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Solar Pons

kevinburtonsmith

Created by August Derleth
(1909-71)

“How many budding authors, not even old enough to vote, could have captured the spirit and atmosphere with as much fidelity?”
— Ellery Queen on“The Norcross Riddle”

One of the most popular–and certainly the longest-running–Sherlock Holmes pastiches of all comes from the heart of the American Midwest. When he was still a teenager, August Derleth impetuously wrote Arthur Conan Doyle a fan letter and asked, since Doyle would apparently not be producing any more Holmes work, if he could pick up the mantle.

The reply from Doyle, while encouraging, left little doubt that his literary creation would remain retired and tending to his beehives in Sussex. Undeterred, Derleth created an homage to Holmes in the phonetically similar SOLAR PONS, a professional detective every bit the equal of Holmes–some have dubbed Pons “The Great Pretender”–and soon began cranking them out.

Following the rules of the pastiche, his assistant was Dr. Lyndon Parker (in the Watson role); their long-suffering landlady was Mrs. Johnson (instead of Hudson); he has a smarter, albeit lazy brother Bancroft (in the place of Mycroft) in the foreign service and Pons and Parker reside at 7B Praed Street. Pons’ London is between the two World Wars, and all stories take place between 1921 and 1939, and (unlike Holmes) Pons makes use of all the technology available to him — including telephones, aircraft and automobiles.

He is certainly more upbeat than the phlegmatic Sherlock Holmes, and in a nice (and somewhat cheeky) turn, the literary characters of Holmes (not to mention Fu Manchu and Hercule Poirot, all in slightly disguised form) inhabit the Pons universe.

The Pons stories and novellas began to appear in various pulp magazines in the late 1920s, and were later compiled into book form, and Derleth continued to write them right up to his death in 1971.

As pastiches goes, they’re generally considered quite good–rarely do such obvious imitations of an original have so many impressive followers. Solar Pons can count among his fans the likes of Ellery Queen, Vincent Starrett and Anthony Boucher. Certainly, there are some inadvertent and amusing errors in language, grammar, spelling and geography stemming from an American author from the midwest trying to write in the voice of a 1920’s Londoner (Derleth rarely left the confines of his beloved Sauk City, Wisconsin), but these creeping “American-isms” were explained away by having the Parker character living in the USA for a time, which had apparently influenced his speech and writing. At their best, Derleth’s Pons stories are as good as Doyle’s Holmes.

The “official” count of Derleth’s Pons short stories is somewhat contestable– certainly there are 67 short stories and one in novel in the “Pontine Canon,” as it’s known. Two additional stories were co-written with science fiction writer Mack Reynolds, one story was co-written with editor Peter Ruber and a posthumous collection of found and largely unedited stories was released in 1998 with the blessing of the Derleth estate. The seven “official” Derleth collections were reprinted as mass market paperbacks by Pinnacle Books in the mid-late 1970’s to a good degree of success and used copies can be easily found online. A small Canadian imprint continues to publish these same books as well as the 1998 posthumous collections to this day. And just to confuse things, these have been various permutations of the collections, while some of the longer novellas have been been billed as novels, and published individually.

The series was even continued after Derleth’s death in 1971. The estate handpicked successor crime writer Basil Copper (author of the Mike Faraday private eye novels) as Derleth’s successor. Copper wrote a total of eight Solar Pons books from 1979-2004, and while these are certainly solid and enjoyable outings, they lack, in my opinion, the snap of the originals. David Marcum picked up the baton in 2017 or so, with a new collection, The Papers of Solar Pons: New Adventures of the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street.

Derleth went on to become a very prolific author and anthologist, penning historical fiction, poetry, children’s tales and science fiction. He was one of the first to publish horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, and went on to found Arkham House, one of the first hardcover publishers of supernatural fiction in the US.

SHORT(ER) FICTION 

COLLECTIONS

NOVELS

Respectfully submitted by Gregg Zullo, with additional research by Kevin Burton Smith.

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