Solar Pons : The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street

By Derrick Belanger

It started with a letter – a letter to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1928, a young August Derleth, at just 19 years of age, asked Sir Arthur if he intended to write any more Sherlock Holmes adventures. Doyle responded that he did not.

Derleth, with a zest reserved for those in their late teens and early twenties, took it upon himself to compose his own Holmes adventures; however, knowing that the great detective was under copyright, he created his own, at the time, modern day detective – Solar Pons.

“[Solar Pons is] a clever impersonator, with a twinkle in his eye, which tells us that he knows that he is not Sherlock Holmes, and knows that we know it, but he hopes we will like him anyway for what he symbolizes . . . The best substitute for Sherlock Holmes known.” – Vincent Starrett

            The first Pons stories were published in The Dragnet magazine in the late 1920s, with the first collection In Re: Sherlock Holmes arriving in 1945. What makes Solar Pons unique is that his adventures are both pastiches and original detective stories. Pons has Holmes’s powers of deduction, and he works alongside his Boswell, Dr. Parker, a stand in for Dr. Watson. They live together at 7B Praed Street and have a landlady by the name of Mrs. Johnson. Pons even has a brother, like Mycroft, named Bancroft who also, at times, is the British government. Solar Pons has also solved cases alluded to in the canon including “The Black Cardinal”, “The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore,” (in the Pons version, it is titled, “The Adventure of the Late Mr. Faversham”, and “Ricoletti of the Club Foot (and his Abominable Wife).”

            As Derleth wrote more Pons adventures, the detective changed from being a clone of Holmes to having his own unique personality. He was much cheerier than Holmes, and a bit more biting towards Parker than Holmes was towards Watson. Unlike Holmes, Pons also delved into parody (“The Adventure of the Orient Express”), horror (“The Adventure of the Nosferatu”), and science fiction (“The Adventure of the Snitch in Time”). There was also world building in the Solar Pons universe. He repeatedly fought a villain who was based on Fu Manchu. He mentions working with William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost Finder, and he even discusses learning to be a detective from Sherlock Holmes, his illustrious predecessor.

            So beloved was Solar Pons that in 1966, noted Holmes scholar Luther Norris created the Praed Street Irregulars. Like the Baker Street Irregulars, the Sherlock Holmes society that was founded by Christopher Morley in 1934, Norris’s group was dedicated to keeping the memory of Pons alive. A journal of Solar Pons scholarship, The Pontine Dossier, was published by Norris from 1967 to 1977.

            With the Solar Pons character having such a devoted fandom, one would think that the original stories would have stayed in print. Sadly, after Pinnacle publishing put out affordable editions of the books in the 1970s, they went out of print soon after. While Basil Copper continued writing new Solar Pons stories and a gorgeous, expensive two volume The Solar Pons Omnibus was published in 2000 by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, it was becoming impossible to find the original Pons stories at an affordable price. Fear was beginning to set in among Pons fans that because a generation had passed since the last affordable edition of Derleth’s Pons stories had been published, the original tales might soon be forgotten.

            In 2017, the first new Solar pons collection was published. Belanger Books and author David Marcum worked with the Derleth estate to publish Marcum’s The Papers of Solar Pons. The book was a success and revived interest in the Pons character. Marcum and Belanger Books sought to publish all new editions of the original Solar Pons collections by Derleth. Creating new editions of the original books ended up being more challenging than expected. There were no master files to access; after all, Derleth wrote his stories before the personal computer was invented. “The Derleth Estate was very happy with the plan, and over the next few months, I worked to convert the original Mycroft & Moran volumes into new editions, completely faithful to the originals,” Marcum recalled on his blog, A Seventeen Step Program. To recreate the books, Marcum went back to the original Solar Pons editions and through using a scanner and line by line editing was able to craft new versions of the books.

            Once the original text documents were completed, it came time for new book covers. Brian Belanger designed the images for the books. “For the Solar Pons series, I wanted something very striking, something that would stand out on a bookshelf across a room,” Brian explained. “Since Pons’s world is that of the 1920s through the 1940s, I immediately thought of film noir.  Not so much the hard-boiled look of Kiss Me Deadly, but the German Weimar era of films, like M and Nosferatu. The cases of Solar Pons are slightly more fantastical than the typical Holmes canon, with nods to Lovecraft and Rohmer’s stories, so I try to give the heavy shadows and silhouettes a dark, dreamy aspect.”

            The new editions were released in 2018 and have since gone on to be some of Belanger Books bestsellers. The books have indeed met the goal of introducing Derleth’s original Solar Pons tales to a new audience, and with the continued popularity of pulp fiction today, their popularity continues growing well into the 21^st century.

Solar Pons Scholarship and Pastiche

            In 2019, after a hiatus of 42 years, an all new edition of The Pontine Dossier debuted. Titled The Pontine Dossier: Millennium Edition, the journal is published annually and is the only publication focusing on Solar Pons scholarship. The next volume will arrive in December 2025.

In addition to the new journal, The Praed Street Irregulars, the Solar Pons Society started by Luther Norris has also become active again. The group meets virtually each February where it holds an investiture meeting for new members. The group also meets annually for the Luther Norris Dinner during the BSI weekend in New York.

Since the publication of the original Solar Pons books, Belanger Books has also published several new Solar Pons story collections, all of which are faithful to Derleth’s vision of the character. The New Adventures of Solar Pons was the first ever anthology of Solar Pons stories written by multiple authors. The Necronomicon of Solar Pons was the first book to merge Derleth’s Solar Pons with his Lovecraftian writings.  The Meeting of the Minds: The Cases of Sherlock Holmes and Solar Pons is a two-volume anthology of adventures pairing Solar Pons with his illustrious predecessor, Sherlock Holmes. Most recently, The American Adventures of Solar Pons was a collection of adventures where Holmes solves cases across the pond in the United States.

The popularity of Solar Pons continues to grow. More Solar Pons books including an 80^th anniversary edition of In Re: Sherlock Holmes and the anthology The Singular Papers of Solar Pons are planned for 2025 along with the latest issue of The Pontine Dossier. 2026 will see an anthology of first year adventures titled, Solar Pons: A Year of Mystery 1919.

            Solar Pons, like his illustrious predecessor, seems bound to be another detective who has never lived but will never die.