Still More Solar Pons: new works from David Marcum et al

Solar Pons is a popular pastiche of Sherlock Holmes that was created by August Derleth and continued by Basil Copper. I previously posted on him, covering both the stories created by Derleth and Copper. And I figured that was it for the character, but not so.

First up is an authorized collection of new Solar Pons stories. The Papers of Solar Pons, by David Marcum, came out in 2017 from Belanger Books. I recently got it and read several of the stories. One story is intended as an “origin” of Solar Pons. The only thing I am disappointed in (other than the high price for a paperback) is that the publisher didn’t make use of the Pinnacle Solar Pons logo!

There are a total of 12 stories in addition to that “origin,” which ties Solar Pons more closely to Sherlock Holmes. Also tied in is another well known fictional detective that many have tried to link to Holmes. I’ll leave it to readers to discover that connection and if they like it. I thought it was pretty clever, and as Marcum is a chronologist of both Pons and Holmes, I am sure it fits in with both characters’ timelines.

Now, thanks to Marcum’s work with the Derleth estate, from whom he got permission to do the new stories, he also has permission to reprint the Derleth Solar Pons stories. These had been done by the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, and I was hoping there would be a new set of paperbacks so I could get the later, unpublished works in an affordable edition. I don’t fully understand the situation, but it seems that the BSDB didn’t have permission from the estate and the promised paperback editions most likely won’t be coming out.

But, instead, Marcum has worked with Belanger Books to do a new collection of Derleth Pons works in eight volumes, available in paperback and ebook formats (there are apparently also hardbacks, but these may be harder to obtain). The set follows more or less the “classic” set:

1. In Re: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of Solar Pons
2. The Memoirs of Solar Pons
3. The Return of Solar Pons
4. The Reminiscences of Solar Pons
5. The Casebook of Solar Pons
6. The Novels of Solar Pons: Terror Over London and Mr. Fairlie’s Final Journey
7. The Chronicles of Solar Pons
8. The Apocrypha of Solar Pons

Volume 6 has the unpublished Pons novel that Derleth wrote, Terror Over London, together with the one he did publish. Volume 8 contains the associated works Praed Street Papers and A Praed Street Dossier, as well as all the unpublished Pons works that had been collected previously in The Final Adventures of Solar Pons. These editions are in the same cover style as Marcum’s volume of new works. Hopefully with this new edition that readers can more easily discover this character like I did back in the early 1990s when I found the Pinnacle editions.

And now we have yet another collection of new Solar Pons works. The New Adventures of Solar Pons contains 20 new stories by several authors. This was recently funded on Kickstarter, and the books are going out to backers. I got mine. These new stories range from shortly after Pons met his associate, Dr. Lyndon Parker, following World War I until after Germany’s defeat in WWII. These two are by Marcum and kind of bookend the other stories.

That last story is interesting, as I can’t recall any Pons stories set during WWII. This one tells us what Pons and Parker did during the war, as well as what Sherlock Holmes really did after his “retirement.” The “true” story behind several of the Holmes movies that came out at the time was a nice touch, and hopefully some got the hint about the English lord in this one as well.  As I don’t think any Pons stories are set after WWII, might this open things up to additional ones?

In addition to the stories, we get a series of “entries” from the notebook of Parker, which appeared in the Solor Pons Gazette and other places. Those are the only reprints in this volume.

It’s unclear if we will see further works, but I would hope that if this volume is successful we’ll see more. Maybe it will lead to more editions of the Solar Pons Gazette, which you can read for free online.