Solar Pons

Solar Pons
Solar Pons character
First appearance 1928
Created by August Derleth
Information
Gender Male
Occupation Consulting detective
Family Bancroft Pons (brother)
Nationality English

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

Approach

On hearing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had no plans to write more Holmes stories, the young Derleth wrote to Conan Doyle, asking permission to take over the series. Conan Doyle graciously declined the offer, but Derleth, despite having never been to London, set about finding a name that was syllabically similar to Sherlock Holmes, and wrote his first set of pastiches. He would ultimately 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 titled In Re: Sherlock Holmes. The similarities can hardly be missed: Like Holmes, Solar Pons has prodigious powers of observation and deduction, and 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. Watson, the Pons stories are narrated by Dr. Lyndon Parker; in the Pons stories, he and Parker share lodgings not at 221B Baker Street but at 7B Praed Street, where their landlady is not Mrs. Hudson but Mrs. Johnson. Whereas 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. 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", Fu Manchu author Sax Rohmer, and Carnacki the Ghost-Finder in "The Adventure of the Haunted Library".

We know that Pons is physically slender and that he smokes a pipe filled with "abominable shag".[1]

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.

Pons stories by Basil Copper

After Derleth's death in 1971, further stories about the character were written by the author Basil Copper. Four of these volumes were published by Pinnacle Books - The Dossier of Solar Pons, The Further Adventures of Solar Pons, The Secret files of Solar Pons and The Uncollected Cases of Solar Pons (all 1979). A further two volumes of Copper's continuations were published by Fedogan and Bremer - ''The Exploits of Solar Pons (1993) and The Recollections of Solar Pons (1995). Fedogan and Bremer also issued a limited edition chapbook of Copper's preferred text of the story The Adventure of the Singular Sandwich. More recently, Sarob Press published two further volumes of Pons work by Copper - the novel Solar Pons versus the Devil's Claw (2004) and a collection titled Solar Pons: The Final Cases (2005) which contains six stories, five being revised editions of earlier Copper Pons contributions, and one Sherlock Holmes story ("The Adventure of the Persecuted Painter ").

Derleth stories edited by Basil Copper

Copper also edited the Pons stories of August Derleth for Arkham House under the title The Solar Pons Omnibus (2 vols, 1982). However, he made extensive edits in the stories. The stories in Copper's edition are also arranged in order of their internal chronology, rather than by release date. Copper "edited" the tales in ways that many Pontine aficionados found objectionable. Roger Johnson states "After August Derleth's death the published stories were edited by Basil Copper, who rather controversially corrected many errors and adjusted many Americanisms, into a handsome two-volume omnibus edition."[2]

A later omnibus, The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition, was issued by Mycroft & Moran in 2000, reverting the stories to Derleth's original versions. The later omnibus also discarded Copper's chronological arrangement in favor of the order in which the stories had appeared in the original Derleth volumes.

Other appearances by Solar Pons

In "The Adventure of the Other Brother", included in The Papers of Sherlock Holmes Volume II by David Marcum (2011, 2013) Holmes and Watson travel to Yorkshire in 1896 to defend Holmes's older brother, Sherrinford, from a charge of murder, as first briefly mentioned at the conclusion of William S. Baring-Gould's biography, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. While there, they encounter Sherrinford's youngest son, 16-year-old Siger Holmes, (named after his grandfather.) Siger looks like a young Sherlock Holmes, and also shows a remarkable facility for deduction. After the solution of the mystery, an extended epilogue relates how Siger Holmes, with the blessing of his uncle, also became a consulting detective, and eventually chose to be called "Solar Pons" in order to make his own name, instead of relying on that of his famous uncle. An explanation is also given stating how the name "Solar Pons" was chosen, and a number of other biographical details match those listed by Derleth in a short précis that he wrote describing Pons's background.

Solar Pons in popular culture

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.[3]

A branch, The London Solar Pons Society, was established in England headed by Roger Johnson. The PSI produced a newsletter, the Pontine Dossier, published by The Pontine Press between 1967 and 1977.[4]

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.

Solar Pons books

By August Derleth

By Basil Copper

by David Marcum

References

  1. "The Adventure of the Haunted Library"
  2. "A Study in Solar: The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street" by Roger Johnson (see External Links)
  3. Christopher Redmond, A Sherlock Holmes handbook, Dundurn Press, 1993, ISBN 0-88924-246-1, p.156
  4. Michael L. Cook, Mystery fanfare: a composite annotated index to mystery and related fanzines, 1963-1981, Popular Press, 1983, ISBN 0-87972-230-4, p.24

External links

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