The affair of the Three Red Dwarfs, as it is chronicled in my notebooks, stands among those cases most typical of Solar Pons's method, and ranks, in the brevity of its problem and the almost pedestrian acuteness of Pons's observation, with the adventure of the Black Narcissus, which it followed. It was one of those cases marked by unusual features which Inspector Jamison of Scotland Yard habitually brought to the attention of 'the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street', as the papers were even then beginning to call Pons. August Derleth: 'The Adventure of the Three Red Dwarfs'
Most fictional sleuths owe something to Sherlock Holmes; Solar Pons owes everything to Sherlock Holmes. August Derleth deliberately modelled his stories on the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, and Solar Pons deliberately modelled his career on that of Sherlock Holmes What's more, they continued together through seventy-five stories and two short novels.
A witty commentator observed that Sherlock Holmes was a man of the 19th century looking forward to the 20th, while Solar Pons is a man of the 20th century looking back to the 19th. Pons does not scorn the latest developments in forensic science, but essentially his livelihood depends on his own imagination and experience, his knowledge, his powers of observation and deduction. Fortunately he has them all, in spades. And titles such as 'The Adventure of the Haunted Library', 'The Adventure of the Missing Huntsman' and 'The Adventure of the Spurious Tamerlane' testify to his success.
In 1928, while he was a first-year student at the University of Wisconsin, August Derleth wrote to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saying that if there were to be no more Holmes stories he, Derleth, intended to try his hand at something similar. He would not write about Sherlock Holmes, of course, as he had no right to do so. 'Who was I,' he later observed, 'to put upon paper new adventures of the illustrious Sherlock Holmes, of whom my maternal grandmother had always spoken as "the greatest detective who ever lived", since she, like so many other readers of the canon, was firmly convinced that Sherlock Holmes lived, not in that sense of the continuing life given him by the Baker Street Irregulars, but as an actual man of flesh and blood, who might be appealed to in cases of dire necessity.'
Derleth continued: 'The form the stories must take was patent. Not that ridiculing imitation designed for laughter, the parody, but that fond and admiring one less widely-known as the pastiche. I needed first a name, syllabically similar to that of Sherlock Holmes. So Solar Pons was born because I thought of Solar in its suggestion of light, and Pons as the bridge -- "bridge of light" seemed to the adolescent mind singularly brilliant, which, of course, it was not.'
The only conceivable setting for Pons and his amanuensis Dr Parker was London, England, though it was a city that the young author knew only from books; and John Rhode's novel The Murders in Praed Street suggested an address just a stone's throw from Baker Street. The first story, 'The Adventure of the Black Narcissus', captured the essence of its original well enough to be snapped up by Dragnet magazine, and others followed in quick succession -- 'The Adventure of the Missing Tenants', 'The Adventure of the Broken Chessman', 'The Adventure of the Late Mr Faversham'. But the Great Depression killed off many of the so-called pulp magazines, and it nearly killed Solar Pons.
Then in 1944 the inclusion of 'The Adventure of the Norcross Riddle' in Ellery Queen's legendary anthology The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes revived the detective's fortunes. His creator, who had experience in publishing with the well-respected Arkham House, established another small company, Mycroft & Moran, to issue limited editions of quality crime and detective fiction. The first book under the new imprint, in an edition of three thousand, was In Re: Sherlock Holmes --The Adventures of Solar Pons. It featured an enthusiastic introduction by the great Sherlockian scholar Vincent Starrett, and it was dedicated to the Baker Street Irregulars. The game once more was afoot.
When I look over my notes concerning the various adventures of my companion, Solar Pons, in the closing years of the 1920s, I am hard put to it to make a choice from a roster which includes the diabolical affair of the Devil's Footprints, the curious puzzle of the hats of M. Henri Dulac, the French consul, and the singular affair of the Little Hangman, but I doubt that there was another in those years which began as dramatically as the strange adventure of John Paul Renfield, clerk of Counsellors Extraordinary, Ltd. August Derleth: 'The Adventure of the Lost Dutchman'
Before his death some thirty-five years later, August Derleth found time among his other work to write and publish four more volumes of Pons stories: the Memoirs (introduced by Ellery Queen), Return (Edgar W. Smith), Reminiscences (Anthony Boucher) and Casebook (Vincent Starrett again). All the titles faithfully echo the Holmesian originals. There were also a short novel, Mr Fairlie's Final Journey, and two novellas, 'The Adventure of the Orient Express' and 'The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians'. And there was A Praed Street Dossier, which contains a good deal of interesting background information and some shorter exploits of the redoubtable Pons. The Chronicles of Solar Pons appeared posthumously in 1973, with a nostalgic introduction by Allen Hubin. And that was that. There was no falling-off in quality; the later stories are, if anything, better than the early ones, because Derleth's writing matured and improved as he aged, and because he cared about Pons and Parker. Even though his regional novels were and are regarded as his finest contribution to letters, you would not have heard him complaining, as Conan Doyle did of Holmes, that Solar Pons 'took his mind from better things'.
Pons himself, of course, is based wholeheartedly upon Sherlock Holmes, but, as Vincent Starrett pointedly remarked, 'Solar Pons is not a caricature of Sherlock Holmes. He is, rather, a clever impersonator, with a twinkle in his eye, which tells us that he knows he is not Sherlock Holmes, and knows that we know it, but that he hopes we will like him anyway for what he symbolizes.' It is apparent that he began his career under the tutelage of Holmes (it has been suggested that he was Billy the page-boy at 221B Baker Street, which is a nice thought), but his style and tastes, though they may imitate his mentor's -- the tobacco in the Persian slipper, the correspondence fixed by a dagger to the mantelshelf -- are really his own. Pons keeps a violin, but his playing is painfully bad; his delight in disguise reaches the rarefied heights of the purely theatrical; his interests extend much further into the occult than Holmes's.
My friend, Solar Pons, the private enquiry agent, has a tendency to be highly dubious of all coincidence -- but was it only coincidence that he should refer to the singular adventure of the late Abraham Weddigan on the very day that I had determined to set down the facts about this horrible affair which shocked a continent and, on its successful termination, brought Pons the profound gratitude of millions of people as well as the personal felicitations of His Majesty? August Derleth and Mack Reynolds: 'The Adventure of the Ball of Nostradamus'
Several writers (but not Conan Doyle) have pitted Sherlock Holmes against the supernatural, despite Holmes's very definite dismissal of such things: 'The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.' But Solar Pons actually does encounter ghosts, clairvoyants, vampires -- even extra-terrestrials: phenomena that would not be out of place in The X-Files. And his 'trifling monographs' include An Examination of the Cthulhu Cult and Others. His methods, however, remain frankly imitative of his master's -- and so do his exploits. How could it be otherwise?
There are other parallels with Sherlock Holmes, of course. Cases of espionage and international diplomacy are plentiful in Pons's career, and several of them involve the participation of his elder brother, the portly, dignified and shrewd Bancroft Pons, a senior official at the Foreign Office.
'That unbelievable conspiracy,' Solar Pons was accustomed to call the affair of the Black Cardinal, which began for me early in January of a year which must remain nameless. August Derleth: 'The Adventure of the Black Cardinal'
Some of the stories actually derive from single adventures in the Holmes canon: 'The Adventure of the Crouching Dog' necessarily recalls The Hound of the Baskervilles, and 'The Adventure of the China Cottage' has something of 'The Devil's Foot' about it. Several offer most satisfactory parallels to those untold adventures about which Dr Watson dropped such tantalizing hints: 'The Adventure of the Red Leech', 'The Adventure of the Remarkable Worm', 'The Adventure of the Trained Cormorant' and my own favourite, 'The Adventure of Ricoletti of the Club Foot', which weaves a tale of heroism and tragedy around the club-footed man and his truly abominable wife. 'The Adventure of the Lost Locomotive' effectively re-stages that tantalizing almost-Holmes story 'The Lost Special'.
'Now and then, too,' said August Derleth, 'real life has afforded me an adventure for the series. Any reader interested enough to look into Bernard Spilsbury: His Life and Cases by Douglas G. Browne and E. V. Tullett will discover the source of "The Adventure of the Cloverdale Kennels" . . . and the source of "The Adventure of the Triple Kent".' (Sir Bernard Spilsbury was perhaps the greatest criminal pathologist in British history. Derleth added: 'It is not a coincidence that the name Spilsbury occurs now and then in the pastiches.')
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. After some debate, the two fantastic collaborations with Mack Reynolds, 'The Adventure of the Snitch in Time' and 'The Adventure of the Ball of Nostradamus', were included. Copper was also authorized to create more exploits for Pons, in a rare and possibly unique case of an imitation imitated. His preferred length is notably longer than that of the originals, but the style, flavour and atmosphere are exactly right, while the protagonists are unmistakably the authentic Solar Pons and Dr Parker.
Then a few years ago a number of Derleth's unpublished manuscripts were discovered in a sort of Pontine equivalent of Dr Watson's famous tin dispatch box, and were deposited with the August Derleth Society. In 1995, with the permission of the author's estate, George Vanderburgh published them, incomplete as they were, as The Unpublished Solar Pons. And that, we thought, really was that.
However -- the following year, April Derleth handed Peter Ruber two large boxes of her father's papers, suggesting that he might edit them for publication. Among much other material the boxes contained the original, complete manuscripts of the stories that had recently come to light, plus one more short story and a short novel. All these are early work, lacking the sophistication of Derleth's mature writing, but clever, vigorous and fast-moving. Ruber notes that the novel, which he entitled The Terror over London, 'shows the definite influence of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu mysteries, in terms of excitement and intrigue'. (The shadow of the Devil Doctor was to be observable throughout the career of Solar Pons, noticeably in the adventures of the Camberwell Beauty, the Praed Street Irregulars and the Seven Sisters.) Finally, there were two more 'off-trail' collaborations with Mack Reynolds.
George Vanderburgh arranged with Arkham House to revive Mycroft & Moran, and under that imprint he published The Final Adventures of Solar Pons. And even that isn't the last, since he and Peter Ruber have recently published The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus, a large, handsome and very expensive limited edition that discards Basil Copper's editorial adjustments. And meanwhile, Copper himself is still writing new tales of 'the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street'.
Solar Pons is a product of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, a contemporary of Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion, Gideon Fell and the Saint. He is worthy of their company.
We hope to include a tribute to that celebrated bookman and Baker Street Irregular Vincent Starrett in a future issue. With their championing of neglected authors, it is debatable whether Starrett (1886-1974) or John Gawsworth should be considered the patron saint of Lost Clubdom. Starrett was an indefatigable promoter of 'Buried Caesars' such as Machen, Haldane Macfall, Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce. Bernard Duffey stated in The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters (1954): 'The Chicago writers had heard of the Europeans, but it was most often Starrett who put their volumes under the noses of such as Ben Hecht . . . ' Starrett was a self-confessed 'dofab' -- a damned old fool about books. Starrett's The Unique Hamlet (1920), a short story satirizing book collecting, is regarded as one of the finest Sherlockian pastiches. It contains the immortal observation by Holmes: 'A book collector is mad enough to begin with . . . ' The tale can be found in The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Penguin, 1985). Starrett's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933) is in print in the US (Otto Penzler Books/Macmillan, 1993). Early editions can usually be had from the Sherlock Holmes Memorabilia shop at 230 Baker Street, NW1; tel: 020 7486 1426 www.sh-memorabilia.co.uk. The book -- 'A masterpiece!' (Christopher Morley) -- contains such delights as speculations on the tantalizing location of 221B Baker Street, lists the unrecorded tales of Dr Watson (fifty-five are cited, though even this is not exhaustive), considers Holmes on stage, his illustrators, methods and published writings. One chapter famously ends:
But there can be no grave for Sherlock Holmes or Watson . . . Shall they not always live in Baker Street? Are they not there this instant, as one writes? . . . Outside, the hansoms rattle through the rain, and Moriarty plans his latest devilry. Within, the sea-coal flames upon the hearth, and Holmes and Watson take their well-won ease . . . So they live still for all that love them well: in a romantic chamber of the heart: in a nostalgic country of the mind: where it is always 1895.
Sounds like the Lost Club.