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.
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.
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.
The above details clearly point to Solar Pons being simply Sherlock Holmes with the name changed. As against that, however, 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 (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".
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