The Solar Pons Gazette began in 2006 and issues may be downloaded from the Solar Pons website below. In 2008, the gazette also published the first Pons story not by Derleth or Copper, entitled Solar Pons's War of the Worlds^[1].

Solar Pons books

By August Derleth

• "In Re: Sherlock Holmes"--The Adventures of Solar Pons - (in the UK "The Adventures of Solar Pons") (1945)
• The Memoirs of Solar Pons (1951)
• Three Problems for Solar Pons (1952)
• The Return of Solar Pons (1958)
• The Reminiscences of Solar Pons (1961)
• The Casebook of Solar Pons (1965)
• A Praed Street Dossier (1968) - [associational volume]
• The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians (1968)
• Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey (1968) [novel]
• The Chronicles of Solar Pons (1973)
• The Solar Pons Omnibus (1982) [omnibus- collects all previous works]
• The Final Adventures of Solar Pons (1998)
• The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition (2000)

By Basil Copper

• The Dossier of Solar Pons (1979)
• The Further Adventures of Solar Pons (1979)
• The Secret Files of Solar Pons (1979)
• The Uncollected Cases of Solar Pons (1980)
• The Exploits of Solar Pons (1993)
• The Recollections of Solar Pons (1995)
• Solar Pons Versus The Devil’s Claw (2004, Sarob Press) [novel]
• Solar Pons: The Final Cases (2005, Sarob Press)

References

Primary references

• T. J. Binyon, "Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction", Oxford University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-19-219223-X, p.12

Online references

External links

• Solar Pons: The Great Pretender at Baker Street Dozen
• SolarPons.com

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