The Casebook Of Solar Pons

The premise is that Solar Pons is the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes.

The steadily expanding devotees of the Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street will hail with delight this crowning volume in a series of collections which have now pastiched the entire quintet of the Master's adventures. Here is another collection of "as sparkling a galaxy of Sherlockian pastiches as we have had since the canonical entertainments came to an end," as Vincent Starrett - who contributes a preface to this book - wrote in his introduction to the first collection of the adventures of Solar Pons twenty years ago.A dozen new Pontine exploits round out the quintet in these pages - from The Adventure of the Sussex Archers to The Adventure of the Innkeeper's Clerk - and between these two tales are such memorable stories as The Adventure of the Haunted Library, The Adventure of the Intarsia Box, The Adventure of the China Cottage, The Adventure of the Crouching Dog, The Adventure of the Whispering Knights, and others, including among them The Adventure of the Missing Huntsman - in which Pons and Parker invade the fox-hunting country of England, and The Adventure of the Ascot Scandal, one of Pons' briefest and most amusing problems.To supplement the tales, the distinguished British author, Michael Harrison, contributes a monograph exploring the background of Dr. Lyndon Parker, and, in the course of so doing, explains the doctor's semi-American English. And, finally, August Derleth has added an Afterword in which he sets forth the facts about the origins of Solar Pons, admitting that it was never his "intention to do any considerable number of pastiches" and relating the circumstances surrounding the continuing numbers of the tales, ending happily with, "I cannot promise to write no more of them."The present collection brings the total number of the Pontine pastiches to 57 - one more than the total of the canonical short stories, of which a reviewer for The Louisville Journal-Courier wrote, "These tales recall, as nothing else has done, those delicious days and nights in Baker Street, days and nights that have vanished forever."- From the original 1965 Mycroft & Moran edition dust jacket

In 1928, at the age of nineteen, college student August Derleth wrote to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle asking him whether he planned to produce more Sherlock Holmes stories, and if not, then he, Derleth, would begin a series of pastiches of his own. Sir Arthur promised nothing, so Derleth went ahead, creating Solar Pons. Between Pons' first appearance in 1929 until Derleth's death in 1971, the bite of the Sherlockian bug prompted him to write more than seventy Solar Pons adventures in the best Holmes tradition. Now, restored from the original 1965 Mycroft and Moran edition, Solar Pons is back in this fifth collection, The Casebook of Solar Pons, containing twelve incredible adventures, including the eerie matter of "The Whispering Knights", the surprising affair of "The Haunted Library", and the mysterious adventure of "The Sussex Archers". This newly restored edition also includes the sixth Pons collection The Novels of Solar Pons, featuring the only two Pons novels that Derleth ever penned - the Golden Age style Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey (1968) and the Sax Rohmer-influenced Terror Over London, written when Derleth was a young man in his twenties, and then filed in his papers and lost, only to be discovered decades after his death. Each of these tales are guaranteed to delight both Pensions and Sherlockians!

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 22. Chapters: August Derleth, A Praed Street Dossier, Basil Copper, In Re: Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey, The Adventure of the Singular Sandwich, The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians, The Casebook of Solar Pons, The Chronicles of Solar Pons, The Dragnet Solar Pons et al., The Exploits of Solar Pons, The Final Adventures of Solar Pons, The Memoirs of Solar Pons, The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition, The Recollections of Solar Pons, The Reminiscences of Solar Pons, The Return of Solar Pons, The Solar Pons Omnibus, Three Problems for Solar Pons. Excerpt: August William Derleth (February 24, 1909 - July 4, 1971) was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and for his own contributions to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror, as well as his founding of the publisher Arkham House (which did much to bring supernatural fiction into print in hardcover in the US that had only been readily available in the UK), Derleth was a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction and biography. A 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, Derleth considered his most serious work to be the ambitious Sac Prairie Saga, a series of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works designed to memorialize life in the Wisconsin he knew. Derleth can also be considered a pioneering naturalist and conservationist in his writing. The son of William Julius Derleth and Rose Louise Volk, Derleth grew up in Sauk City, Wisconsin. He was educated in local parochial and public high school. Derleth wrote his first fiction at age 13. He was interested most in reading, and he made three trips to the library a week. He would save his money to...

This long-awaited second collection of pastiches of the immortal Sherlock Holmes offers eleven new adventures of Solar Pons, who has been called by Vincent Starrett "a clever impersonator, with a twinkle in his eye, which tells us that he knows he is not Sherlock Holmes, and knows that we know it, but that he hopes we will like him anyway for what he symbolizes." Here are such fascinating stories as "The Adventure of the Paralytic Mendicant", an account of as unique a vengeance as was ever perpetrated between boards; "The Adventure of the Circular Room", a tale of a diabolic plot which will rouse many a memory of the old Master; the complex puzzle which will be of particular interest to bibliophiles told in the Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine Contest prizewinning "The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders"; the curious affair which is "The Adventure of the Tottenham Werewolf'; and others which will bring back old, long-vanished Baker Street days. Once again in the London of years ago "the game is afoot." Certainly no living writer has brought the Holmesian pastiche to a higher development than this. There is very little difference, indeed, in the atmosphere of the stories, once they have begun to unfold; No. 7B Praed Street readily becomes 221B Baker Street; and Solar Pons, attended by his Dr. Lyndon Parker, often becomes curiously interchangeable with the Master of Baker Street and his Watson. "There is no intention to deceive," as Vincent Starrett wrote in his introduction to the first collection. "These nostalgic reminders of vanished days and nights in Baker Street are intended only to please."