Solar Pons
Solar Pons is a fictional detective created by August Derleth as a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Robert Bloch wrote of the series "During a span of a century there have been literally hundreds of Sherlockian imitations, ranging from parody to direct duplication, but no one except August Derleth ever succeeded in capturing the essential charm of Doyle's original concept...To Pons's exploits he brought not only expertise but evident expression of his respect, appreciation, and affection for the source of their inspiration. Viewed as Holmesian homage or as a character in his  own right, Solar Pons became Derleth's personal guide to an enchanted time and place." 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 in 1928 and they were published in "The Dragnet Magazine" in 1929. He would ultimately write more stories about Pons than Conan  Doyle did about Holmes. Character model. Pons is a pastiche of Holmes; the first full book about Solar Pons was published in 1945 titled ": The Adventures of Solar Pons". 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' 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 Pons to fill the same role. Like Holmes, Pons is physically slender and smokes a pipe filled with "abominable shag". The actual 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. Pons  fans also regard Derleth as having given Pons his own distinctly different personality, far less melancholy and brooding than Holmes's. The Pons stories also cross over, at times, with the writings of others, such as Derleth's real-life literary correspondent H. P. Lovecraft in "The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders", and with Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, the fictional creation of author William Hope Hodgson in "The Adventure of the Haunted Library". Pons has several encounters with Dr. Fu Manchu, the fictional creation of author Sax Rohmer - see such stories as "The Adventure of the Seven Sisters" (collected  in "The Chronicles of Solar Pons"); "The Adventure of the Praed Street irregulars" (collected in "The Reminiscensces of Solar Pons"); and "The Adventure of the Camberwell beauty", collected in "The Return of Solar Pons"). The tales in the Pontine canon 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 (e.g., Dr. Fu Manchu); perhaps the most outstanding example is "The Adventure of the  Orient Express", in which are thinly disguised versions of , Hercule Poirot, and the Saint. Several of the Pontine tales have titles taken from the famous "unrecorded" cases of Holmes to which that Watson often alluded including the matters of "Ricoletti of the Club Foot (and his Abominable Wife)", "The Aluminium Crutch", "The Black Cardinal", and "The Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant". Others of the canon are variants 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. The first 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" (original UK title: "Some 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". Later, 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 "). Most recently, PS Publishing reissued the complete Basil Copper Pons stories in 6 volumes, adding a 7th volume entitled "The Solar Pons Companion" which contains related non-fiction and assorted materials. The earlier volumes match  the Pinnacle collections, and all use the same titles. 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" (two 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." 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" (1962). 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 Societies and Journals. A society, the Praed Street Irregulars (PSI), was dedicated to Solar Pons. The Irregulars were founded by Luther Norris with assistance from Peter Ruber in 1966 in the style of the better-known Baker Street Irregulars. The PSI produced a newsletter, later a journal, the "Pontine Dossier", published by The Pontine Press between  1967 and 1977 for 15 issues. A branch, The London Solar Pons Society, was established in England headed by Roger Johnson. Other branches were established in other areas. Though it is not formally associated with the Praed Street Irregulars, publication of "The Solar Pons Gazette" began in 2006 as an online journal. In more recent times, Belanger Books has revived "The Pontine Dossier" as "he Pontine Dossier: Millenium Edition,' a print journal, with two annual numbers published to date. Solar Pons in Popular Culture. The "Twin Peaks" character Cyril Pons is named after Solar Pons.