Just before the release of a new two-volume Solar Pons collection, The Meeting of Minds: The Cases of Sherlock Holmes and Solar Pons, we get the next issue of scholarly journal of Solar Pons: The Pontine Dossier, Millennium Edition.
For those who missed my previous posts on him, Solar Pons is popular character inspired by Sherlock Holmes created by August Derleth, continued by Basil Copper and more recently by David Marcum and others. As Pons is more than just a Holmes copy, calling him a pastiche doesn’t do him justice.
As I noted previously, The Pontine Dossier was a scholarly journal from the 1970s recently brought back. And following the style of the original Pontine Dossier, the covers for both of Belanger Books‘ issues so far are the same, just different colors. However, while having around the same number of pages, this issue is larger than the prior issue, which is a little frustrating for those wanting series to be of a consistant size.
The second issue is Vol. 1, No. 2, marked as Winter/Spring 2021. And this issue has several good articles. The first article looks at the possible connection of the character of Saul Panzer from the Nero Wolfe series and his connection to Solar Pons. This is interesting considering the connection mystery fans make between Wolfe and Holmes.
The next article, by Ray Riethmeier, focuses on a set of stories by H.F. Heard written in the 1950s about a retired detective who goes by the name of Mr. Mycroft. I was not aware of this character. Heard wrote a trio of novels and a couple of short stories. As this character’s stories appear to be set in the 1940s, while some assume Mr. Mycroft was really Holmes, the writer of this article believes he was really a retired Solar Pons. Though I do like the idea of Marcum’s that Pons might have been doing work for the Allies during WWII, I can see how this might work as well. It would be nice if someone would reprint all the Mr. Mycroft stories in a single volume, as they aren’t readily available.
From David Marcum, we get a longish article on Basil Copper and his Solar Pons works. I personally enjoyed his Pons stories, though I know that many, including Marcum, are upset about him altering Derleth’s Pons works he collected in his omnibus collections. Here Marcum gives several examples of what happened so that others can understand the issues, as well as his issues overall with Copper’s Pons works. This article is also pretty heavy with photos, which can only be fully appreciated in the epub version as you can see them in color. One of the most interesting sets of photos show where the cover artwork from the recent set of Copper Solar Pons collection came from.
From editor Derrick Belanger, we get an examination that Pons did not inherit his deductive skills. It disagrees with the idea that Pons and his brother are related to Holmes and his brother, and from them inherited somehow their skills and abilities.
The final article by Brian Belanger explains how he developed the cover artwork style used in the Belengar editions of the Solar Pons works. While unique, I would have loved to have seen the continuation of the use of Pinnacle’s Solar Pons logo that was also used by PS Books for the Copper Pons collections. Oh, and The Shadow was Kent Allard, not Lamont Cranston, as any good pulp fan knows.
There is also a memorial piece on Steven White, who did the audio editions of the Solar Pons works.
It’s another good collection, and hopefully we’ll see another next year. And I need to do reviews for both the recent The Necronomicon of Solar Pons and the upcoming The Meeting of the Minds. And we will hopefully see another collection next year as well, so more to look forward to.
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