Here is The Recollections of Solar Pons (1995), which is the sixth collection of Solar Pons stories by Basil Copper. It was planned to be the final collection of his stories from Pinnacle, but it never happened. Instead, it was published by Fedogan & Bremer in 1995. Thankfully, PS Publishing has reprinted it, as I wasn’t able to obtain a copy of that F&B work. So this will also be a first time reading for myself.
Now “The Devil’s Claw” was planned to be the final story in that collection years ago, but as I understand it wasn’t finished as the whole Pinnacle deal fell through. Copper then finished the tale much later, expanding it to a short novel. I’m not clear on when this was done, but suspect this was why it wasn’t included in the collection when F&B published it, but wasn’t done until Sarob Press did it as a stand-alone volume. It replaces the corrected version of “The Adventure of the Singular Sandwich,” which appeares in its proper place in Uncollected Cases.
A curator at the Egyptian Museum in London come to Pons, starting “The Adventure of the Cursed Curator.” He has recently returned from an expedition to, well, Egypt, and reports attempted theft of the items and a murder in Egypt. Once he’s back in London, strange things continue. All seem centered around the items brought back. This includes treasures on loan from the Cairo Museum, as well as pottery from the expedition. Who is behind it, and can Pons stop it?
While the title of “The Adventure of the Hound of Hell” makes you think it’s centered around an actual animal, you’ll learn what it is in the story. A young woman comes to Pons in a panic. Her fiance, a young lawyer, has been arrested for the murder of his rich, miserly aunt, who has named him as her sole inheritor. His aunt lives in an old house, having only two servants who don’t live there. But because of her miserlyness, she often owes several people money, many of whom had come recently to demand payment. But the local police inspector thinks the young man did it. Pons thinks otherwise, and looks into things, even bringing together all the potential suspects to unmask the real murderer.
This time a former neighbor of Dr. Parker‘s brings him and Pons “The Adventure of the Mad Millionaire.” A millionaire neighbor of his, whom he has also invested a large amount of money with, has semingly gone crazy, doing bizarre things. After hearing of the case, Pons looks into it, pulling in Parker. He soon figures out that he hasn’t gone mad, but that some outside forces are to blame. Can Pons get to the bottom of things and solve this strange mystery?
And, finally, The Adventure of The Devil’s Claw. A young man brings the case to Pons. His rich but reclusive uncle has died under mysterious circumstances, with a strange six-toed, clawed footprint around him! He had come to live with his uncle recently, one of his only surviving relatives. But in recent months, he had notices several strange events. For some reason, his uncle started to act strangely toward him, as did the local villagers. And he saw his uncle making strange visits to the nearby cemetery, but also showing great fear of some unknown foe. Due to what happened, the young man was under a cloud that he was somehow involved. Can Pons get to the bottom of things and clear them up?
All the stories here are good. We again have a sort of return of Baron Kroll, as he’s seen as the mastermind behind the scenes of the first story. But doesn’t actually appear. The final two stories, especially The Devil’s Claw, makes one think they might be similar to The Hound of the Baskervilles. But not so. Its good that both were more original then that.
The next volume from PS Publishing is the Solar Pons Companion, Vol. 7. But as I pretty much covered it in my posting on the Copper Solar Pons stories, I won’t be doing a post on it. Instead, we go back to the Derleth Solar Pons volumes with Vol. 7, Chronicles.
Having read (or re-read) all the Basil Copper stories, what do I think? As well as the series from PS Publishing? Yes, all the stories are longer than Derleth’s. I don’t think that’s good or bad. I think it’s more the author’s style. I don’t think the stories are padded or the like.
Some complain about Pons and Parker saying each other’s name on occasion in their back-and-forth dialogue. It is somewhat noticeable, but I didn’t see that has hugely distracting. I did think that Pons seems a bit more sarcastic with Parker, but this may be more a British thing than American.
In my (re)reading of the Derleth Pons stories, their behavior is not the same as what we see in Copper’s. In Derleth’s works, Pons seems more complementary at times with Parker. So that is something I don’t like.
As to the PS edition, they are overall good. But I had a few “issues” in light of having read the Belanger Books editions. The cover artwork is good, even reusing some of the previous artwork from the Sarob Press volumes. I like they reused the Pinnacle’s “Solar Pons” logo. I wish they had cited the sources for the cover artwork in the books, though they did cite the artists.
I would have liked if there had been more editorial material in each volume. In each, we got the same two-paragraph statement on sources. But as I have pointed out in these reviews, several stories were replaced by corrected versions, but no mention of this occurs in the volumes. Though, if you read the copyrights you’d see this. It would have been nice that this had been more clearly stated in each volume. One had to read the Companion volume to get the full story of how the series came about, and how it was written and published. It would have been nice if some of this had been shared in each volume as we got in the Belanger series. Hence, I do recommend that if you enjoyed this series that you get the Companion volume as well.
And with that, we move on to the next Derleth volume.
